Chapter 72 Between Shadows And Bonds

• Rachel POV
• The air in the living room was so heavy it almost vibrated, as if a single misplaced word could spark a fight right there in the middle of my home. Jeremy and Cody stared at each other across the table, the silence between them louder than any words. Jeremy’s eyes were hard, his jaw clenched, his posture that of someone ready to protect something—or someone—at any cost. Cody, on the other hand, maintained an unsettling calm, but I could see the tension in his shoulders, in the fingers that lightly tapped the edge of his plate. They were like opposite sides of the same coin, and I, caught in the middle, was the fragile thread holding them in a precarious balance.
• My heart pounded unevenly, a frantic drum in my chest. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want two parts of my world—the past Cody represented and the present I fought to preserve with Jeremy—to go to war in my own house. Each glance exchanged between them was a silent battle, and I felt torn, ripped between curiosity about who Cody was and loyalty to everything Nick, Scarlett, and Jeremy meant to me. It hurt. It hurt because all I wanted was peace, a chance to breathe without being in the eye of a hurricane. But maybe, after everything, that was asking too much.