Never Mistake a Queen for a Lapdog novel Chapter 1100

Pressed against his chest, Noreen could feel the heavy shift in his emotions.

"I calculated every single variable. I paved your road and made sure you were indestructible... but the one thing I never saw coming was you throwing away your chance to study abroad just for me."

He had only found out when investigating Bianca Lowell. Back then, he assumed she had stayed out of a sense of obligation, but it had still gnawed at him.

Noreen looked up, meeting his eyes in the shadows. "What if I hadn't given up that opportunity? What if I had just left the country?"

He didn't answer immediately.

The tenderness in his eyes slowly evaporated, replaced by a suffocating darkness that chilled the very air in the bedroom.

When he finally spoke, his voice was dangerously flat, entirely devoid of warmth. "Then I wouldn't have wasted so much time setting up the board."

"I would have destroyed them all and gone down with them."

The words were spoken quietly, but they hit like a freight train. No hesitation. No weighing the odds. Not a single trace of doubt.

Noreen's breath caught at the terrifying flash of pure ruthlessness in his eyes.

Seth lowered his head, burying his face in the crook of her neck. His breath was scorching against her skin. "But you stayed."

"I became addicted to every second I spent with you. I couldn't bear to leave you. And then I kept thinking... if I dragged everyone straight to hell, what would happen to you?"

He would never forget the night she had stood stubbornly in the pouring rain outside the Gilmore family estate, begging them to donate bone marrow for Rosalind, only to be locked out. He remembered the utter despair in her eyes when she returned to the hospital.

He was terrified that if she hit a wall like that again, there would be no one there to catch her.

So he had meticulously molded her into an absolute force of nature—someone who could stand tall in the center of a hurricane.

He altered his entire strategy. He utilized everyone he could, walking a razor's edge just to buy her enough time to become untouchable.

What she didn't know was that the moment she finally became strong enough to stand alone was the exact moment he was forced to let her go.

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