The Luna You Betrayed Is No Longer Yours

Chapter 119: Chapter 119 Virella offered help

_Author’s POV_

Kaelen called three times before he gave up. frёeωebɳovel.com

He sat in the study with the dead phone in his hand and told himself Virella was probably asleep, that the phone was on silent, that there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for why she wasn’t picking up on a night when he needed to talk to someone and she was the only person left who was supposed to be on his side.

He put the phone down and poured another drink.

The study was quiet, Maelis had gone to bed early. The staff moved through the back parts of the house doing whatever staff did at this hour. The television was off and Kaelen had no interest in turning it on because the last time he’d turned on the television it had shown him Alaric and Rowena walking across a tarmac together and he had thrown his phone at a wall.

He drank and looked at the desk.

The email from the trademark lawyers was still open on his laptop. He had read it so many times in the past twenty-four hours that he had memorized the language of it, the legal framing, the names of the company filing the suit, the fourteen-month registration date that predated his own by enough of a margin to make his lawyer sound tired every time they discussed it.

He had spent the day trying to find Cole. frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓

Cole’s phone was disconnected now. Not just unanswered. Disconnected, the number dead when you called it, like it had never existed. The email address Cole had used for all their correspondence bounced back undelivered. The address listed on his employment contract was a mail forwarding service registered to a shell company that his lawyer was still trying to trace.

It was professional.

That was the thing that kept coming back to Kaelen when he sat quietly with it. This wasn’t a coincidence or a filing error or an administrative mistake. Someone had placed Cole in his operation specifically. Someone had built a trap and dressed it as an opportunity and waited patiently for him to walk into it, and he had walked into it willingly and said thank you on the way in.

He thought about Rowena again.

He kept thinking about Rowena, which was itself a habit he had not been able to break and which was becoming a source of frustration because she was gone and she was not coming back and thinking about her was not solving the trademark problem or finding Cole or unfreezing his accounts.

But she had said it. Right there in his club, in front of everyone. One more word and the club would be gone by Monday.

It was not Monday. It was the night after that conversation.

And the club was functionally gone.

He finished his drink and poured another one and knew he was having too many and didn’t stop.

Virella came home just after midnight.

She came through the front entrance and he heard the door from the study. He heard her footsteps in the corridor and then they stopped outside the study door, paused, like she was deciding something. Then the door opened and she looked in.

She looked normal.

Hair slightly windswept from the cold outside. Coat still on. Color in her cheeks from the night air.

“You called,” she said.

“Three times,” he groaned.

“My phone was on silent,” she said, coming in and sitting down across from him, pulling her coat off and laying it over the arm of the chair. “What happened.”

“Same thing that happened this morning. It’s getting worse.” He turned the laptop toward her and watched her read the screen. “The accounts are still frozen. Cole is completely gone now, phone disconnected, email bouncing. My lawyer thinks the shell company Cole’s address was registered to is going to take weeks to trace, if they can trace it at all.”

Virella read carefully, her eyes moving across the screen with the attentiveness of someone following the details.

“What about the Alpha King’s office,” she said. “Did you reach out.”

“Reid sent a standard decline this afternoon,” Kaelen said. “Unable to intervene in private commercial disputes.” He said it flatly, with the bitterness of someone repeating words they had read too many times. “That’s it. That’s all I got.”

Virella was quiet for a moment.

“That’s because of that night,” she said.

“I know it’s because of that night.”

“You threw a cheque at her in front of the Alpha King,” she said. “And you called her shameless in his presence.”

“I know what I did, Virella.”

“I’m just saying the decline makes sense,” she said. “He’s not going to help you after that night.”

Kaelen looked at his drink.

She was right. That was the worst part. He knew she was right and he had known it this morning and he had gone to reach out to Alaric’s office anyway because there was no other option with the weight he needed and the option had come back declined inside of three hours.

“What am I supposed to do?” He asked. It came out flat and tired and nothing like the Alpha he was supposed to be, the one who had grown up understanding that showing that kind of exhaustion was a weakness you didn’t display.

He didn’t have the energy for that performance tonight.

Virella looked at him. Something moved across her face that he read as sympathy, which was what she intended him to read there.

“You need to find who did this,” she said. “Not just Cole. Whoever placed Cole. That’s the thread that matters.” She leaned forward slightly. “And you need to do it quietly, without making more noise in the press than you’ve already made this week.”

“My lawyer is working on it,” he said.

“Your lawyer is slow,” she said. “You need someone faster.”

“I don’t have someone faster.”

“I might,” she said.

He looked at her.

“I have contacts,” she said. “I’ve mentioned them before. People who move quickly and don’t leave traces.” She held his gaze. “Let me make some calls tomorrow morning.”

He looked at her for a long moment.

This was the thing about Virella that he could never fully reconcile. She had every reason to be finished with him. After what he had said about not loving her, after the miscarriage, after last night and every night before it, she should have walked out and not come back. Instead she was sitting across from him at midnight offering to help him with contacts he didn’t know she had.

He didn’t ask himself why tonight.

He was too tired to ask himself why.

“Okay,” he said. “Make the calls.”

She nodded and stood and picked up her coat.

At the door she paused.

“Get some sleep, Kaelen,” she said. “You look terrible.”

Then left.

He sat in the study alone and looked at the laptop screen and the drink in his hand and the wall in front of him.

From somewhere in the back of his thinking, Shade made a sound that was not quite a word.

Hopefully, Virella would help him.