Chapter 70 Chapter 70: (END) Callum was busy. Declan was recovering. The phone calls that had once been daily became weekly, then biweekly, then monthly, then — not never, but close to never: the occasional text, the birthday acknowledgment, the Christmas message that took three days to compose and said

Chapter 69 Chapter 69: He could do nothing but give up. The sentence existed in his mind as a fact rather than a decision — the way gravity is a fact, the way the earth’s rotation is a fact. He didn’t accept it. He simply stopped resisting it, the way

Chapter 68 Chapter 68: He got out of the car. Stood in the hospital garage. His face was white — the color of paper, the color of absence — and his shirt was soaked, and his hands were shaking, and the man who had once driven at three hundred kilometers

Chapter 67 Chapter 67: When Declan woke up in Halcombe General Hospital, the first thing he noticed was that he couldn’t feel his legs. The second thing he noticed was that Callum was sitting beside the bed — not sleeping, not reading, not looking at his phone, just sitting, with

Chapter 66 Chapter 66: She walked between them. Looked at Callum — at the stubble, the bloodshot eyes, the suit, the desperation — with an expression that held pain and pity and something harder than either. “I trust Edmund.” Her voice was steady. “If you want to prove he was

Chapter 65 Chapter 65: “Edmund.” His voice was ice over fire — the Hargrove composure, cracked, revealing the heat beneath. “Isn’t it enough that you took Lara? Now you send someone to run Declan off the road p> He wrenched free of Edmund’s grip. Staggered. Steadied himself against the doorframe.

Chapter 64 Chapter 64: The morning after the wedding, the Blackwell estate was quiet in the way that expensive houses are quiet: deliberately, architecturally, with double-paned windows and thick walls and the particular insulation that money provides against the noise of the outside world. Sunlight came through the bedroom curtains

Chapter 63 Chapter 63: “Declan p> His voice was calm. This was the worst sign. Callum’s calm was not peace — it was the absence of everything else, the blank that remained when fear and anger and grief had all been burned away simultaneously, leaving nothing but function. “I’m here

Chapter 62 Chapter 62: The intersection was three miles from Kingsgate Hall. Declan was driving at a speed that the road was not designed for — the speed of a man who had spent his career exceeding the limits of what machines could do and had forgotten, or was choosing

Chapter 61 Chapter 61: At the Ashworth garden, the two hundred guests watched the live feed and cheered. They received gold ingots — solid, heavy, stamped with the Blackwell crest — and boxes of sweets that were individually wrapped and probably cost more than they should have. The opulence was