Free Web NovelChapter 24: GO TAKE YOUR LIFE BACK
Chapter 23
Lumi
I lay perfectly still beneath the heavy duvet, my hands curled beneath my chin, listening to the absolute silence of the London night.
But my mind refused to quiet down.
Every time I closed my eyes, the sequence of the evening played on a relentless loop. The heavy click of Ren’s hotel door closing down the hall.
The sharp, freezing bite of the wind outside the station. And then, the image of him bursting through my door—huge, breathless, dripping wet, with his right hand wrapped in ruined, bleeding gauze.
I turned onto my side, my gaze fixing on the nightstand where the dark, woven texture of the charcoal sketchbook rested next to the tin of professional pencils.
He went across the city for this.
The thought sent a strange, low thrum straight down my spine. It wasn’t just a gift; it was a memory materialized.
He had listened to a passing, broken whisper I’d dropped days ago about how drawing used to be the only thing that made the noise in my head stop.
He had memorized it. And then he had run through a freezing London downpour, ignoring the agonizing burn of his split knuckles, just to hand me a piece of quiet.
When I had wrapped my arms around his waist, burying my face into the damp, heavy leather of his jacket, the air in the room had changed so fast it made my breath hitch.
I remembered the exact texture of his heart beating like a wild, trapped thing beneath my palms. I remembered looking up, seeing his dark eyes drop to my lips, and feeling a sudden, suffocating heat that made me want to lean into him until the rest of the world completely vanished.
I pulled the duvet tighter around my shoulders, forcing a hard, steady breath down my throat.
Stop it, Lumi. Don’t be a fool.
I had to anchor myself back to reality. Ren wasn’t doing this because of some grand, romantic fairy tale. He was doing this because of Neve.
Neve was his sister, his blood, and I was Neve’s best friend. When Neve had begged him to look after me in London, she hadn’t just asked him to be a driver; she had trusted him to keep me safe.
Ren was an alpha—built on a rigid, unyielding foundation of loyalty and protective duty.
To him, I was a responsibility. I was a woman who had been battered by life, and because his sister loved me, he was going to act as my shield until I could stand on my own two feet.
He was treating me like family. That was the unhurried, decent truth of it. The intense look in his eyes, the breathless tension between us—it was just the raw adrenaline of the day, mixed with his hatred for Callum. To think it was anything else was dangerous.
It would ruin the one clean, safe relationship I had left, and God knows Neve would skin me alive if she learnt that for a minute I’d looked at her brother’s lips.
A deep, aching wave of gratitude rolled over me. Even if it was just out of loyalty to his sister, nobody had ever cared for me with such fierce, protective detail.
He made me feel like something worth fighting a war for.
Unable to sleep, I slid out from under the covers. The wooden floorboards were cold against my bare feet as I walked over to the desk, carrying the sketchbook and the tin of charcoals. I clicked on the small desk lamp, bathing the corner of the room in a soft, amber glow.
I opened the book. The heavy, textured surface of the paper felt beautiful beneath my fingertips. I selected a thick charcoal pencil, the dark graphite staining my thumb, and let my hand move across the page.
For the past years, my drawings had been dark, cramped, and chaotic. But tonight, the strokes were fluid. Wide. Free.
I began to sketch the silhouette of a woman. I didn’t plan her features, but as the charcoal smudged and shaped itself under my fingers, the lines softened. I defined the curve of her jaw, the long sweep of her eyelashes, and then, the tilt of her lips.
She was smiling.
It wasn’t a small, polite grin meant to keep the peace. It was a radiant, genuine smile—the kind that lit up an entire face.
It looked exactly like the expression I had felt on my own face when I opened that package tonight. For the first time in a lifetime, I hadn’t drawn a woman hiding in the shadows. I had drawn someone who looked entirely alive, entirely safe, and entirely free.
I stared at the drawing for a long time, the charcoal dust clinging to my skin.
I carefully closed the book, walked back to the bed, and picked up my phone. The digital clock read 2:14 AM.
I opened the chat thread with Ren. The last messages were our short exchange about the shop, but I couldn’t just close my eyes without sending something back into the dark to thank him.
I opened my music app, searching for a specific acoustic track I had listened to a thousand times whenever the world felt too heavy. It was a song about gratitude, about looking at someone who holds up the sky for you when your own arms are too weak to do it.
I copied the link and pasted it into the text box. The preview populated immediately, showing the title in clear, bold letters: You’re Amazing.
I didn’t add any text. I didn’t want to complicate the quiet understanding we had built.
I just pressed send, watched the message bubble drop into the thread, and slid the phone beneath my pillow.
As I pulled the blankets up to my chin, the heavy tension in my shoulders finally dissolved, and I let myself fall into a deep, dreamless sleep.
The next morning, the pale London sun was barely cutting through the heavy gray clouds when the SUV pulled up to the curb outside Eleanor’s office near Regent’s Park.
The atmosphere inside the lawyer’s room was completely different from the emotional storm of the day before. It felt clinical. Professional. Deadly.
Eleanor sat behind her massive mahogany desk, her sharp eyes scanning a thick stack of documents while the printer in the corner hummed rhythmically, spitting out fresh pages.
"You’re early," Eleanor said without looking up, her pen making sharp, decisive marks on a legal pad. "Good. I don’t like wasting daylight."
I took the leather chair across from her, pulling my coat tightly around myself.
Ren didn’t sit. He stood exactly where he had the day before—a massive, silent force anchored right behind my shoulder, his arms crossed over his chest.
His right hand was wrapped in fresh, clean white bandages, the blood from yesterday completely washed away, though his expression remained as hard as iron.
"Is it ready?" I asked, my voice holding a steady, cold precision that surprised even myself. Yesterday’s tears were gone.
Eleanor took a final page from the printer, tapped the stack against the desk to align the edges, and slid it across the polished wood toward me.
"The initial divorce petition is fully drafted," Eleanor stated, her tone entirely devoid of pity and filled with a sharp, professional satisfaction.
"I’ve structured it on the grounds of irretrievable breakdown due to marital misconduct and emotional distress. I’ve also attached a formal asset freeze motion regarding your joint bank accounts and the commercial properties listed under your name."
I looked down at the top page. In bold, unyielding legal font, it read: IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE, FAMILY DIVISION. My name and Callum’s name were printed side by side, separated only by a cold, definitive ’And’.
"This severs everything?" I whispered, my fingers touching the edge of the paper.
"It sets the wheel in motion," Eleanor corrected, leaning back in her chair and clicking her pen.
"Once he is formally served, he has a strict statutory window to respond. Given the timeline of the fraudulent adoption documentation we uncovered regarding Theo, his legal team will likely panic the moment they read the accompanying affidavit. They will know they have zero leverage."
I picked up the stack of papers, the weight of the thick sheets feeling remarkably heavy in my hands. "Good. I want him to read every single word."
"My clerk can handle the formal service by this afternoon," Eleanor said, reaching for the documents.
"No," I cut in, my voice sharp enough to make Eleanor’s eyebrows raise in slight surprise. I gripped the papers tighter. "I want to take it to his office myself."
Eleanor paused, her sharp gaze analyzing my face. "Lumi, serving an estranged spouse directly in an adversarial custody and divorce proceeding can be highly volatile. It is usually best to let a professional courier handle the confrontation."
"I am not running anymore," I said, looking Eleanor dead in the eye.
The memory of Callum’s cruel words in the park—calling me broken, calling me a failure—burned in my stomach, but it didn’t make me want to cry. It made me want to fight.
" He thinks I’m hiding in a hotel room, terrified of him. I want to walk into his territory, place these papers on his desk myself, and let him see exactly who is taking his world apart."
Beside me, I caught the sudden, sharp shift in Ren’s posture. The air around him grew instantly heavy, the familiar, dark rumble vibrating deep in his chest.
"I’m going alone," I added, turning my head slightly to address the shadow behind me. "I need to do this myself, Ren. It’s my mess. I need to look him in the eye without a bodyguard standing over me so he knows he doesn’t have power over me anymore."
"No," Ren rumbled. The word left his mouth like a heavy iron vault shutting. It left absolutely zero room for negotiation.
"Ren, please..."
"I said no, Lumi," he repeated, his voice dropping into that freezing, quiet whisper that made the small hairs on my arms stand up.
He stepped around the chair, looming over the side of the desk, his dark eyes locked onto mine with an unyielding intensity.
"You can face him all you want. You can hand him the papers, you can tell him he’s nothing, and you can take back your name. But you are not walking into his office alone."
"It’s just a corporate building, Ren. He’s not going to attack me in front of his staff," I argued, my own stubbornness flaring up to meet his.
"He is a desperate man with a title and a crumbling territory," Ren countered, his jaw locking so hard the muscles in his neck looked like steel cables. frёeωebɳovel.com
He leaned in just an inch closer, his massive frame completely cutting off my view of the rest of the room.
"A desperate man does stupid things when he realizes he’s losing control. Yesterday in that park, I stood by and let him speak to you because I didn’t want to ruin your legal standing. But if you think I am letting you walk onto his turf without me standing right at your back, you don’t know anything about me." I stared up at him, my breath catching in my throat.
The protective fury radiating off him was magnificent, a wall of pure iron that refused to let a single scratch touch me.
"I don’t need you to fight him," I whispered, my voice softening as I looked at the clean white bandages on his right hand.
"I don’t need to fight him to let him know I’m there," Ren muttered, his gaze dropping to the stack of divorce papers in my hands before rising back to my eyes.
"I will stand at the door. I won’t say a word. But you are not going anywhere near that scumbag without your shield."
I looked down at the papers, then back up at the fierce, beautiful determination etched into the rugged lines of his face.
He wasn’t trying to boss me around or steal my moment of strength; he was just making sure I had a safe harbor to return to the second the storm got too loud.
He was doing his duty for Neve, keeping her best friend safe, but the weight of his dedication felt heavy enough to shake my entire world.
"Alright," I said softly, yielding to the absolute certainty in his eyes. "We go together."
Ren nodded once, a grim, satisfied tilt touching the corner of his mouth as he stepped back, giving me space to breathe again.
Eleanor watched the two of us from behind her desk, a faint, knowing smile playing on her lips as she closed her legal pad. "It’s time," she said, waving her hand toward the door. "Go take your life back, Mrs. Vance. I’ll have the court filings formalized by the time you return."
