All Chapters of Bound By His Debt: Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

Elena’s POVThere is a way to clean a kitchen so that nothing in it can be blamed.I knew it by heart. Wipe the granite in long clockwise arcs so no streaks catch the light. Align the dish towels by their seams. Stack the glasses with their rims all facing the same way, because Mark noticed when they didn't, and what Mark noticed, Mark corrected. By ten past nine on Thursday night, the kitchen gleamed like a showroom, and I stood in the middle of it with a sponge in my hand and nothing left to scrub.I pressed my palm to my ribs. Beneath my cardigan, the bruise had ripened to the color of a plum, and it flared whenever I breathed too deeply. Two nights old. I had been carrying his whiskey to the study, my fingers still slick from the dishes, and the glass had simply slipped. It hit the hardwood and burst, and in the silence afterward I heard him set down his phone."Clean it up," he had said, very softly. The softness was always the worst part.So I had knelt and picked up every

Elena’s POVThe office had no windows.That was the first thing I noticed when Gideon released my arm and the door shut behind me with a sound too soft for how final it was. Black walls. A desk as wide as a coffin. A leather chair, a single lamp, a decanter on a side table. No clock. I had counted the whole drive, every turn, every red light, twenty-six minutes in the dark, and now the counting had nothing left to hold on to.The lock clicked. I felt it in my teeth.Jax stood with his back to the door, slipping out of his coat. He hung it over the chair with slow, careful hands. He had not spoken a single word to me since my kitchen, and the silence was a cruelty all on its own. Mark’s silences always ended in something. I knew their shapes. This one I couldn’t read.She’s clean. She’s young. She’s obedient. Mark’s voice kept looping in my head like a stuck record. He had been selling a product, and I knew what happened to products. They got used.So this was it. This was how I

Elena’s POVMark’s laptop still had his fingerprints on the screen.I saw them the moment Gideon led me into Jax’s office and left me alone with it, smudges along the edges where my husband had carried it, a greasy thumbprint in one corner. It made my stomach turn. Even here, in this black windowless room, he was still touching things I had to live with.I sat down in the leather chair. My feet didn’t reach the floor properly. I felt like a child who had been put in a stranger’s seat.Midnight, I told myself. You have until midnight.It took me nine tries to guess the password.I tried his birthday. His mother’s name. The Porsche. Then, with a hollow feeling in my chest, I typed the date we were married, and the screen opened.I stared at it. Out of everything he could have chosen to guard his secrets, he had chosen the day he promised to love me. Of course he had. It was the one date he would never think to defend, because he was sure I would never think to use it.I almost l