Chapter 153: Chapter 153 Alaric saw the marks
_Rowena’s POV_
The hotel room was too quiet after Alaric left.
Each time Alaric left me, loneliness followed. One I hated to admit.
I needed a distraction.
I pushed myself upright against the pillows and reached for my phone. Celeste had sent three more files while I was sleeping, all neatly organized with short labels that told me exactly what I was looking at without wasting a single word. It was a money trail, prorecords and witness confirmation.
I worked through them slowly, piecing the full picture together. Virella had been careful, but careful people still left edges, and Celeste had found every single one of them as usual.
The trademark case against Kaelen was a loophole, the shell company too, and the payments to someone inside his legal team. All of it was documented. I wondered how Celeste found out about it.
I was halfway through the third file when my phone rang.
To my surprise, it was Kaelen.
I looked at his name on the screen for a moment before answering.
“Rowena.” His voice came through. “I heard you are okay now. You’re safe now, right?”
“I am,” I said.
. “I’m glad.”
I believed him. That was the thing about Kaelen, underneath everything that had gone wrong between us, underneath Virella and the years of distance and the disaster our marriage had become, he was never a bad person. Just a weak one in the ways that mattered most.
“How are you holding up?” I asked. “With the case.”
“It’s difficult,” he admitted. “But manageable. My legal team found inconsistencies in the filings. We think someone on the inside was feeding information.” He sighed. “I should have seen it sooner. They still work for Virella and I need to fish them out.”
“Virella was thorough,” I said. “Don’t be too hard on yourself about that.”
He was silent for a while. Then he added, “I’m sorry, Rowena. For everything. Not just this. For all of it.”
I sat with that for a moment. The apology wasn’t unexpected, I’d known it was coming eventually, in one form or another.
“I know,” I said. And “Take care of yourself, Kaelen.”
“You too. Also, can I ask you out for lun_”
I ended the call.
I set the phone down and looked at the ceiling for a moment. There was no ache where that conversation had happened. Take me out for lunch? In his dreams.
Final was the right word for it. And final felt, unexpectedly, like relief.
The door opened without a knock, which meant it was Alaric. Everyone else knocked before they entered.
He stepped into the room and his eyes moved briefly to the phone in my hand before coming back to my face.
He didn’t ask what I was doing.
“Kaelen called,” I said anyway, which surprised me more than it seemed to surprise him. Why was I explaining?
He nodded once, moved to the chair beside the bed, and sat down.
“How is he?” he asked.
“Managing,” I said. “He’ll be alright eventually.”
Alaric nodded again. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked at me with an expression I was starting to recognize. He had something.
“Celeste told me something,” he said finally.
My hands stilled on the file in my lap.
“She mentioned a gym,” he said. “She said there were traces. That you may have injuries that haven’t been treated.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Rowena.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You said that in the facility too,” he said. “While your wrist was bleeding.”
I looked down at the bandage. Fair point. Infuriating, but fair.
At the gym. I hadn’t told anyone about the gym because there was no version of telling it that didn’t make me sound like I needed to be handled carefully, and I refused to be handled carefully. I survived it. I had kept my head straight all the way through it, and I had gotten out, and that was supposed to be the end of it.
Except Celeste had found the traces anyway. Because of course she had. She was Celeste.
“It wasn’t as serious as she made it sound,” I said.
“She said you were tortured,” Alaric said, and for the first time the controlled calm in his voice had something underneath it, something tight and restrained that told me exactly how much effort the calm was costing him right now.
I met his eyes.
“I handled it,” I said.
“I know you did.” He didn’t look away. “That’s not the point.”
“Then what is the point?”
“The point,” he said slowly, “is that you don’t have your wolf anymore. You can’t heal the way you used to. And if there are injuries that weren’t treated properly, they won’t just disappear on their own.” He sighed. “I need to know what they did.”
I looked away from him. “You don’t need to know the details.”
Alaric stared at me for the longest time before he did something I hadn’t seen coming.
Alaric actually reached out to me, pulled me gently by my hand, taking the blanket off from my body and reaching for my shirt. I tried to stop him but it was already too late.
He reached for my shirt, pulled it up and exposed my messy stomach.
The moment he caught sight of the marks I’d tried to conceal, something flashed in Alaric’s face that I hadn’t seen before.
His lips actually trembled.
“Alaric,” I called out slowly, reaching out to rub his shoulders. “I’m fine.”
He didn’t let me land before he pulled me close and wrapped his arms around me in a hug. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t protect you.”
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