Alle Kapitel von The House of the Damned: Sin & Deceit (A Dark Romance): Kapitel 51 – Kapitel 60

Georgia's POVThe rain had stopped by the time I got inside but I was still soaked, my coat a saturated confession clinging to my skin as I closed the door behind me.I closed it softly. The way you close a door when you are keeping something.Because I was keeping something now. A secret with weight to it, with warmth to it, with the specific gravity of something that has fundamentally altered the person carrying it and cannot be put down or handed off or pretended away.The chandelier fractured light across the marble floors, too harsh, too revealing, the kind of light designed for a showroom rather than a home. Fresh peonies on the console table, arranged with surgical precision, their perfume mixing with polished wood and the antiseptic emptiness that had always underlain this house no matter how many flowers were placed in it. But underneath all of it, clinging to my coat and my hair and my skin, something else.Petrichor. Rain on warm pavement. Cedar and something darker underne

Georgia's POVThe days without him hollowed me out.Josiah came back from London on a Thursday as scheduled, his car coming through the iron gates at six in the evening, and I stood in the foyer in the correct dress with the correct expression and performed the wife with the practiced fluency of someone who had been doing it for fourteen months and had recently discovered, with the specific devastation of things discovered too late, exactly what the performance was costing.He kissed my cheek. Sandalwood and cedar and the ghost of the flight and the particular energy of a man who had been productive for two weeks and was satisfied with himself. His eyes moved over me with the inventory quality and registered nothing unusual.I had been kissed in the rain by another man four days ago.He saw nothing.We sat at dinner and he talked about London and the meetings and the outcomes and I nodded at the correct intervals and asked the questions that demonstrated appropriate engagement and ins

Georgia's POVHe caught my wrist three evenings later.I was moving toward the door of the dining room, dinner concluded, performing the small navigations of an evening in this house, and his hand closed around my wrist before I had registered his movement. Not brutal. Never brutal, not in any way that left the kind of evidence other people could see. Just his fingers around my wrist with that focused possessive certainty, his thumb resting directly over my pulse point.Feeling my heartbeat. The way he had felt it at my throat in the car after the party, his fingertips over the place where I could not hide what my body was doing.I went still."You've been distracted lately," he said, his voice the pleasant neutral register of a man conducting an assessment rather than having a conversation. His eyes searched mine with the cold patience of someone who had time and understood that time was its own form of pressure.I manufactured a smile. Felt the muscles of it strain. "Just tired."He

Georgia's POVI called Michael from the garden, away from the house and its listening walls, standing in the far corner near the jasmine that had grown past its edge and had still not been cut back.He picked up on the first ring.I told him about the folder. Kept my voice low and even, the practiced steadiness of a woman who had been managing her own crisis response for fourteen months and had gotten very good at it. I told him about the dates and the times and the locations and the receipt from the bookstore and the single line about the café.The silence on Michael's end when I finished had a texture I had not heard from him before. Not the careful containing silence of a man managing his response. Something hotter underneath it, something that was taking considerable effort to keep in its designated lane."Georgia," he said, and his voice was very controlled and very quiet. "I need you to listen to me.""I'm listening.""I don't want you to go back inside that house tonight if you

Georgia's POVI barely had time to close the front door behind me before his voice cut through the foyer."Where have you been, Georgia?"I froze.The house had that wrong quality, the specific wrongness of a space that has been waiting rather than simply empty. The grandfather clock marked time in the hallway, its pendulum moving with mechanical indifference. Tick. Tock. The heartbeat of something I had been dreading without knowing exactly what shape it would take when it arrived.Josiah stood by the staircase.His suit was immaculate, his posture controlled, everything on the surface exactly as it always was. But underneath the surface something had shifted. I had spent fourteen months reading the architecture of this man, learning the specific language of his silences and his stillnesses, and what I was reading now was not the familiar cold assessment of ownership being confirmed.This was a hawk that had identified its target and was deciding when to move."I was at the gallery b