All Chapters of Caught In Between Lust And Desires Book 2: Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

🖱️ Jayden 🖱️Sammy's body hit the scorched earth and didn't move again, and something inside me simply broke.I don't remember making a conscious decision. I don't remember choosing to reach for the power I'd been so carefully rationing years back, terrified of exactly this kind of overflow. I only remember the world going white-gold at the edges, my own blood roaring in my ears loud enough to drown out the chaos still tearing through the clearing, and the sudden, absolute certainty that I would burn every single thing standing between me and the two men currently lying broken on the ground in front of me.My blood boiled over.I felt my all body going crazy, not metaphorically, but genuinely, my veins lighting up beneath my skin like molten gold, power that had always answered to careful control now simply refusing to be contained a moment longer. The compulsion I'd used once on Wren, desperate and untrained, felt like a candle flame compared to what tore loose from me now, vast an

🖱️ Jayden 🖱️Halsted found me exactly where I'd been for the last three days, sitting between Sammy and Victor's beds, one hand resting on each of their chests, counting heartbeats that refused to change no matter how many hours I spent willing them to."Your Majesty," he said quietly, and something in the careful, measured way he said it made my stomach drop straight through the floor before he'd even finished the sentence. "I need to speak with you. Properly. About what we're actually facing here.""Say it," I said, my voice rougher than I intended, not looking up from Sammy's still, pale face.Halsted hesitated, and that hesitation alone told me everything before he even found the words."We've run every test available to us," he said finally. "Corrin and I both. We've consulted every text Jane's managed to locate, every healer with any experience treating magical trauma of this magnitude. And I need to be honest with you, Jayden, because I think you deserve honesty more than you

🖱️ River 🖱️I watched Jane fall asleep in the rocking chair before she'd even finished her sentence, Aria still curled warm and heavy against her chest, both of them utterly spent by a day that had somehow managed to be both entirely ordinary and completely exhausting all at once.I didn't wake her. I simply sat there a while longer, watching the two of them breathe in that slow, matched rhythm only new mothers and their infants ever quite managed, and let myself feel, honestly, something I'd been carefully not examining too closely for the better part of a year.I missed my wife.Not the version of her currently asleep in this chair, exhausted and devoted and stretched thin across a dozen different responsibilities she refused to set down even for a single evening. I missed the version of her from before sharp-tongued, endlessly capable, entirely present in whatever room she occupied instead of perpetually half-somewhere-else, running calculations about Sammy's vitals or Victor's t

🖱️ Jayden 🖱️The valley didn't appear on any map.It took Jane four months of careful, patient interrogation of captured Keeper stragglers and an equal amount of time cross-referencing Wren's stolen notes to finally pinpoint the exact location… a sunken basin hidden behind layers of forgetting so old that even now, standing at its rim with an army at my back, I could feel the strange, slippery way my own mind kept trying to slide away from the sight of it."You're sure this is it," I said quietly, staring down at the churning, storm-dark valley below."As sure as I can be," Jane said beside me, one hand resting instinctively against the small pouch at her hip where she kept a scrap of Aria's blanket. She'd insisted on coming despite every argument River and I had offered against it, and in the end none of us had possessed the heart to overrule her. "The forgetting enchantments are stronger the closer you get. If you start feeling like you can't quite remember why you came here, that

🖱️ Jayden 🖱️Two years.Seven hundred and thirty mornings of sitting between them. Seven hundred and thirty mornings of one hand on Sammy's chest, one hand on Victor's, counting heartbeats that had never once changed their rhythm, no matter how many words I poured into the quiet room or how many nights I lay awake bargaining with a universe that had stopped answering me somewhere around the end of the first year.I was telling Sammy about the harvest festival when Jane walked in.I knew it was her before I looked up. Nobody else entered this room without knocking first, out of a kind of reverence the entire palace had developed for the vigil. Jane had never once knocked. She just came in, the way she always had, brisk and certain and carrying the weight of half a kingdom on her shoulders.Except today, she wasn't brisk.She stood just inside the doorway, one hand gripping the frame, her face carved out of an exhaustion so deep it looked less like tiredness and more like something st