All Chapters of BOUND TO THE BILLIONAIRE CAPTAIN: Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

POV: Maureen I used to clean teeth for a living before I met Viktor, and the very first thing that job teaches you about human nature is that the people who swear up and down that it doesn't hurt are always the ones gripping the vinyl armrests until their knuckles go stark white. Clara Hayes had been gripping her sterling silver dinner fork like that for four full courses. I watched her quietly from my designated seat at Viktor's right hand, the exact way I had carefully trained myself to watch everything that happened in this house—with my eyes fixed obediently on my porcelain plate and the rest of my senses tuned like an old radio frequency. By the time the third course arrived at the table, I had mentally cataloged her physical state the same way I once cataloged a patient's mouth. Her small jaw was set a quarter of an inch too tight. Her shoulders were held low and steady, so that nobody sitting at the table could call them tense. She kept a deliberate half-step of space betwee

Clara’s POV The words on the screen were NOT SUBMITTED, in red, and Brenda from financial aid was pretending very hard not to watch me read them. I had come in at 8:55 on Monday morning with a coffee, a granola bar, and a short speech about a form I assumed had been eaten by Briar's famously haunted email system, and I stood at her counter now with the granola bar forgotten halfway out of its wrapper while the red letters grew larger the longer I looked. Her office had fluorescent lights that hummed in B-flat, a cat poster that said HANG IN THERE, and a succulent on the windowsill that appeared to have died of honesty. I had pictured Brenda as a villain for two weeks, ever since the phone call in the dressing room. In person she was a small, tired woman of about fifty, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and the face of someone who had delivered a thousand pieces of bad news and kept every one of them. "This is the Merit Grant renewal," I said. "For spring. I filed it in August

Carter POV Delroy, who’s been guarding Briar Arena at night for eleven years straight, mostly spends his shifts glued to a cracked tablet—watching Korean dramas, but always with the sound off. When he saw the mop in my hands, he stared at it, then lifted his gaze to my face and shook his head. “Captain, you’re holding that thing like a stick.”“It’s a mop,” I said, trying to adjust my grip.He took a slow sip from his steel thermos, shaped like some kind of rocket ship. “Looks like a hockey stick in your hands. Figure-eight motion, son. You clean the floor—you don’t score goals on it.”It was just after 12:40 AM, two days since the disaster of a dinner at my dad’s mansion. I’d barely slept more than three hours at a time since that night. Every time I shut my eyes, my brain just started counting red lights in the dark. I’d texted Clara at midnight, asking what she was up to, and she shot back in ten seconds: “scrubbing a locker room shower drain, why, are you offering a monetary rewa

Carter's POV Coach Miller told me I'd played the best forty minutes of my career, and I told him I hadn't noticed, which was true, because I had spent all forty looking at Row 3. We won 3-2, with my goal as the winner, and the cut above my left eyebrow was courtesy of a Redwood State stick in the last four minutes, and the trainer wanted to give me six stitches in the locker room while I told her, twice, that it could wait. Jaxson found me in the corner peeling a spiral of white tape off the knob of my stick, one careful strip at a time, and leaned over my shoulder. "Is that a pen cap?" "No." "It's purple." "It's a coincidence." I closed my fist around it and put it in my pocket. "Don't say anything." "I didn't say a thing." Jaxson grinned in the way he does when he is about to say several things later, to the entire team, in a group chat. I showered in the VIP locker room, in the same stall where my life had gone sideways three months earlier, and kept a towel on the entire

Clara's POV The registration for the Rock Contest closed in three days, and by Sunday afternoon I had written the same four lines eleven times in eleven different ways. The practice room four smelled like old coffee and piano felt and the ghost of a radiator that hadn't worked since 2019, and I had been sitting at the upright since noon with a notebook and a pen and the kind of vague, humming emptiness that comes from having cleaned a closet floor you'd rather not admit to cleaning. I hadn't slept. I hadn't cried, which I was going to grant myself a point for, and I had decided that a woman who could walk out of that room with her mop and her dignity untouched could most certainly walk into this one and write a chorus. The door opened without a knock, and in came Carter with two coffees and a stack of flashcards and a Steri strip curling at the edge of one "Don't," I said, "I haven't said anything" "You're about to be sorry. I don't want it." I took my coffee, because I am