All Chapters of Caught In Between Lust And Desires Book 2: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

🖱️ Victor 🖱️The dining hall looked exactly the way I imagined hell would if hell hired interior designers.Three hundred Victors. Three hundred separate conversations. Three hundred people answering, half-annoyed and half-instinctive, every single time someone shouted the name "Victor" across the room.I stood at the entrance for a solid five seconds, just taking it in, before letting out a long, defeated sigh."This was a mistake."'You're only realizing that now?' my monster asked, sounding thoroughly unimpressed with me."I thought there'd be, I don't know, maybe twenty of us."'You were informed there were over three hundred and you came here in a train with all of them.'"I thought they were exaggerating and I will get use to this set up."'Why on earth would anyone exaggerate something so specific?'"I don't know. Marketing."I stepped inside anyway, bracing myself for the noise.The moment my foot crossed the doorway, someone bellowed, "Victor!" and I turned instinctively, o

🖱️ Sammy🖱️ I kept to the far corner of the dining hall, half-hidden behind a pillar and a strategically placed breakfast tray I had no intention of actually eating, watching Victor across the crowded room without letting myself get caught doing it. I still can't believe that's our Victor, I thought, not for the first time that morning. He didn't look like a king. He didn't look like anything close to the man who'd once made an entire room fall silent just by walking into it. He looked tired, and thin in a way that made something uncomfortable twist in my chest, and completely, hopelessly out of place among three hundred laughing strangers who all happened to share his stolen name. But the way he ate. That was the part that kept catching me. He held his fork the exact same way angled slightly wrong, more like a weapon than a utensil, an old habit from a childhood spent being taught to fight before he was ever taught table manners. He tore his toast instead of cutting it, same as

🖱️ Jayden 🖱️ I walked into the war room which was really just Jane's temporary command center shoved into a side parlor with too many chairs and not enough snacks and immediately regretted every choice that had led me to this exact moment. "Absolutely not," Jane was saying, pointing a pen at Sammy like it was a weapon. "You do not get to sit on a discovery like that for an entire day and then casually mention it over breakfast pastries." "I wasn't being casual," Sammy said, hands raised in surrender. "I was being strategic." "You were being a coward." "Excuse me?" "A tactical coward," River offered helpfully, lounging against the wall like this was the most entertaining thing that had happened to him all week. "There's a difference." "There is not a difference," Jane snapped. "There's a little bit of a difference." I stopped in the doorway, absorbing the full chaos of the scene, and decided the responsible, mature, Supreme King thing to do was simply stand there in silence u

🖱️ Jayden 🖱️"I'm so sorry, guys. I'm going to go see him right now. I'm not waiting until tonight."The words left my mouth before I'd fully decided to say them, but the second they were out, I knew there was no taking them back. I stood up from the chair I'd barely settled into, my whole body suddenly buzzing with a kind of electric certainty I hadn't felt in ten years.The three of them stared at me, clearly not expecting that."Jay…" Sammy started.I was already moving.Before any of them could catch up enough to convince me otherwise, I was out the door and heading straight toward the guest wing, toward room 303, toward a name and a number that had been living rent-free in my chest since the moment River said them out loud."Jayden, let's talk about this," Sammy said, falling into step beside me, his hand catching my arm gently, not hard enough to actually stop me, just enough to make me slow down for half a second."There's nothing to talk about.""There's a lot to talk about.

🖱️ Victor 🖱️"What the hell is going on with me?"The words tore out of me the second the door clicked shut, my back hitting the wall as my legs finally gave out beneath me, sliding down until I hit the floor in a heap of shaking limbs and ragged breathing.Screaming get out at them had been the only thing standing between me and something so much worse. The only lever I had left to pull. If I hadn't shouted, if I hadn't forced every last scrap of control I had left into pushing them out that door, I genuinely didn't know what would have happened next.‘You're safe,’ my monster said, quiet, careful, like he was talking someone down off a ledge. ‘They're gone. It's over.’"It's not over." I dragged both hands through my hair, gripping hard enough to hurt, needing the pain to feel like something real, something I actually had control over. "It's not even close to over. Did you feel that? Did you feel what I felt in there?"‘I felt it.’"I wanted to kill them so bad that it insane."Sa