Mathieu was already fast asleep in his room. The apartment had fallen quiet with the late hour, yet sleep remained impossibly far from Jacqueline. She lay awake, staring into the darkness as the events of the day replayed relentlessly in her mind.
The way Damien had claimed her.
The words still echoed in her head, refusing to fade. She couldn't push that moment away no matter how hard she tried. Everything about it felt unreal, almost dreamlike. In the span of only a few hours, the direction of her entire life seemed to have shifted.
She had never expected anything like this.
At first, she had assumed he had returned only to mock her. The way he ignored her earlier had convinced her of that. But what happened in that empty classroom… that was something else entirely.
What had changed?
The last thing she remembered from the past was that Damien loved someone else. Yet today he had stood in front of her and openly declared that she belonged to him.
