Semua Bab My Ex Called Me Fat, Now His Father-in-Law Wants Me: Bab 31 - Bab 40

Chapter 31: Thorne Territory POV: Julian The kid was slow refilling my glass, and slow was a thing I didn't tolerate from staff, so I let the crystal sit empty in front of me until he noticed on his own and came scrambling back across the dining hall with the decanter shaking slightly in his grip. "Sorry, Alpha, I was..." "I don't care what you were." I didn't look at him while he poured. Looking at staff when they apologized only encouraged them to keep doing it, and I'd learned a long time ago that the fastest way to run a house was to make everyone in it slightly afraid of drawing your attention at all. "Refill it before it's empty next time, or find work somewhere that tolerates incompetence." He nodded, backed away too fast, nearly clipped a serving cart on his way out. I watched him go and felt nothing about it one way or the other. Territory ran on order. Order ran on consequence. I'd inherited that particular lesson from my father before I was old enough to understand what

Chapter 33: Fetch It Yourself POV: Odette Clara has came back from Beckett's place three days after Nikolai grabbed my wrist in the study, and I felt her return before I properly registered it, that specific bristling change in a house's air pressure right before its most volatile person walks back through the door. I heard her arrive from the small study where Cai and I were working through fractions, the front doors opening below with enough force that the sound carried up two floors, followed by the click of heels moving fast and irritated across marble. Cai's pencil paused mid-word. "She's back," he said, flat, not looking up. "I heard." "She always slams the doors when she's had a good weekend with Beckett. You'd think it'd be the opposite." I filed that away without comment, some small, unwilling part of me cataloguing exactly how much this nine-year-old had learned to read his own sister's moods like weather patterns, the way you learn to read a storm's approach by the sp

Chapter 35: Rehearsal POV: Clara I made it exactly to the top of the stairs before I let my face do what it wanted to do. The smile held the whole walk out of the kitchen — I'm proud of that, honestly, proud of how smooth it came, how unbothered I looked setting the garment bag back over my arm like the conversation had cost me nothing at all. That's the part people never understand about control. It isn't the absence of feeling. It's knowing exactly which room gets to see it. My room did not get to see composure. I dropped the garment bag over the chaise and went straight to my vanity, and the girl looking back at me from the mirror had two spots of furious color high on her cheekbones that no amount of expensive concealer had ever fully managed to hide. I hated that about my own face. My mother's coloring, apparently, I didn't remember her well enough to confirm it myself, but Aunt Elena used to say it, back when she still visited more than twice a year, you flush exactly like S

Chapter 37: The Cold Shoulder POV: Odette I went back to Cai's study because it was the only place in the house I could think of to put myself, and I sat down across from him and stared at the workbook between us without seeing a single number on the page. "You okay?" Cai asked, after the third question I answered wrong that he clearly knew I should've gotten right without thinking. "Fine." "You said that word the exact way I say it when I'm not fine." I looked up at him, and something about a nine-year-old catching my own tell back at me almost made me laugh, except the laugh that came out was closer to something breaking than something amused. I didn't tell him what happened. He had enough of his own family's cruelty to carry without me adding his sister's lies to the pile. I spent the rest of the afternoon running the accusation through my body like a splinter I couldn't stop probing with my tongue. Not the words themselves, I'd survived worse words than ...you struck her, bu

Chapter 39: Coward POV: Odette I wasn't reading. I'd been staring at the same page for twenty minutes, one leg tucked under me on the library window seat, the words blurring into shapes I couldn't be bothered to sort back into meaning. Outside, the estate grounds had gone that deep, flat blue they turn right before full dark, and somewhere down the hall a clock I still hadn't located ticked loud enough to notice, the sound oddly steady against the low, restless hum in my own chest. I heard him before I saw him. Weeks in this house and apparently I'd learned his footsteps by heart without meaning to, heavier than staff, slower than Cai, a particular weight to each step that I could've picked out of a lineup blindfolded. I kept my eyes on the page anyway. Let him work for it. "You've been avoiding me," he said from the doorway. "I've been reading." "You haven't turned a page in ten minutes." Great. He'd been timing me. I looked up, mostly out of irritation, and watched him cross t