Free Web NovelChapter 410: Chapter 410
Nathan’s POV
I pushed back from the table. I needed to move, to do something, because sitting still with this weight on me felt impossible.
"I’ll fix it," I said. "I will make it up to her. I’ll spend the rest of my life—"
"Nathan." Grandmother’s voice sharpened, just enough. "Sit down."
I sat.
She looked at me steadily. There was love in her face. There was also something that looked a great deal like grief.
"She has forgiven you," she said. "She told me that. She does not hate you. But forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same thing, and you need to understand that or you will spend the rest of your life chasing a woman who has already made her peace and tormenting both of you in the process."
"I love her," I said. "I know I never showed it properly. I know I spent years treating her like she was invisible and then I let her be taken away because I was too proud and too stupid to listen. But I have realized my mistake. I love her, Grandma. I know I do."
"I believe you," she said quietly.
"Then help me." free𝑤ebnovel.com
"I am helping you," she said. "By telling you the truth." She reached across and covered my hand with hers. "She is not willing to come back. Her words to me were clear. She said she has forgiven you, but she does not want you. That is her right, Nathan. That is the right of a woman who built herself back from nothing."
My wolf made a low, anguished sound inside me that I swallowed before it could reach my throat.
"She said there is nothing between you any longer," Grandmother continued. "That she cannot go back. And I believe her. So does my own heart, which came here hoping to convince her otherwise."
I stared at the food going cold on my plate.
"I will not tell you to stop loving her," my grandmother said softly. "I do not think you can turn that off any more than you can stop breathing. But I am asking you — as the woman who raised you, as someone who loves you more than most things in this world — to let her live. Do not keep placing yourself in her path. Do not keep making her manage you on top of everything else she carries."
The silence was terrible.
"She deserves peace," Grandmother said. "So do you. But you will not find yours by trying to take hers."
Something broke open in my chest.
My chair scraped back. I was on my feet before I had made a conscious decision to move.
"Nathan—"
I was already walking.
"Nathan, come back and finish your—"
The dining room door closed behind me.
I didn’t know where I was going. My feet moved and I let them down the corridor, away from her voice, away from the table with its untouched food and its careful silverware and the truth she had laid down on it like a verdict.
My wolf paced inside me, restless and wounded, still fighting instincts it had no right to act on anymore.
“Let her live,” Grandmother had said.
I pressed my back against the corridor wall and closed my eyes. I can’t give up on her. I can give up on Aria.
Aria’s POV
The gathering at Shevron Estate had the particular energy of a war council held in a living room. I had asked everyone in front of me to come.
Jonathan sat at one end, composed as always, his white shirt precise, his expression giving nothing away. Williams sat beside him with his long legs stretched out and a glass of something amber in his hand at noon, which no one commented on because it was Williams.
Chloe had spread her laptop and three folders across the coffee table where she sat on a chair.
Amelia stood near the window, her arms folded, watching the room. Rowland had been pacing until about ten minutes ago, when he apparently decided pacing was inefficient and sat on the arm of the sofa instead.
Tyler and his wife sat together on the smaller couch. She had her hands in her lap, her fingers laced tight. Jackson was beside his father, pressed close.
I stood at the centre of it. fгeewebnovёl.com
"I’m done waiting," I said. "We have the evidence. We have Tyler. We have the DNA report confirming Sophia’s parentage. We have the forged death certificate. We have the surveillance records." I looked around the room. "I want this finished. I want us to take action against Patrick and Sophia."
"Agreed," Amelia said. "But we still need Clarence herself. A living, breathing Clarence on the record, not just documents."
"Proof of life," Jonathan said. "A recorded appearance or a live capture isn’t enough. Without her, Patrick’s lawyers will spend six months arguing about the footage."
Chloe nodded from behind her laptop. "He has money and he has contacts. We put this in front of a judge without Clarence in the flesh and they will find a way to make it muddy."
I was about to respond when Rowland’s head turned sharply toward the door. A half-second later I smelled it too, a scent I knew better than I wanted to.
The knock came.
Rowland was at the door before anyone else moved. He pulled it open, and his body filled the frame the way bodies do when they are making a point without words.
"Uncle Nathan," he said flatly.
Nathan stood in the doorway. He was in dark clothes, no tie, his jaw set. His eyes moved immediately past Rowland to me, and then, with the brief sweep of an Alpha reading a room, across every other face present.
His gaze landed on Tyler.
Something in his expression changed, a flicker of recognition, then calculation.
"Why are you here?" I asked, keeping my voice level.
