All Chapters of Scarred Hearts: A Mafia Billionaire Romance : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Day ThreeSilence fell over her like a second skin, drawn tight and stretched wide across her breast, and tauter with every cringing second. Second by miserable second, time retreated, dragging her consciousness of it with it.No longer hunger.The waiting.Waiting for the inevitable.Waiting for the next faint spurt of hope.Waiting for the door to open, to find it wouldn't.Her belly had quit pleading, asking for food. It had given up the need, the place where dwelt. No meal—no way to move, to stand up and see. She had tried once to creep, her hands trembling for every inch, but her legs went out from her, and she lay on the hardness of the ground.The pain was another kind.It didn't belong to her. Not all hers.The weight of being left behind, and seeds of doubt that had planted themselves in her. How it had led her to doubt everything she'd ever known and been of Harrison, of herself. The soft-whispered man at the door today, who had her contained in this cold room.She knew what

The door creaked open slowly.Slow.Creaking.Intentional.Leya did not move.Not yet.She was curled tight in the bend of the bed, turned away from the door, towards the wall. She was motionless, breathing even and deep, the only sound in a room still heavy with the scent of silence and stale air.Then there were footsteps.Two sets.Heavy. Deliberate.Harrison.And—Nathaniel.She had their pace now. The way they moved. The way one moved like he owned the world and the other like he never wanted to ever hit the ground.Harrison's feet first on the ground. Closer to the center of the room.Nathaniel is close by the door.Not a sound.Leya didn't turn. She didn't even blink. She let them gawk.Let them know what they have done.She didn’t need to perform pain. It was written on her skin. It bled into the room from the pale blue under her eyes, from the sharp edge of her cheekbones, from the chapped split of her lower lip.She had wasted away beautifully.Harrison’s voice broke the sil

Nathaniel closed the door, and Harrison was left standing by himself in the vacant room that had been overrun by them.He did not stir.There was a smell of rose soap that still clung to the air with an unforgiving hold.It was not her fragrance that lingered, however.It was her silence.She never pleaded.She never cried.She never even regarded him as a man.She left him in the sunlight.And did not mind if she might as well murder him. But at least.There was a fist on either side of him.Harrison Blackwood, for the first time in his life, did not have that feeling of the presence of a hunter in the room.He did have the feeling of the quarry.---Meanwhile – East Wing, Vivian's Private Sitting RoomThe drapes were drawn. The fire was burning low. And the brandy in Vivian Blackwood's snifter was older than most of the servants.She stood at the mantelpiece, stiff as a cathedral.Eleanor sat across from her, still on the velvet chaise—cross-legged, unspotted, like an over-indulged

The Crystal Lantern flickered, not so much as flared.Fatigued bar wedged between broken-down buildings and broken sidewalks, it was the kind of neighborhood most women shunned after nightfall. The kind of neighborhood Leya Anderson—Blackwood wife, convict bride, painted china doll of a poisoned manor—shouldn't be a part of.And yet… it was where she lived.She was alone on the sidewalk for a minute before her first shift, fingers buried in coat, the spinning neon sign beating a hard red throb overhead. It throbbed like something sick and terrible.She didn't fit.Not because she'd never fit anywhere anyway. Not since everything.Inside was sticky with spilled whiskey, burnt orange peel, and bodily fluids. Glasses broke. There was a flash of too-obvious laughter. Music thumped through the boards.The bartender—a man named Reed, early forty, tattooed hands and cigarette voice—greeted her with a jerk of his chin."You Leya?" he said, his eyes running over her like a checkpoint scanner.

The house slept. That deep, heavy sleep money buys. No bedlam. No alarms. But only endless corridors with silent sconces and floors that shone without a creak. Leya was rigid in the center of her bedroom. She spent there once a minute or two—or so—rigid, inaccessible, just staring at the spread on her bed. Same hoodie. Same jeans. The same black sneakers that never creaked on marble. Her ritual. Her uniform for the other existence. The one she had. --- Getting Ready Slid out of her silk nightgown and into jeans with the knees worn soft at the frayed hems. Pulled the hoodie over her battered shoulders. Tied back her hair in a tight braid. Stuffed the crumpled money into her sock—never her purse. The purse got grabbed. She'd learned that. And she looked in the mirror. No makeup. No perfume. No hint of the woman Harrison used to know. A face carved out of determination. Eyes that wouldn't blink. She stuffed the pocket knife into her sleeve and closed the drawer. Just in c