All Chapters of Please Ruin Me, Daddy : Chapter 221 - Chapter 230

245 Chapters

221. Taste of almost

SELENA By morning he was already a fact on the street.Not in my doorway. Across from it, on the narrow balcony of the corner building, shirt dark, coffee in one hand, watching the road like men watched trading floors. When Sienna pressed her face to our window and waved, Kael lifted two fingers. She lit up as if he had sent fireworks. I pulled her back by the sleeve.“Don’t make a schedule out of him.”“He already has a schedule,” she said. “It’s called standing there.”At nine he came down to the entrance and did not climb. Sienna ran the stairs before I could negotiate terms. I followed because I had no choice, hair tied up for laundry work, hands already detergent-rough. Kael’s gaze caught on my hands and lingered too long, as if the evidence of ordinary labor offended something private in him.“Park,” Sienna announced. “Broken swing. Daddy pushes. Mummy counts.”“Thirty minutes,” I said.Kael’s eyes flicked to mine. “An hour.”“Thirty.”Sienna groaned. “You people are bad at sh

222. Harder to hate

SELENA The street had gone thin by the time I came down again.Sienna was asleep with Dragon under her chin and the notebook of laws open on the pillow like a passport. I only meant to check the entrance lock. I told myself that twice. On the third step I saw him already there; not on the balcony, not in a car, in the shadowed mouth of my building where the district’s noise fell away.Kael looked up as if he had been waiting for the exact sound of my foot.“You should be inside,” he said.“You should be across the street.”“I was.” A pause. “It got… loud in my head.”He did not climb. He stayed on the entrance line he himself had been respecting all day, hands empty, shoulders less squared than in the park. Up close, without Sienna as a buffer, the damage of the two weeks sat more honestly on him: sleepless edges, a mouth that had been held too tight for too long, eyes that still wanted and no longer bothered to hide the wanting behind pure command.I stayed on the second step. “If

223. His Obsession

KEAL I lasted until 8:40 a.m. before the district started to feel like a self-inflicted wound.Sienna had already done her balcony wave. Selena had already not done one. I stood with coffee gone cold and watched the street the way a man watched a door he had agreed not to break, then put the cup down and went to the car because the company did not care that my marriage was living above an electronics shop.The driver waited. I dismissed him with a look and took the wheel myself.Bad decision.The road into the old business spine of the city was familiar enough to drive blind, which was the problem. Blind left room for the stairwell. For Selena’s back against plaster. For the flinch. For the way she had told me not to smile as if a smile were more dangerous than a threat. For Sienna’s weight on my arm after fourteen days of nothing. For the children’s syrup left on a step like a man trying to invent a language between violence and begging.I took a corner too wide.A delivery bike sc

224. Harder to See Coming

SELENA I waited until Sienna was fully under; mouth open, Dragon crushed under one arm, the notebook closed for once on the floor. Then I put on a shirt that did not look like surrender and went down to the entrance without giving myself time to rehearse.Kael was not on the balcony. He was at the corner of the building, phone dark in his hand, as if he had already felt the shape of a conversation coming. When he saw me he straightened, that automatic male attention he never bothered to hide anymore.“She’s asleep,” I said.“I know.”“Of course you do.”He let the jab pass. His eyes moved over my face, searching for the usual currencies; fear, exhaustion, the crack that let him push. I gave him none of them on purpose.“This arrangement ends,” I said.The street noise seemed to step back from him. “Say that again.”“The room across the street. The balcony. The silent watch. The rent. The food tab. All of it. It ends.” My hands were steady by force. “You don’t get to colonize this di

225. Unfinished

SELENA Eight weeks after I told him to leave the district, morning no longer began with a balcony.It began with a kettle that belonged to me, in a walk-up two districts away from the electronics shop, where the landlady did not know the name Carter and did not want to. The place was small, clean enough, paid from wages I earned doing inventory and shift covers at a mid-size grocery depot. No tab opened itself for bread. No man stood across the street with coffee. When Sienna asked, on the first week, whether Daddy could see our window, I said no. When she asked whether that meant he was gone, I said no to that too.Gone and distant were different words. We were learning both.Kael saw Sienna on Thursdays and alternate Sundays. The arrangement had been cut into being through arguments that left both of us raw and, somehow, still standing. He picked her up from the depot entrance, never from inside my door unless I allowed it. He returned her on time. The first two weeks he arrived

226. The line broke

SELENA Sienna had been gone eleven minutes when the knock came.Not the landlady’s rhythm. Not a delivery. Two knocks, measured, as if the hand already knew it would be answered. I wiped my palms on my skirt, checked the peephole out of habit, and the hallway tilted.Kael.I opened because the alternative was pressing my back to wood and pretending a locked door still meant the same thing it meant eight weeks ago.He stood there in a dark coat, rain-dark at the shoulders, no child in sight, no public version of himself. Just the man. The eyes hit mine and held, and for one second neither of us moved.“She’s at school,” I said.“I know.”“Then why…”He stepped forward. I retreated on pure reflex and he came with the movement, into my hall, into the smell of kettle-water and Sienna’s crayons, into the life I had built out of shifts and rules. My hand went up.“Kael…. what are you doing?”He closed the door behind him.The click was soft. Final. My stomach dropped so hard I felt sick wi

227. The Almost-yes

SELENA The corridor creak outside died into ordinary footsteps and vanished.Inside, nothing ordinary remained.Kael still had me at the wall, mouth close enough that every breath felt shared, hand not locking the door; just resting on it as if the closed fact of wood was a third person in the room. My lips were swollen from a kiss I had not authorized and had still, for one catastrophic second, returned. The taste of him sat in my mouth like evidence.“Clock,” I said.His eyes narrowed. “What.”“School.” My voice was rough. “If you’re in this kitchen when I have to leave, I’m walking out with you still here, and I won’t do that. She doesn’t come home to this.”Something landed in his face; frustration, respect, the specific pain of being limited by a child he loved more than his own impulse. He nodded once. Did not step back far enough.“Then answer before the clock owns you.”“I already answered.”“You answered with your mouth saying no and your hands in my coat.” His gaze dropped

228. starving the monster

SELENA I expected him to push within twenty-four hours.A message. A second knock. A car that stayed too long at the curb. The old pattern under new language. I went to bed with the kitchen still ghost-warm from his coat on my chair and woke prepared to refuse him again.Nothing came.Thursday arrived like any other workday: Sienna’s shoes by the door, depot shift notes on the table, rain in the street. At pickup he was already there, on time to the minute, umbrella angled for her alone until she grabbed my hand and forced the three of us into one temporary shape under the fabric. He didn’t use the closeness. He said hello to her as if the closed-door morning had not happened, asked about numbers and drawings, and only met my eyes once over her head.The look was not a question.It was a man holding a line with both hands.“Four-thirty,” he said.“Four-thirty,” I answered.He returned her at 4:29 with damp curls and a story about ducks. No package. No speech. No attempt to come up.

229. A taste of home

SELENA It started with a paper crown and a lie of omission.Sienna waited until Thursday evening, after Kael had already done the clean handoff and driven away like a man serving out probation, before she climbed onto the kitchen chair and announced:“Parent craft morning isn’t only one parent.”I turned from the sink. “What.”She produced the school note from her bag with the ceremony of evidence. In crayon on the back, in her writing, she had added a line the school had not:Mummy and Daddy both. Bring both. Sit together.“Sienna.”“Miss Elena said families can come how they are.” Her chin lifted. “How we are is two places. That doesn’t mean two separate mornings. I already told Daddy on Sunday that you said it was okay.”The room went very quiet.“You told him what?”“That Mummy said both.” She had the grace to look slightly afraid then, which meant she knew. “So he wouldn’t stay clear. So he would come. You can be angry at me after the crowns are done.”I sat down because the alt

230. A taste of ownership

SELENA I chose the place because it had exits.A second-floor café above a bookstore, glass front, busy enough that nothing could become a closed-door kitchen without witnesses, quiet enough that a conversation could still cut. I sent the time and the address with no greeting.Selena: 2:15. One hour. I’m not coming home with you.He answered in under a minute.Kael: I’ll be there.No negotiation. No attempt to change the ground. That alone put a tension under my ribs I didn’t like.I arrived early and took the corner table with a view of the stair. At 2:14 the air in the café changed, as if people felt a pressure front before they understood it. A woman at the counter stopped mid-sentence. A man in a suit adjusted his chair without knowing why. Then Kael appeared on the stairs and the room’s attention simply… rearranged.The coat, the walk, the unsmiling focus, the kind of body that implied private security even when none stood visible. He didn’t look at anyone else. He looked for m

...

20 21 22 23 24 25

SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP