Free Web NovelChapter 109: Chapter 109 A Lawsuit
_Kaelen’s POV_
The table was quiet after everyone left.
I sat in my own club, in my own chair, with the cheque in front of me that Alaric had placed back on the table like it was something embarrassing, and I stared at it.
“You did it again.”
Shade’s voice came in flat and tired. Not angry. Just tired, which was somehow worse than angry.
“Every single time,” he said. “Every time there is a chance to do something right, you find the exact wrong thing to do instead. It’s almost impressive.”
“Not now,” I said.
“She was sitting there having a decent night,” he continued, ignoring me completely. “Not bothering you. Not causing problems. Just sitting in a club with her friends. And you decided to accuse her of cheating.”
“I didn’t—”
“You said she threw herself at him. That’s an accusation. That’s exactly what that is.” He paused. “She stayed in your house for three years, Kaelen. Three years of running everything while you were somewhere else. Did she once, in three years, give you a reason to say something like that about her?”
I didn’t answer.
“No,” Shade said. “She didn’t. Because that is not who she is and you know it. You’ve always known it. You said it because you were embarrassed and you wanted to hurt something and she was standing there.”
I picked up a glass from the table. Someone else’s unfinished whiskey. I didn’t care. I drank it.
“You were supposed to be winning her back,” Shade added. “That was the whole point of tonight. You saw she was here and you sat down and you had an actual opportunity to just be decent for thirty minutes. Instead you threw a cheque at her.”
“She wasn’t going to come back anyway,” I said.
“Because of things like tonight,” Shade said. “Do you hear yourself?”
I didn’t respond to that.
Virella came back to the table before I left.
I hadn’t expected her to. I thought she had walked out with everyone else. But she came back and stood across from me and looked at me with an expression that I had never seen from her before.
She was calm.
Not the tight controlled calm of someone holding anger back. Actually calm. The kind of calm that had moved past the hot part of the feeling and arrived somewhere colder.
“You embarrassed yourself tonight,” she said. Quietly. “You embarrassed me. You embarrassed this club.” She picked up her bag from the chair. “And you ignore your own wife.”
She left.
No raised voice. No dramatic exit. Just turned and walked out.
I watched her go and thought about the fact that she had sounded, just then, almost like Rowena. That same quiet delivery. That same stillness.
Virella had never spoken to me like that before.
I grabbed the glass of whiskey from the bar that one of my staff brought over without being asked and drank it in one go and set the glass down.
The club was still going around me. Music, people, laughter, the whole thing continuing like nothing had happened, because for most people in the room nothing had happened. Just another night. Just another table drama that would be a story someone told a friend tomorrow.
For me it was something else entirely.
I drove home with the windows down because I needed the air and I needed the noise and I needed something other than Shade’s voice and my own thoughts competing in my head.
He had kissed her hand.
Right there in front of everyone. In front of me. In my club. The Alpha King had walked in and taken Rowena’s hand and lifted it to his lips and the entire room had gone silent and she had let him do it and her face had done something when he did it that I had never once seen her face do when she looked at me.
Not even at the beginning.
I gripped the steering wheel and kept driving.
I told myself she was only mine. I had said it before and I said it again inside my own head and the words had the same shape they always had but they felt different than they used to. Lighter. Less certain. Like a wall I kept insisting was solid but that had started producing a different sound when I hit it.
She was still mine.
I just had to fix what tonight had broken and then fix the things before tonight and then fix the things before those and somewhere at the end of all that fixing, she would see.
“Kaelen,” Shade said.
“Don’t,” I said.
He went quiet.
I got home and I went to bed and I lay there in the dark and told myself tomorrow would be different and eventually I fell asleep because there was nothing else to do.
Morning came.
I woke up to my phone buzzing on the nightstand. Not a call. An email notification. Then another. Then three more in quick succession, which was not normal and dragged me out of sleep faster than I wanted.
I picked up the phone. ƒreeωebnovel.ƈom
The sender was a company name I didn’t recognize. The subject line said: Formal Notice of Trademark Infringement — Legal Action Pending.
I sat up.
I read it.
Then I read it again.
The email claimed that my club’s name was a registered trademark belonging to their company. That I had proceeded with a grand opening without proper licensing approval. That their legal team had documented the infringement and intended to pursue formal action unless the matter was resolved within fourteen days.
I stared at the screen.
The name was mine. I had come up with it myself. I had checked the registration database when we were setting the place up and there had been nothing there. I had the filing records. Everything was in order. Except I was waiting for registers approval.
I put the phone down and picked it up again and read the email a third time.
The company name at the bottom meant nothing to me.
I had never heard of them.
I got out of bed and went to my desk and opened my laptop and typed the company name into the search and waited.
The results came back.
I looked at them.
I looked at them for a long time.
Damn, what the hell?
