All Chapters of The House of the Damned: Sin & Deceit (A Dark Romance): Chapter 161 - Chapter 170

Later that evening, I found myself seated across from Carlisle in that cavernous dining room. The table—long enough to seat twenty—had been transformed into an intimate setting for two. Dozens of candles flickered in silver holders, casting more shadows than light, while blood-red roses spilled from crystal vases. “You look stunning,” Carlisle said, his dark eyes reflecting the candlelight as they traced over me. I’d worn the black dress he’d requested—a designer piece he’d brought back from Paris, all sleek lines and subtle sensuality. It clung to my curves like a second skin, the plunging back leaving me feeling both powerful and vulnerable. “Thank you,” I murmured, taking a sip of champagne—not wine tonight, but vintage Dom Pérignon that probably cost more than my monthly rent. “What’s the occasion?” His lips curved into that smile that never failed to make my heart race—part charm, part predator. “Does there need to be one?” The staff moved silently around us, serving course a

Georgia - It started like an itch. The kind that begins at the base of your spine—ignorable at first, then maddening. A murmur from above, voices layering atop one another, growing from whispers into a symphony of human noise. The clinking of crystal, the tap-tap-tap of expensive heels on hardwood floors, bursts of laughter that penetrated the stone ceiling of my prison like bullets. A party. Fucking wonderful. I counted the sounds like some people count sheep. Twenty-seven footsteps overhead. Eleven distinct voices. Four bursts of feminine laughter—the kind that bends at the edges, engineered to make men feel clever. The house was coming alive above me while I rotted below, forgotten like last month’s trash. The noise built slowly at first, then all at once—the way fear does. The way drowning must feel. One minute I was treading water, the next I was sucked under by the riptide of sound. The vibrations traveled through stone and wood, through the marrow of my bones. I could feel

Adeline - Carlisle’s hands—those elegant, manicured hands that had once traced the curve of my spine with such reverence—now grazed my skin like a mortician prepping a corpse—clinical, dispassionate, already mourning what he planned to kill. His fingertips no longer lingered. They performed their duty and retreated, leaving me cold in places that used to burn. It was nothing I could point to definitively. Nothing I could grab hold of and say, “Look, this is wrong.” But in the three weeks before our wedding, something had shifted beneath the floorboards of our relationship, subtle as a house settling, but far more ominous. “It’s normal to be nervous,” my mother had said on the phone last week, her voice crackling with static and forced cheerfulness. “Every bride gets cold feet.” But these weren’t cold feet. These were frost-bitten appendages on the verge of necrosis. The Manor—his ancestral home that was soon to be mine—had always felt vast, but now it seemed to breathe around me,

Georgia - I began marking his visits with tiny, invisible lines scratched into the underside of the bed frame. Not actual dates—those had long since melted together—but the rhythm of his comings and goings. Like tracking the cycles of some malevolent moon whose gravitational pull warped the tides of my sanity. Kind Carlisle. Cruel Carlisle. Absent Carlisle. I never knew which version would walk through that door. On kind days, his footsteps were different—lighter, almost apologetic as they approached my cell. The lock would turn with a gentle click rather than the sharp metallic snap I’d grown to dread. And his face—God, his face would be the one I remembered, the one I’d fallen for, with those eyes that crinkled at the corners when he smiled at me. “Georgia, darling,” he’d say, voice honeyed as he perched on the edge of my bed like we were any normal couple having a chat about our day. His fingers would find my hair, twirling a strand almost absent-mindedly. “I’ve missed talking

The day he found me in my wedding dress was different. I’d been pacing my cell for hours, the torn sheets trailing behind me like the ghost of a bridal train. My fingers kept adjusting the bodice, smoothing nonexistent wrinkles from the skirt. In my head, I was walking down an aisle lined with peonies and baby’s breath. My father was beside me, his arm linked with mine. And at the end, waiting with that half-smile that always made my stomach flip—Carlisle. The real Carlisle’s arrival shattered the fantasy. He entered without knocking, the door swinging open with casual disregard for my privacy. I froze mid-step, suddenly aware of how I must look—a madwoman playing dress-up in shredded bedding. But instead of laughter or disgust, something else flickered across his face. Interest. Amusement. Maybe even a touch of the hunger I remembered from before. “Well,” he said, closing the door behind him. “Aren’t you... creative.” I straightened my shoulders, chin lifting. Some dormant part o