Chapter 218: Chapter 218: Regret
Chapter 218: Regret
The difference showed itself again in the most direct way.
Serena’s legs were long, and one of her strides covered what took Elias two. Once she forced herself forward, the distance he had made vanished fast. He had barely reached the edge of the campus approach before she caught him from behind.
Elias fell into her arms.
There was no warmth in it.
Only force.
Serena’s arms locked around his waist, hard enough to stop him from twisting free. Her body closed around his like a cage.
"Let go of me!"
Elias fought wildly.
This time, Serena did not answer.
She did not threaten, coax, explain, or call him Eli. She simply held him and dragged him back toward the car.
From a short distance away, Liora watched the scene with a mild smile. "Need help?"
Serena did not even look at her.
She acted as if she had heard nothing. With one arm still locked around Elias, she hauled him to the car, forced him into the back seat, climbed in after him, and shut the door.
The locks clicked.
"Drive," she told the driver.
Liora chose that moment to slide into the front passenger seat. Through the rearview mirror, she caught one glimpse of Serena in the back, hair disturbed, cheek marked, mouth still touched with blood, body pulled tight around a boy trying to escape her.
Liora’s lips curved.
The atmosphere in the car was so strange that even the driver, who had worked for Serena for years and seen more private disasters than most people could imagine, felt trapped inside it. Her hands tightened around the wheel. All she wanted was to get her employer home as fast as possible.
The car pulled away.
A partition rose between the front and back seats, sealing the rear cabin into privacy.
The driver released a quiet breath as if someone had removed a blade from the back of her neck.
"Nervous?"
The light laugh from the passenger seat made the driver jolt.
She realized it was Liora and relaxed by a fraction. "Ms. Voss, please don’t scare me like that."
Compared with Serena, Liora was easier to speak to. Not safe, exactly. No one with that last name and that smile was safe. But Liora did not punish small truths for existing in the room.
"How could I not be nervous?" the driver muttered, eyes still on the road. "Anyone who ran into something like this would be..."
"It’s just a couple’s fight," Liora said. "Nothing serious."
As she spoke, she slid a small earbud from her ear.
The smile remained on her mouth.
Her eyes, however, darkened a little.
Behind the partition, Elias was pinned across the leather seat.
Serena had braced one hand beside his head and the other near his shoulder, trapping him between her arms. Whenever he tried to speak, she kissed him and swallowed the attempt before it turned into words.
After the first few tries, Elias understood.
Opening his mouth only gave Serena more room to silence him.
So he stopped speaking.
He turned his face as far aside as he could and raised one arm to shield himself, blocking her from reaching more than the corner of his mouth. He pulled in on himself, all the softness gone, like a small animal curling its spines outward.
Serena could do nothing with that.
At last, she lifted herself away.
For the first time, honest confusion moved across her face.
She did not understand what was happening to her.
If this had been before, if Elias had made her this angry, she would have punished him. Humiliated him. Made him remember who held the money, the contract, the room, the locks, the medical bills, the bed. She knew a dozen ways to make a beautiful boy tremble without leaving a mark anyone could use against her.
But now her anger had passed anything she had felt before. It was larger than every old irritation and every past injury combined. It should have demanded release. It should have needed someone in front of her to break, someone to destroy until the pressure inside her quieted.
Yet facing Elias, all that fury had nowhere to go.
He blocked every exit.
He sat there stiff and guarded, refusing her mouth, refusing her hands, refusing even the name she used for him. His resistance pressed against her chest until anger became something duller and harder to breathe through.
Was this sadness?
Serena’s cheek twitched.
Her first instinct was denial.
Sadness? Serena Blackwood? Over a man?
Impossible.
Another voice inside her answered with a question she could not silence.
If she truly could not feel hurt because of Elias, why had she not punished him already?
Every complicated problem always had at least two choices.
If what Elias said was true, if he had gotten drunk and been taken by more than one woman, and if Serena could not accept it, then she could let him go.
Even that choice split in two.
She could make him leave her life and never come back.
Or she could make sure he disappeared from everyone’s life.
If she could accept it, if she could tolerate the mistake, then a small punishment should have been enough. A warning. A lock. A lesson. Something controlled and useful.
Yet no matter which choice she placed in front of herself, Serena could not make the decision.
Every path exposed the fact she had known for longer than she wanted to admit.
She cared about Elias.
Not as a pet. Not as a purchase. Not only as a substitute shaped by old desire and anger. She cared enough that he could hurt her. Enough that imagining him with someone else made her body forget how to function. Enough that she could feel grief before she even knew what she had lost.
Once Serena admitted that, the pressure in her chest changed.
It did not ease.
It sharpened.
Regret became clear.
It sank into her heart with a pain so precise that she lifted one hand from beside Elias’s head and pressed it against her chest, as if pressure from the outside might hold the ache in place.
She could have stopped this.
The thought came first.
Then all the others followed.
If she had trusted Elias more.
If she had not tested him.
If she had doubted him but chosen a test that did not strip him of dignity.
If she had made Liora leave at once.
If her apology had been cleaner, sooner, more honest.
If she had not let him walk out after the breakup.
If she had let him go, but sent Liora to make sure he went home safely.
There had been too many chances.
Too many moments where a single different choice might have kept the ending from becoming this.
The cruelest thing in the world was not failure.
It was knowing she could have prevented it.
Serena had never imagined pain could be this difficult to endure. She had thought willpower was enough for anything. Work, hunger, anger, family pressure, boardroom traps, years of smiling at people she wanted removed from her sight.
This was different.
Her breathing grew heavier because she had to pull air in deliberately now.
The car finally stopped.
Serena moved at once, grateful for the need to act. Action was easier than thinking.
She reached for Elias and tried to pull him out of the car.
He resisted immediately.
He clung to the seat as if he had grown into it, refusing to move no matter how hard she tugged.
Serena leaned down to lift him.
He kicked her.
His fists struck her shoulder, her chest, her arms. He struggled with the frantic strength of someone who had already decided that being carried inside was another kind of defeat.
Serena’s brows drew together.
She did not make a sound.
No complaint. No warning. No anger.
She let him hit and kick, then gathered him up anyway, forcing him from the car and into her arms.
The house staff had already been waiting near the entrance to the Blackwood residence. The moment they saw Serena step out with a fighting, beautiful boy in her arms, all of them stared.
Several started forward at once.
"No," Serena said.
They stopped.
So they could only watch as the woman they served carried Elias toward the house, both of them visibly disheveled, Serena’s face marked, Elias struggling in her grip.
The door closed behind them.
The staff turned, almost as one, toward the other person they answered to.
Liora stood near the car, face unreadable.
She gave a casual wave of her hand. "Go. Some things are not your business, and not your question to ask. So don’t ask any unnecessary questions."
"Yes, Ms. Voss."
The staff scattered at once.
Only after they were gone did Liora release a slow breath.
She raised a hand and pressed it to her chest.
It felt tight there.
Unpleasantly tight.
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