All Chapters of BOUND BY THIS BLOOD CONTRACT : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

POV: MaliaThe courier envelope didn’t look like a threat. It sat on the edge of the granite kitchen island, disguised as a mundane promotional mailer for a boutique I hadn’t shopped at in years. I stared at the return address. A phantom company. Elena’s distinct, hurried handwriting barely peeked through the printed label, the looping ‘M’ in my name giving her away.I waited until the housekeeper, Mrs. Gable, retreated to the laundry wing before I slid a butter knife under the adhesive flap. The envelope tore open with a sharp rip. Inside, wrapped in a single layer of bubble wrap, was a matte black flash drive. No note. No explanation. Just a heavy piece of encrypted metal that felt ten degrees colder than the room. I slipped it into my pocket, the cold plastic biting against my thigh, and walked straight to my study.The door locked behind me with a solid, reassuring click. I pulled my secondary laptop from the false bottom of my desk drawer—the one entirely disconnected from Jarrah

POV: MaliaI had spent my entire life pretending my birthday didn’t exist. Growing up, it was just another day the bills were due, another day my father drank too much to forget the precinct politics. When I married Jarrah, I explicitly told him I didn't want parties, cakes, or forced celebrations. He had respected that boundary for three years.Which was why finding him standing in my private sitting room the next morning felt like a violation.The morning light filtered through the sheer curtains, casting a soft glow over the velvet armchair where Jarrah sat. He held a small, flat velvet box in his right hand. He wasn't dressed in his usual armor of a three-piece suit. He wore a simple dark sweater, the sleeves pushed up to reveal the heavy silver watch on his wrist. He looked dangerously domestic."I know the rules," he said before I could open my mouth to object. "No events. No public displays."I stayed near the doorway, hyper-aware of the distance between us. The memory of the o

POV: MaliaThe ride to the waterfront was suffocatingly quiet. I stared out the passenger window, watching the blurred neon lights of the city smear across the rain-slicked glass. The steady thrum of the engine vibrated through the floorboards, matching the restless tapping of my boot against the mat. I couldn't stop thinking about the heavy Glock sitting in the glovebox right in front of my knees. The weight of the impending violence pressed down on my chest, making it hard to draw a full breath. I kept my eyes fixed on the passing shadows, afraid that if I looked at Jarrah, I’d lose my nerve and beg him to turn the car around. The silence in the cabin was so thick I could practically feel it choking me. We were accelerating toward the edge of a cliff, and I had willingly strapped myself into the passenger seat.Jarrah shifted gears, his hand brushing my knee in the cramped space of the console. The brief contact sent a jolt through my system, sharp and electric. I risked a glance at

POV: MaliaThe coffee went cold twenty minutes ago, but I kept the ceramic mug pressed between my palms. It gave me something to ground myself with, something to distract me from the charcoal-grey wool jacket draped over the back of my dining chair. Julian had left it behind last night. The left cuff was slightly frayed, a tiny, humanizing imperfection on a man who otherwise moved through the city encased in impenetrable armor.I shouldn't have let him stay as long as he did. I shouldn't have let him stand so close to me in the entryway, the space between us shrinking until I could feel the heat radiating off his skin. Every time he looked at me with that quiet, careful intensity, the rage I’d nurtured since Callan died began to fracture. I hated it. It felt like a direct betrayal of my own blood. Callan was on the ground, and I was standing in my kitchen, rationalizing the lingering scent of cedar and rain clinging to the fabric of the man I blamed for putting him there.I tipped the

POV: MaliaThe blinking cursor on my secondary monitor mocked me, keeping rhythm with the dull, throbbing ache at my temples. I rubbed my eyes, pressing the heels of my palms into my sockets until bursts of static color flared behind my eyelids. The clock in the corner of the screen read 3:14 AM. The house was utterly silent, the kind of heavy, pressurized quiet that only exists in massive, empty properties. Downstairs, Jarrah’s security detail would be doing their hourly rotations, their rubber-soled boots making no sound on the imported hardwood. Up here, in the cold ambient glow of my setup, there was only me and the ghost of my brother.I dropped my hands and stared at the terminal window again. My custom decryption script had been crawling through the Victoria Police internal servers for eleven days. It was a reckless, stupid gamble, pinging localized nodes through a proxy chain that would take a forensic team weeks to untangle, but Callan’s official autopsy report had never made