All Chapters of I Died Loving You, I Woke Up Hating You : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Sandra’s POVI needed to think and I couldn’t think inside that house.I took the long path that ran along the estate’s western boundary — the one that went through the older part of the Ashveil territory where the trees grew close together and the pack didn’t patrol heavily because nothing of significance had happened there in decades. I’d walked it in the first life when things got too loud inside my own head. Old habit. My feet found it without consulting me.The morning was cold and quiet and I walked until the estate disappeared behind the tree line and then I kept walking.Who benefits from its dissolution.Corvin’s words. My father had signed that agreement twenty years ago — land rights, territorial cooperation, the Whitmore holdings tied formally to the Blackwood estate. In old pack law that kind of agreement meant the Whitmore family retained certain protections. Property. Standing. A formal relationship with the most powerful Alpha family in Blackridge that kept smaller thr

Sandra’s POVI was out of my chair before the glass finished falling.Not because I was brave. Pure reflex — the kind your body develops when it’s died once already and decided that was enough. I grabbed the woman’s arm and pulled her sideways off her chair and we went down behind it together as something hit the wall where her head had been.Not a bullet. Something smaller, faster — a compressed wolfbane cartridge, the kind used for targeted delivery. It hit the plaster and burst and the smell came immediately, sharp and chemical, and I pulled my jacket over my nose and kept low.“Can you move,” I said.“Yes.” Her voice was steady. Steadier than mine would’ve been.“Door at the back.”“Storage room. No exit.”“Window on the second floor?”“Yes.”I looked at the window we’d come through. The glass was mostly gone, cold air pushing in hard, and the street beyond was dark in a way that was different from regular night dark — the lamp across the road had gone out. Someone had killed it d

Sandra’s POVAgain.He said it and then he heard himself say it and something changed in his face — not panic, Zadok didn’t panic, but something close to the feeling underneath panic. The moment of realizing you’ve said the true thing before you meant to.I stood very still.“What did you just say,” I said.He didn’t answer immediately. He was doing that thing — the measured pause, the weighing — except this time it looked like the weighing wasn’t going well for him. Like the scales kept tipping somewhere he hadn’t planned.“I misspoke,” he said.“You don’t misspeak.”He looked at me. I looked back. The lamp on my desk was the only light and it put half his face in shadow and I wished it didn’t because I needed to see all of it right now.“Zadok.” I kept my voice level. Steady. Everything I didn’t feel. “What did you mean by again.”Silence. The estate around us was completely quiet in the way it gets in the deep hours — that specific absence of sound that makes a room feel like it ex

Sandra’s POVI stood there looking at my mother’s face for longer than I should have.She was younger than I’d ever imagined her — younger than I was now in the first life, younger than the vague shapeless idea of her I’d carried around for eighteen years because nobody had ever given me anything concrete to hold onto. My father didn’t keep photographs. Didn’t speak about her. The official version of her life in this house was her absence, and I’d grown up furnishing the gaps with whatever scraps I could find.This was the first real thing I’d ever had of her.I turned the photograph over and read her handwriting again.She knew exactly what she was protecting. So do you. Don’t stop.She’d written that knowing she might not be there to say it in person. She’d put it with Sable and trusted that it would reach me when I was ready for it, and whatever ready looked like she’d apparently decided it looked like this — standing in my father’s study at two in the morning with a man from the t

Sandra's POVI stood in the records room doorway and felt the news settle into me the way cold water does — not all at once, just steady and inevitable until everything was saturated.Sable had walked into the Voss residence voluntarily.I kept turning that word over. Voluntarily. Because it was doing a lot of work in Mara's sentence and the weight it carried depended entirely on something I couldn't know from here — whether Sable had made a choice or whether someone had made it for her and dressed it up to look like one."How do you know she went voluntarily," I said.Mara looked at me. A brief assessment — she was recalibrating me the same way everyone else had been, the same slight adjustment behind the eyes when I said something that didn't fit the version of me they'd filed away."Security footage from a business across the road," she said. "She walked up to the front door alone. Knocked. Was let in." A pause. "No visible coercion.""Visible," I said."Correct."Zadok had his arm