Lahat ng Kabanata ng Ruined By Mr. Cross: Kabanata 91 - Kabanata 100

Selene’s PovMarcus met us with news that felt almost anticlimactic after everything. Helena had been detained in Geneva, quietly, through diplomatic channels neither of us had needed to touch personally, her accounts frozen, extradition proceedings already underway. Adrian’s trial date had been set. Cassandra, having testified fully, was rebuilding a smaller, quieter life outside the family’s shadow, something neither of us begrudged her.“It’s not entirely finished,” Marcus said. “These things rarely tie off as cleanly as anyone wants. But the danger’s over. Whatever’s left is paperwork now, not threat.”“Paperwork we don’t have to carry,” Damien said, and I heard the relief underneath it, the same relief I felt settling into my own chest.“Does this mean you’re actually going to take a vacation from being on call,” I asked Marcus, “or is that a foreign concept to you at this point.”“I’ve forgotten how,” he admitted. “You two have kept me employed at a pace that doesn’t leave much

Damien's PovFour years had a way of moving both faster and slower than I expected, folding itself into ordinary Tuesdays and school shoes that never fit for more than a season, until I looked up one morning and found I could no longer remember what the townhouse had sounded like before it was full of a small, opinionated voice narrating everything she saw."Daddy, why is the sky."I looked up from my coffee. "Why is the sky what, exactly?""Just why is the sky," Lucy said, with the patience of someone explaining something to a particularly slow adult. "Why is it there.""That's a question for your mother," I said. "She's better at the ones with no actual answer.""I heard that," Selene called from the hallway, coming in already dressed for the office in a blazer Lucy had decided, sometime last winter, was her favorite because it was the color of a storm. "The sky is there to hold the clouds up. Otherwise they'd fall on us."Lucy considered this with the gravity she brought to everythi

Damien’s PovLucy turned five the same week Cassandra called, the first time she’d reached out directly in over a year, and I almost let it go to voicemail before something made me answer.“I don’t want anything,” Cassandra said, before I could even say hello. “I know that’s usually the first thing you assume when I call. I only wanted to say happy birthday to her. If that’s allowed.”“It’s allowed,” I said, surprising myself with how easily it came out.“I mean it, Damien. Nothing else. No favors, no reappearing acts.”“I believe you.”There was a pause on the line, the kind that used to mean she was calculating something, but this one felt different, quieter. “You sound like you actually do.”“I do,” I said. “People change. Even you, apparently.”She laughed, a small dry sound. “Don’t get sentimental on me.”I glanced at Selene across the kitchen, who was elbow-deep in frosting a cake Lucy had specifically requested be “purple, but not too purple,” and she nodded, quiet permission p

Damien’s PovThe call came from Lucy’s school two weeks later, not urgent, just unexpected enough that Selene’s face went tight the moment the number flashed on her phone.“Mrs. Cross,” the woman on the line said, once Selene had put her on speaker in the car, “nothing’s wrong, I promise. Lucy just said something today that I thought you’d want to know about, given the circumstances.”“What did she say,” Selene asked carefully.“We were talking about families,” the teacher said, “different shapes of them, and Lucy told the class her family started with a marriage contract and ended with a love story. I wanted to check that was, ah, an appropriate thing for her to be sharing.”I nearly drove off the road laughing. Selene covered her face with both hands, somewhere between mortified and delighted.“It’s accurate,” Selene said finally, still laughing. “I promise it’s not classified information. She’s just better at summarizing our lives than either of us have ever managed.”“She’s remark

Damien’s PovI woke before Selene did, the journals still scattered across the bed where we’d left them, and I lay there for a long while just watching her sleep, the early light catching the side of her face, her hand still resting loosely over the closed cover of the first journal like she hadn’t wanted to let go of it even unconscious.I didn’t move for a long time. There was no reason to rush the morning. Lucy was with Naomi for a few more hours, the greenhouse downstairs still strung with the flowers from the night before, the whole house quiet in a way it rarely got to be, and I found myself simply grateful, the way I still was most mornings, that I got to lie here and watch her breathe instead of anywhere else in the world.When she finally stirred, she did it slowly, blinking against the light, disoriented for a moment before her eyes found mine.“You’re staring,” she said, voice rough with sleep.“I’m allowed,” I said. “It’s the morning after our wedding. I intend to stare as