#Chapter 24: Bonding

Kayla The moment I stepped through the front doors of the estate, I felt a heavy weight settle on my shoulders. My mind was still spinning, replaying everything I had just seen in that dark, suffocating basement. And it didn’t help any that I didn’t even get to come home to my own house, but rather a foreign place that was still mostly empty after Isabella fucking stole everything. I hurried up the grand staircase, ignoring the soft “Luna, welcome home,” from one of the housemaids. The second I got to my bedroom and the door closed behind me, I pressed my back against it and exhaled shakily. I had known from the start that Nicholas wasn’t exactly a… paragon of virtue. He was arrogant, manipulative, and seemed to love the idea of fulfilling the typical ‘bad boy’ trope. I could put up with it, though, knowing that he wasn’t actually going to cause trouble and that we were helping each other achieve our goals. But what I had just seen wasn’t the calculated y