Caelum is in the living room when I go to him and this time I know something has changed.He’s hunched over his computer, the look on his face grim and the line of his lips tight. I can tell something’s wrong, it’s obvious, yet when he looks at me his eyes soften. He sits up straight and I unconsciously notice how much space he takes up on the couch.The couch is large enough though. It’s almost perfect for someone of his size.I take the leap of faith and I go to sit beside him. Directly beside him. I feel Caelum stiffen as I settle in and that makes me chuckle, because this shows he’s just as nervous as I am and that settles me.“Is anything the problem?”I can almost already tell there is, yet this isn’t one of those moments where the knowledge of an imminent problem would bring cold to my fingers or a scared rumbling to my belly. The laptop is shining in front of us. When I direct my eyes to it I almost half expect him to close the open window, but he doesn’t.Instead he seems t
The more I read the more I feel like hitting my head on something, or slamming a knife against my chest and letting the sharp end go in so fast it just stops everything.“This is going to put a lot of people in trouble.”Caelum chuckles beside me and when he speaks, his voice tickles something at the back of my brain though his statement is solemn, “I don’t believe they’re thinking about any of that.”I agree with him because they’re not. It’s obvious they’re not.Volta Shipping isn’t just any shipping company, they have ties everywhere, and even if they seem small, I don’t think they are. They’re one of those organizations I never got to wrap my head around, to be honest. Nothing seemed clear cut when it came to them, but they served my purpose so their origins at the time wasn’t that big of a stumbling block“A scandal of this size could sink Volta.”They don’t have the necessary footholds to survive something of this magnitude, not to talk of the fact that Ulric doesn’t know what t
“Alora!”I can barely keep the shrill scream from my voice.“Aloraa!!!”There’s something almost perfect about the air today and though I'm screaming my lungs out, I realize all this, just a few happy moments with these people, washes away the years of pain and trauma I've always been trying to keep under the surface. I scream again,“Aloraa!!!”This time she sticks her head out from one of the rooms with a disgruntled look on her face, like an annoyed cat. Her words are calm and slow as she responds, “Is there any reason why you want to shake the pillars of this manor with the sound of my name?”I scoff and chuckle at the same time because if I could do that, I would have done it a long time ago, just not to these pillars and not to this house.I go through the door and into the room she’s in and when she’s seated on the bed again, looking up at me confused and with a slight frown on her face, probably because I’m grinning so much, I say the first thing that comes to mind,“You start
Alora’s response does not surprise me, but the efficiency of the task does. I realize that I can see what Caleum meant when he told me to go ask Alora. He didn’t just want me to congratulate Alora on her return to reporting. He wanted to save me the stress of having to find things out myself. Things like who to truly side with within this Volta vs Highrise dilemma, and while siding with Volta would have been the easiest and best choice, now I know it’s the right choice too.I know I wasn't wrong with my judgment, and Alora has done the fact-finding to prove it.“Did you get what you needed from her?”Caelum is still seated on the couch when I return, and this time I don't even think twice about it. I throw myself onto the couch with a slump, sitting as close to him as I can and feeling the warmth of his skin on mine through his shirt as I respond.“Ulric is the one setting the company up. I was right.”Caelum chuckles in a way that makes me feel he’s saying there was never a doubt ab
Caelum nods when I say that and it takes some time, it takes me some time for me to fully process it all, but I find myself chuckling, and when I look up at Caelum again, I find I can't say anything else than what I've said twice now.“You knew.”Caelum nods again and I feel something shift in my mind as I stare at the ceiling once more. The height of it makes the house feel all the more real to me to an extent and I don't know why but I let it ground me.I let the slight look of uncertainty I had seen in Caelum’s eyes bring my mind back to the right track, and with all this knowledge, I look at the situation with new eyes, and I repeat it over and over in my mind again, that he knew.I had always wondered at why Volta was so loose.Why they were so freehanded. Why they would literally not report us to the authorities whenever Ulric tried to sneak contraband into our products and get them shipped overseas?It’s because he knew.Caelum owns Volta. He’s known from the start that Ulri
Caelum doesn’t let us speak about Volta, and in the spirit of that, I let myself relax in his arms for the rest of the day. I realize it’s nice to sit in Caelum’s highrises’s arms. He doesn’t like it when I call him Highrise, and I realize I don't like it too much.Mostly because the name Highrise reminds me too much of the family connected to it, yet at the end of the day, my daughter bears that name. I bear that name.I want to stop bearing it because of the man who’s made the name a noose around my neck. Ulroic made the highrise name a rope by which he could tug me this way and that, and I let him. I let him do that out of the obligation I felt to be responsible for that name.Ulric made me hate the Highrise name, but Ravenna and Caelum make me feel like some good can come out of it.Like there’s hope, for me and for all of us who bear the name Highrise by association, and not by inheritance.“What are you thinking about?”I hear Caelum’s words strike chords in my heart and another
Sophia’s pov.I wake up in Caelum’s bed, and I wake up to the feeling of him around me. His skin - so close to mine and his hands around my waist again, holding onto me, like I'm running somewhere.I sigh at the warmth that curls in my stomach, and I sigh at the feeling of his presence, of him, mentally breathing on the mate bond, but more than that, I sigh at the fact that he’s here. The fact I'm not alone anymore, and that as weird as all this might be, I am going to figure it out.I turn to look at him, and I see dark hair tumbling over a sharp and ridiculously handsome face. I see that face has eyes tightly closed in sleep, but his expression while in sleep makes me wonder if he’s actually enjoying the sleep or not.There’s a line, a silver line, just on one of his cheekbones. Up close I can see it without having to strain my eyes.Caelum Maxmoff sleeps with the same expression I used to see on his face each time we met in the halls of this house, or the dining room. Caelum slee
I watch as Alora pulls out a social media blog on her screen and I am hit by a sudden feeling of nostalgia.I totally forgot about the pictures I took with Ulric. I don’t know what effect they’ve had or what he’s using them for, and I feel foolish now because I was doing that with the belief that he’d hold up to his end of the bargain and give me my share of the wealth I helped him build for the better part of my life.I’d always had the feeling that Ulric would try to pull one last trick on me, and yet what confuses me is that for the life of me, I can't believe this is the trick he meant to pull on me.Ulric Highrise values his pride more than anything else, so I want to believe he had every intention of giving me the share he had promised once we got divorced. The share I made him agree to give me by signing. Ulric would have done it just to let it be a slap on my face, so maybe it’s my disbelief in the fact that he could do that, which got me into the mess I found myself in the f