All Chapters of A Prison Called Love Taboo: Chapter 231 - Chapter 240

SELENA The shift ended late enough that the depot lights had already gone the color of old oil.Sienna was at the house tonight. His night. Staff upstairs. That was the only reason I had taken the late shift.I signed out, pulled my jacket over the uniform shirt, and took the back exit because the front lot always smelled like men waiting for nothing. The alley to the main road was narrow, wet from earlier rain, and ordinary in the way ordinary things are before they stop being ordinary.I made it twelve steps.Then a van door slid open that I had not registered as occupied, and two men were already too close for the distance to mean anything.“Mrs. Carter.”The name hit harder than a hand. I stopped because running in a dead-end alley with a bad angle was not bravery; it was invitation. My fingers found the phone in my pocket.The taller one smiled without warmth. “Don’t.”He did not grab me yet. He only stepped in until my back understood the wall. The second man stayed behind my s

SELENA The coat around my shoulders smelled like him and blood.I sat in the passenger seat with my hands clenched in the fabric and watched the depot alley shrink in the side mirror until the dark took it. My jaw ached where fingers had forced my face up. My arm throbbed in the shape of a stranger’s grip. Somewhere behind us, men were still on the ground and neighbors were still deciding what they had and had not seen.Kael drove without speaking for two streets. His hands on the wheel were wrecked; split skin, drying red, a faint tremor he probably hated. Every time a streetlight passed over them I saw the alley again: the sound of a joint giving, the wetness, the way he had not looked human until he turned back to me.“Sienna,” I said. “Asleep when I left,” he answered. “She stays asleep.”That was enough. The child was not in the alley. The war had come for me alone.I let my head fall back against the seat and laughed once, a cracked useless sound. “I asked you to respect dis

KEALSleep was a joke I refused to tell myself.I sat in the study with the door open as promised, cleaned hands stinging under the lamp, the alley still playing behind my eyes in wet frames: her jaw forced up, a stranger’s grip on her arm, the van door’s black mouth. Every time the house made a small sound I was on my feet before the sound finished. Not because I expected Liam’s men inside these walls. Because my nervous system had not received the message that the threat had moved.By 2:13 a.m. the chair had become useless.I told myself I was going to my room.My body took me down the guest corridor instead.The door was not fully latched. A seam of lamp-glow; hers, left low, cut the dark. I should have walked past. A better man would have walked past. I had never successfully pretended to be that man where she was concerned; the most I had managed, these last weeks, was not breaking her door down. Tonight even that thin achievement frayed.I set my fingers on the wood and opened

SELENA I woke up empty on one side of the bed and sore between my legs.For a minute I only listened. The house had that thick morning quiet money buys; air moving, distant water, no street. My arm throbbed when I flexed it. The mark on my jaw felt tighter when I yawned. Last night was still on my skin in the most literal way, and the second I admitted that to myself I got up like the mattress had turned hostile.I put yesterday’s clothes on with my back to the mirror. If I looked too long I’d start negotiating.Sienna’s door was half open. She had one leg thrown out of the blanket and Dragon crushed under her chin, mouth open, dead to the world. I stood there longer than I needed to. Not sentimental. Counting breaths. Making sure the alley had not followed me into the wrong room.Downstairs, Kael was already in the kitchen.Shirt black, sleeves pushed up, coffee ignored near his hand. The split on his knuckles looked uglier in daylight. He watched me come in like he’d been doing no

SELENA My key stuck in the lock the way it always did, and for some reason that tiny familiar annoyance almost made me cry.Inside, the place smelled like closed windows and the ghost of detergent. No staff quiet. No expensive air. Just the table with one chair kicked out from yesterday morning and a mug I hadn’t washed. I dropped my bag, stood in the middle of the room, and listened hard; fridge, street, my own blood in my ears. Nothing else. No van door. No footsteps timed to mine.It still didn’t feel like safety. It felt like a box someone could find again if they already knew the shape of my name.I showered until the water ran cold, scrubbed my arm too roughly around the bruise, and put on clean clothes that didn’t smell like his house. In the mirror my mouth still looked like it had been kissed into bad decisions. I turned away before I could start replaying the guest bed in high detail.Phone on the counter. The one he’d forced into my hand. I stared at it like it might bite.