All Chapters of A Prison Called Love Taboo: Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

KEALThe list arrived within the hour.Three board names. Two quiet account freezes that should not have been possible without internal pathway knowledge. One supplier contract “delayed” by a compliance concern that had not existed on Friday. Separately, each item could be explained away by markets, nerves, coincidence.Together, they formed a signature.My signature, once. Taught, drilled, handed down to a son I had shaped for rooms like these. Watching that shape turn and bite the structure that made it did not surprise me as much as it should have. Betrayal only shocked men who believed blood guaranteed obedience. I had never believed that. I had believed control did.I closed the laptop.From the living room came the sound of Sienna arguing with a balloon about bedtime law. Selena answered her in the patient voice she reserved for chaos she still intended to love through. The birthday house continued, foolish and warm, a few meters away from the study where the empire had just r

SELENA Kael had his keys in his hand before the baby monitor finished crackling. “You’re leaving?” I asked. “He walked into my building.” “And if you walk into a public floor and put him through glass, Sienna’s next specialist report writes itself.” Kael turned on me in the living room with the full force of that cold, focused fury that still made my stomach dip even after months of learning its weather. “He used an override from when he still belonged there. That is not a message. That is a hand on my property.” “I’m not talking about property. I’m talking about the five-year-old upstairs who just asked you to be less sharp and then fell asleep believing the house could manage that.” The reminder landed and did not soften him. It only made the choice uglier. He looked at the stairs, then at the phone photo, then at me. For a second I thought pure possession would win. It almost did. I saw the version of him that would drive downtown, cross a lobby, and turn a blood proble

SELENA Sienna checked our faces like a doctor.First mine, then Kael’s, then mine again. She had both hands on his jaw, squishing his cheeks until his mouth looked ridiculous.“Less sharp?” she asked.Kael’s voice came out flattened by her palms. “Less sharp.”“Promise?”He pinky-promised without argument. She accepted it, climbed into my lap on the couch, and fell asleep ten minutes later with her foot hooked around his wrist like a tether. Dragon was on the left. The house finally exhaledKael carried her upstairs. I followed as far as her doorway and watched him tuck the blanket around her with a precision that made my chest hurt. When he turned, I was still there. He closed her door softly and stopped in front of me in the hallway.“Why did you do that?” he asked.“Do what?”“In the glass room. You had every reason to stay out of it. You didn’t.”I started toward the bedroom. He followed. The door clicked shut behind us, not locked, just closed. Lamp light. Messy sheets from a mo

SELENA The stillness in him was worse than shouting. “What happened with your ex-wife, Kael?” For a second he didn’t breathe. Then he stood up from the bed so fast the mattress shifted under me. Not toward the door. Toward the open space of the room, like he needed distance from the question itself before he decided what to do with the woman who had asked it. “No,” he said. “That’s not an answer.” “It’s the only one you’re getting on a night that already had enough blood in it.” I stayed on the bed, bare feet on the duvet, and watched his back. “Liam made it my business when he asked if you hit me and used his mother’s crying as the example.” Kael turned. The look on his face was not the conference-room cold and not the gated cold. It was closer to the kitchen. Closer to the version of him that made the air feel too small. My body recognized it before my pride did. I slid backward on the bed without standing, creating space, palms against the sheets. He saw the move

SELENAMorning started with Sienna standing beside the bed, Dragon under one arm, studying the gap between us like a crime scene.“You slept far,” she said.Kael opened one eye. “Go brush your teeth.”“You usually sleep like a fence. Now you’re like two fences.” She pointed from my pillow to his. “Is this because of the midnight talking?”My head lifted. “How do you know about midnight talking?”“You said ‘what time is it’ very loud. Then Daddy said ‘are you scared of me.’ Then I went back to bed because that is adult soup.” She climbed onto the mattress anyway and sat in the literal empty space we had left between our bodies. “I am a bridge.”Kael stared at the ceiling. “Out of this room.”“Bridge first.” Sienna took my hand, then his, and slapped them together on top of the duvet with bureaucratic force. “There. Fixed. No more far sleeping. Far sleeping makes the house weird.”I laughed under my breath before I could stop it. Kael’s fingers tensed against mine, then extracted themse