All Chapters of Please Ruin Me, Daddy : Chapter 161 - Chapter 170

SELENA Friday smelled like rain and courtroom soap.The hallway outside the hearing room was all polished floors and low voices. Sienna refused to let go of my hand from the moment we left the car. Dragon was tucked under her other arm with one wing bent from how hard she held him. Every time a stranger walked past in a suit, her fingers tightened until my knuckles ached.Kael walked on her other side.He did not wear the face he used at home when she ordered him onto the rug. This was the public version: clean lines, controlled silence, the kind of man judges recognized as powerful and lawyers recognized as dangerous. Only I could see the tension at the edge of his jaw, the same place I had pressed my mouth two nights ago when the door was locked and the war had briefly changed shape.“Don’t let them take me,” Sienna whispered.“We won’t,” I said.Kael looked down at her. “You stay with us.”She nodded once, but her eyes still tracked every door like any one of them might open onto

SELENA For a second after Liam spoke, the dining room felt underwater.Ask him who the Carter empire goes to if his heart stops tomorrow.The meaning tried to assemble itself in my head and kept slipping, because if it assembled fully I would have to stand in my own house and accept that the man I had slept under two nights ago had quietly placed an empire under our daughter’s name and never once opened his mouth about it.Liam watched me struggle and smiled like he had been waiting years for that exact facial expression.“There it is,” he said. “The famous Selena silence. You were always good at that. Standing in rooms while men rearranged your life and looking like the furniture might answer for you.”“Liam.” Kael’s voice was low.“No. She should hear this without you translating.” Liam’s eyes stayed on me. “You thought the worst thing he did was put his hands on you. Or take you from a marriage that was already dead. Or build this little locked house and call it love. But he did s

LIAM Blood tasted like metal and humiliation.I had spent years being the careful son. The polished one. The one who left rooms before they exploded and called that maturity. Standing in my father’s dining room with my mouth split open and his fist in my shirt, I finally understood how much of that carefulness had just been delayed screaming.“You want to talk about fairness?” I said, and my voice came out thick because of the blood. “I gave that company the years I should have given my marriage. Do you know that? Do you understand what I traded?”Kael’s face stayed locked down, the same old emperor expression, as if emotion were something other people paid for and he only collected.“I stayed in offices until midnight because you taught me that was what a Carter did,” I pushed. “I flew when you snapped your fingers. I sat in rooms with men twice my age and learned how to make my voice sound like yours. And every time Selena looked at me like she was married to a ghost, I told mysel

SELENA I stayed in Sienna’s doorway long enough to make sure the dining room noise had not reached her sleep.She was deep under, mouth open, dragon pinned under one arm the way she held safety when she could not negotiate it out loud. The no-hitting club. The bad seat. The white sheets she still mentioned in passing like a weather report from a country she refused to visit again. I smoothed the blanket once, carefully, and left her door open a crack.Kael was in the hallway when I turned. Not close enough to touch. Close enough to make the air feel claimed. He had washed his hands. The blood was gone from the floor behind him. Of course it was.He cleaned aftermath the way other men cleaned glasses; as if order could argue with what had caused the mess.“You’re not sleeping in there with her all night,” he said.“I didn’t say I was.”“You were thinking it.”I walked past him toward our bedroom because choosing a different room would turn this into theater, and I refused to give the

SELENA Kael was already saying no before the call ended.“She’s not coming in.”He said it to the guard, to the room, to the version of the day that had been balloons and dragon pancakes and a paper crown. The cream coat at the gate had wiped all of that off his face in one clean stroke. On the rug, Sienna was still asleep with frosting near her mouth and one hand on the bicycle wheel. Five years old. Briefly safe in the way only sugar and exhaustion could arrange.“She brought a gift,” I said.Kael turned. “I don’t care if she brought a choir and a signed apology. Not today.”“It’s her birthday.”“Which is why not today.”The guard remained on the line, waiting. Outside, Clara stood beyond the iron like a woman who had learned that persistence could be styled as patience. I wiped my hands on a kitchen towel I did not need and forced my voice to stay even.“If we send her away from the gate on Sienna’s birthday, we hand her the exact story she likes to tell. Closed house. Hostile p