Free Web NovelChapter 106: Chapter 106 Kaelen showed up
_Author’s POV_
Kaelen walked in about ten minutes after Virella’s humbling.
He came through the main entrance in a dark jacket, relaxed, the easy confidence of a man walking into a space he now owned. He was scanning the room the way owners scanned what they owned, checking the crowd, the staff, and the general atmosphere of the place.
Then he saw the table and stopped.
His eyes moved across the group. Kasper. Greg. Pierre. Ezekiel. Virella sitting with her cheque book still open on the table like a prop from an argument that hadn’t finished yet.
And most importantly, Rowena.
He stood there for a moment. Then he walked over.
The table felt it before he arrived. That particular shift in energy that happened when someone with history walked into a space where that history was sitting.
He stopped at the edge of the table.
“Rowena,” he acknowledged just her.
“Kaelen.” She looked up at him with the same calm face she had given Virella twenty minutes ago. “Congratulations on the club. The service is excellent. You should be proud.”
It was a perfectly polite thing to say.
Delivered in a perfectly polite tone.
And somehow it landed like a full stop at the end of a very long sentence. Not a compliment between people with warmth between them. Just an acknowledgment. Professional and clean. The kind of thing you said to someone you had filed under finished business.
Kaelen’s jaw moved slightly.
“Thank you,” he said.
“The lighting is good too,” she added, and looked back at her drink.
He stood there for a second longer than was comfortable. Then he pulled a chair from a nearby table and sat down at the edge of the group because leaving immediately would have looked worse than staying.
Virella looked at him but he didn’t look back at her. He ignored her completely.
The table was quiet for a moment, then Ezekiel turned to Kaelen with the expression of someone who had been waiting for the right audience.
“Your wife,” he said, “was rude to me.”
Kaelen blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“She sat down at this table and proceeded to do a whole performance.” Ezekiel gestured vaguely at Virella. “The cheque, the club reveal, the hair flip. All of it directed at Rowena. And I was sitting right here. Nobody introduced themselves. Nobody acknowledged me. She didn’t even look at me until she realized who I was.” He leaned forward. “I found it very rude.” ƒгeewёbnovel.com
Virella made a sound. “I didn’t know you were—”
“That’s exactly my point,” Ezekiel said pleasantly. “You should be polite to people before you know who they are. That’s how manners work.”
Kaelen glared at Virella and she looked at the table, clenching her fist.
Pierre was looking at the ceiling with the expression of someone trying very hard not to enjoy something. He wanted to laugh hard.
Kasper had picked up his drink and was using it as a reason to look somewhere else.
Kaelen turned back to Ezekiel with a careful expression, as if he was recontextualizing the last few minutes of his life in real time. “I apologize on behalf of—”
“No need,” Ezekiel said, waving it off. “Just noting it for the record.” He picked up his glass. “The club really is nice though. Genuinely. Don’t let what I said about my sister’s place get back to her. She’s already insufferable about it.”
Kaelen stared at him confused.
“Drink?” Ezekiel offered.
“I,” Kaelen said. “Own the bar.”
“Right.” Ezekiel nodded. “Even better.”
Rowena pressed her lips together and looked at her glass.
Kaelen leaned back and tried to look like he was in control of this situation, which he was not. His club, his table, his wife sitting across from him not making eye contact, and somehow he was the least comfortable person in the group.
He looked at Rowena again but she wasn’t looking at him. She was watching the dance floor with the relaxed expression of someone who was having a decent evening and intended to continue having one. So what if the place was owned by her ex-husband?
Kaelen had not seen her look that relaxed ever.
Something about that was harder to sit with than her being upset would have been.
“The competition,” he suddenly brought it up.
She turned to look at him.
“You drove well,” he said. It came out flat and he knew it and he couldn’t fix it because the words were already out.
Rowena looked at him for a moment. “Thank you.”
“I didn’t know you could drive like that.”
“There are a lot of things you didn’t know about me,” she said. Not unkindly. Just factually. She looked back at the dance floor.
Kaelen was quiet.
Virella picked up the cheque from the table and put it back in her bag slowly.
Ezekiel, who had been watching the exchange between Kaelen and Rowena with a focused attention as if cataloguing information, turned to Pierre beside him and said quietly, “How long does he plan to keep doing this to himself?”
Pierre looked at him and raised a brow. “Doing what?”
“Sitting this close to something he lost and acting like proximity is the same as having it back.” Ezekiel tilted his head slightly. “It’s exhausting to watch.”
Pierre said nothing. But he looked at Kaelen and then at Rowena and then back at his drink and Ezekiel watched the small shift in Pierre’s expression with the attentiveness he brought to things that interested him.
Things at this table interested him quite a lot.
Including Pierre.
The music changed to something with more bass and the energy in the club lifted with it. Greg appeared from the direction of the dance floor looking energized and slightly damp and pointed at Kasper meaningfully. Kasper stood up with a sigh that was mostly performance.
Rowena watched them go with something close to a real smile.
Kaelen kept looking at Rowena. He wasn’t even mad at the fact that she almost killed him on that day.
Virella watched Kaelen watch Rowena and her anger increased. She hated Rowena deeply. Plus, Rowena couldn’t even ask about Virella’s baby.
Nobody was watching the entrance.
Which was why nobody saw the man come in until he was already halfway across the room.
Alaric caught sight of Rowena and the rest before they saw him.
