All Chapters of Step Daddy's Lakeside Sin : Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

(Richard’s POV)The Vermont house looked the same from the outside. That was the first thing that felt wrong. Porch light still off. Curtains still half-drawn the way we had left them. There was no broken glass. No forced door. The quiet of the place was so complete that for one stupid second I let myself hope she had simply fallen asleep with her phone dead.Then I unlocked the door and stepped inside.“Millie?”My voice moved through the rooms and came back unanswered. Adrianna followed behind me, still clutching the bag of documents like it was the only solid object left in her life. I moved through the ground floor fast to the kitchen, living room, the small hallway bathroom. A mug sat half-full on the counter. Her sweater was missing from the chair where she had left it. The bag she kept packed near the door was gone.She hadn’t been taken from the house. She had left it.I took the stairs two at a time, ribs still protesting from the fight in the woods, and shoved open the bedro

(Millie POV / close third on the room)The knock never came.Footsteps crossed the gravel instead, measured, heavy, and deliberate. Then the handle of the cabin door was tested once from the outside. When it didn’t give, a shoulder hit the wood with controlled force. The frame shuddered. Henry moved faster than the second impact. He grabbed my arm, pulled me off the couch, and pushed me behind him toward the inner wall as the door burst inward on the third strike. Richard came through the dark like a man who had already decided what he was willing to become tonight. For one suspended second, no one spoke. The broken door hung crooked. Moonlight spilled in behind him. Richard’s eyes found me first, a rapid, fierce moment of whether I was breathing, standing, hurt before they locked onto Henry with pure, lethal focus.“Millie,” he said. His voice was rough. “Come here.”I took a step.Henry’s arm blocked me without even looking back. “She’s fine where she is.”Richard shut the ruined doo

(Millie POV)Richard drove until the city lights thinned into a quieter stretch of road lined with anonymous buildings and late-night silence. He didn’t take me back to Vermont. He didn’t take me anywhere that belonged to our old names. The place he finally stopped at was a private suite hotel that smelled of clean carpet and money meant to buy discretion. He paid in cash, kept me close from the entrance to the elevator, and only let the door close behind us once he had checked the locks, the windows, and the connecting wall. The room was large and impersonal. The interior; soft lamps. A wide bed. A city view blurred by rain. The second the door was secured, the adrenaline that had been holding me upright started to drain out of my body all at once.Richard turned to me like he could see it happening.“Sit.”“I’m fine.”“Millie. Sit.”I sat on the edge of the bed. He crouched in front of me and ran his hands gently from my shoulders to my wrists, then to the curve of my stomach, check

(Henry’s POV)The sirens started three blocks after I left my building. At first it was only one pair of lights in the rearview mirror, distant enough that a smarter man might have slowed, signaled, and pretended to be ordinary. I pressed the accelerator instead. The engine answered with a low snarl, and the city stretched into streaks of neon and wet asphalt. A second siren joined the first. Then a third. Their sound bounced between the buildings and crawled under my skin. But I did not stop. Every rational instinct listed the consequences in neat order… arrest, questions, Vivienne’s name dragged into official light, the documents, the cabin, Millie. None of it outweighed the single fact sitting in my pocket beside the locket. Adrianna had not answered her phone. Everything else could burn for an hour. I took a hard right against the light, cut through a service lane, and forced the car into a narrower street where patrol units couldn’t fan out as easily. The sirens swelled, then war

(Adrianna’s POV)The hospital corridor smelled of antiseptic and recycled air. I stood at the nurse’s station with my hands wrapped around my bag so tightly the straps cut into my palm. When the doctor finally came out of Vivienne’s room, he looked tired but composed, the way men looked when the news was not disastrous enough to soften their voice.“She’s responding well,” he said. “The imaging is reassuring. She’s stable, conscious for longer periods now, and the wound is healing as expected. Barring complications, she should make a full recovery.”Full recovery.Of course she would.I nodded as if the words were ordinary. Inside, something bitter twisted. Even a vase against the skull had not taken Vivienne out of the game for long. She would be back on her feet soon enough, rearranging the board with that same cold precision she had always used while the rest of us bled in the margins. I left the hospital without going into her room. I had nothing left to say to her that would not