บททั้งหมดของ FOURFOLD OBSESSION: Chained By Their Desires : บทที่ 1 - บทที่ 8

MIA'S POVI have exactly one rule for parties like this: never learn anyone's last name before midnight. Last names lead to context. Context leads to consequences. And I'd flown eleven hours from London to a stepfamily I'd never met, in a city I didn't know, three days before I was expected to walk into a house full of strangers and call it home—so tonight, of all nights, I wanted exactly zero consequences.The party was some fraternity-adjacent thing off campus, borrowed from a friend of a friend of the girl I'd sat next to on the plane, and I'd said yes to the invitation for the same reason I said yes to most things lately: because saying no meant sitting alone in a hotel room thinking about the wedding photos my mother kept texting me, of a man I'd met exactly twice and a house full of sons I'd never met at all.By eleven, I'd been folded into a circle on the back patio without quite agreeing to it—a loose ring of strangers sitting on overturned crates and a sagging outdoor sofa,

MIA'S POV My room was on the third floor, at the end of a hallway that smelled like fresh paint and old money, and the first thing I did once the door clicked shut behind me was sit on the edge of an unfamiliar bed and try to remember his voice.Not the words. The words I had memorized without trying — *I'd rather not know yours either* — but words could belong to anyone. What I needed was the shape of it. The particular low register, the way it had dropped a half-step quieter right before he said something he meant. I closed my eyes in a stranger's guest room and replayed three nights ago like a recording I was only allowed to hear once, and by the time Warren knocked on my door to call me down for dinner, I had exactly nothing to show for it except a headache and four faces I couldn't stop comparing to a voice in the dark.Dinner was its own kind of ambush.The dining room was long enough that conversation had to travel, which meant most of it didn't bother — Warren talked, mostly

MIA'S POV I didn't confront Sebastian. I'd meant to — I'd walked out onto that terrace with the whole accusation loaded and ready — but the moment I saw his face, careful and closed and giving away exactly nothing, I lost my nerve for a different reason than I expected.I realized I didn't actually want it to be a confrontation. I wanted it to be true. And those were two very different things to want at six in the morning with no sleep behind me."You're staring," Sebastian said, without turning around."Am I?""You've been staring since you walked out here. It's a specific kind of staring. I'd like to know what I did to earn it."*Everything*, I almost said. *Nothing. I don't actually know yet, and that's the problem.*"Julian said you've been in a mood for three days," I said instead, testing. "Since right before I arrived."Something shifted behind his eyes — there and gone so fast I couldn't have sworn to it in a courtroom. "Julian talks too much before he's had coffee.""That's

MIA'S POV I found out about the party by accident, the way I seemed to find out about everything in that house — a text left open on the kitchen counter, Finn's phone lighting up while he ran upstairs for his jacket, a single line glowing on the screen before it locked itself again.*Everyone's already at the lake house. Don't bring the new girl.*Don't bring the new girl.I stood there in the kitchen for a long moment, feeling something hot and humiliating climb up the back of my throat. Three days since the terrace. Three days of Sebastian being careful and distant, of Finn being just slightly too bright, of Julian watching all of us like a man cataloguing a problem he hadn't decided how to solve yet — and apparently, underneath all of it, there'd been a whole other life happening without me. A party. A lake house. A version of this family that closed ranks the second I wasn't looking.I told myself I didn't care. I told myself that twice, which was becoming a habit with me, and it