Elsa
Adam never brought up the incident, and I didn’t either. The silence between us was suffocating, a constant reminder of the pain and heartbreak that I carried. Every time I thought about it, it felt like a stab to my chest, sharp and unrelenting. I could tell it had shaken Adam, too.
Since what happened with Lucas, I had noticed how much more tense Adam had become. Four times that week, he had tried to claim me, to make me his, and almost succeeded once. Yet he kept holding back, and I couldn’t understand why. Why was he hesitating? It was tearing me apart.
Leaving him, walking away from all of this, felt impossible. My emotions for him were tangled up with everything else—my father’s involvement, the partial claiming, and the looming sense of betrayal. It was a chaotic, unbearabl
