[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"origin-bl-bound-to-my-enemy-the-billionaire-who-took-my":3,"chapter-bl-bound-to-my-enemy-the-billionaire-who-took-my-bl-bound-to-my-enemy-the-billionaire-who-took-my-chapter-280":6},{"origin":4,"title":5},"english","[BL] Bound to My Enemy: The Billionaire Who Took My Girl",{"chapter":7,"nextChapterSlug":19,"prevChapterSlug":20,"totalChapters":21,"novelImage":22},{"id":8,"novel_id":9,"title":10,"slug":11,"index":12,"content":13,"wordcount":14,"created_at":15,"updated_at":15,"volume":16,"translator":17,"content_hash":18},1735714,2219,"Chapter 280: Drowning","bl-bound-to-my-enemy-the-billionaire-who-took-my-chapter-280",280,"\u003Cp>CYAN\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>It was not a dream. It was something less formed than a dream. It was just a sensation of warmth turning into cold.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I felt something slipping through my hands like sand. There was the smell of salt water and the sharp tang of iron.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I felt the weight of someone leaning against me. Then that weight became an absence before I could even fully register that it was there.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>My thoughts were not complete yet. They were not coherent. They were just a direction, like a compass needle pointing toward something that was no longer there.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Then I reached the surface. I did not break through it with a splash. I was just present all of a sudden.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I felt the texture of the fabric against my cheek. It was not my fabric. I felt the specific weight of a heavy blanket. It was not my blanket.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I heard the sound of a television playing at a low volume. Something was on the screen, but I was not watching it.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The light in the room was coming from the wrong angle. It had the wrong quality. This was not my window.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>These things registered in my mind, but they did not land. There is a difference between those two things.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Registration is passive. Landing requires something that I did not currently have access to.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I sat up slowly. I did not move slowly because I was in pain. I moved slowly because speed requires intention.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Intention requires more energy than was currently available to me. I looked at the room through a narrow lens.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The circle of the image was present, but it was surrounded by the soft dark of peripheral nothingness.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The image itself was slightly blurred at the edges. It looked like someone had adjusted the focus partway and then simply walked away.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I did not feel panic. I did not feel relief or confusion. I just had the awareness that something was around me and that I was inside of it.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>My memory did not arrive in a continuous stream. It was not like a film playing in a theater. It came in separate frames without any connective tissue between them.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>In the first frame, I saw my own hands. They were dark. There was something on them that did not belong to me.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>In the second frame, there was a sound. It was not quite a voice and not quite a scream. It was muffled, like the way sound travels through deep water.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The third frame was a sensation of something warm becoming cold. It was the specific temperature shift of life leaving something that was only warm because of me.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>In the fourth frame, I was running. I saw the dock and the dark water.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>In the fifth frame, there was nothing. It was the nothing that comes after the body decides it has taken enough for one day.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The gaps between these frames were not frightening to me. They were just gaps. My brain was selecting what to show me and what to hold back.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>It was like a parent deciding what a child is ready to see. When I tried to reach toward those frames, they receded.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>My brain stepped in front of them and told me not yet. I accepted this.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>My brain has been doing this my whole life. I have learned that pushing against it costs more than waiting for it to open up.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Someone was there with me. I remembered this much. I could not see the face clearly, but I remembered the shape of a person.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I remembered the temperature of a presence. It was familiar in a sensory way rather than a logical one.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>It was not the recognition of a name or a face that made it familiar. It was something more primitive than that.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>It was a similarity to something I already knew. My body categorized it as being adjacent to what is safe and adjacent to what is known.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I remembered a voice making something like a bet. It mentioned a number. Two days.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The voice was cold and precise. It was nothing like warmth, but it was close to the shape of something I recognized.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The image in my mind cleared slightly at the edges.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The face was familiar in a specific way. It had the same architecture as someone else’s face, but it was much colder.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>It had the temperature of someone who built walls earlier than most people do and built them much better.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The name arrived. Nick. He was Noah’s brother. He was the man with the jaw that I had hit on a pavement in what felt like a different life.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>He told me to follow.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>So I followed.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I did not decide to do it.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>My body moved toward the warmth in a cold room without being asked.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I looked around the room properly now. I saw the couch and the blanket. I saw the coffee table and the television.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Everything was clean and ordered. It was the specific order of someone who controls their environment because that is the only version of control they can have.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I moved through the space slowly. I saw the kitchen and the bathroom. I saw the details of a space that belonged to a person who bought the same brand of everything. To this person, variables were just inefficiencies.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The last two days arrived in my mind as awareness rather than memory. I was aware of moving when I was directed to move. I was aware of eating when food appeared in front of me. I responded when I was spoken to.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>All of it happened from the outside of myself. I was watching myself do these things through someone else’s eyes that happened to be my own.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I recognized this feeling. It was not new. I had been here before. It was not this apartment, but it was this state of being. I was looking from behind glass at my own life operating without me.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\"This feeling again,\" I said aloud. I said it to no one, or I said it to myself. It was the same thing.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I sat back down on the couch. There was a quiet in my head, but it was not a peaceful quiet. It was the wrong kind of quiet. It was the silence of a room after something loud has stopped.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I took an inventory of my mind. The constant low-level noise that my brain always makes should have been there.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>My thoughts should have been running and making observations. My pattern recognition and analysis should have been running on everything all the time.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Instead, there was almost nothing. There was just a hollow space. Underneath that hollow, there was a specific wrongness. I knew the space shouldn’t be empty because something was filling it before.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The name arrived quietly and without any drama.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Cassian.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>That is what was there.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>That is what filled the space. Now the absence of him was louder than the name itself.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>A thought about my medication surfaced. It was muscle memory. My brain had learned early on that it needs management when certain states arrive.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I had not brought it with me. I had been here for two days without it.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>A quiet urge appeared at the edge of my mind.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>It was an old friend that was not really a friend. There you are, I thought. I was wondering when you would show up.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I did not follow the urge today. I noted it and set it aside. I have had years of practice, so I knew it could be set aside even when it felt like the only thing that would help.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Another presence flickered at the edge of the emptiness. It was a face, but it was not Cassian’s face. The word arrived before I could even decide to think it. Noah.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The resistance in my mind was immediate. I shut the thought down fast. It was faster than the last time I shut it down, which had been faster than the time before that.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>But the restraint only made the feeling stronger. That is the thing about suppression.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I have known this academically for years, and I lived it anyway. Knowing something and being able to stop it are two entirely different skills.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Underneath it all, there was a quiet truth. It was not dramatic. Cassian chose someone. He is choosing someone.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>And it is not me. I know this. It shouldn’t matter, and yet it does.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>A thought arrived again about the person who owned this apartment. I noticed that\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Nick watches too closely for someone who performs the act of not watching.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>He had brought a stranger home, which contradicted everything his apartment said about him.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>It contradicted the order and the control and the single-brand lifestyle.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The contradiction was interesting to me, even in this state. My brain still noticed those things.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The curiosity was small, but it was present. It was the first thing that had felt like the real Cyan since I was on that dock.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Why did he let me stay? I wondered. He didn’t have to. He wanted to leave. He left anyway and then he came back.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I did not have the answer. I noted the curiosity and set it beside the other things for later.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The turning point was small and not dramatic at all. A thought crossed my mind fully.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Two days. That is what he said. Cassian will wake up.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Everything about it was utterly impossible but I still wanted to believe.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Then the next thought came. Cassian was shot.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>It was not fragmented anymore. It was not a frame without connective tissue. It was complete and clear and present.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Everything followed in a sequence. I remembered the dock and the blood. I remembered Cassian’s weight and the car. I remembered the hospital and the floor. It was all playing like a film now.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The buffering In my brain ended. The quiet became something else entirely. I sat very still for a moment while the information arrived in full.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\"I need to go,\" I said aloud to the empty apartment.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The device was sitting on the cushion beside me. It was not my phone. It was Nick’s spare. He had left it with a passcode that he had said aloud as if it was nothing. But it was not nothing.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I picked it up and entered the passcode. I dialed his number... Something I’ve memorized my whole life.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The phone rang once.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\"Master Cyan,\" a voice said. It was Reginald. He answered on the first ring because he always answers on the first ring for me.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I exhaled. It was the specific exhale of someone who had been somewhere else for two days. I had just heard the first voice that sounded like home.\u003C\u002Fp>",1814,"2026-06-06T16:23:43.455Z",1,"novelbin.me","f4b8a5d3666a85fd67c1b98d3be26268288b8b4be07ff3c49296a42d49c5fc7d","bl-bound-to-my-enemy-the-billionaire-who-took-my-chapter-281","bl-bound-to-my-enemy-the-billionaire-who-took-my-chapter-279",307,"https:\u002F\u002Fnovelzhen.com\u002Fimages\u002Fcovers\u002Fbl-bound-to-my-enemy-the-billionaire-who-took-my-cover.jpg"]