Free Web NovelChapter 120: Chapter 120 Puzzle pieces
_Author’s POV_
Virella closed the study door behind her and walked down the corridor toward her room.
She was smiling before she reached the stairs.
Not the smile she wore for Kaelen, the one calibrated to look like concern and soft-heartedness. This one was real. Small and private and entirely for herself.
She had sat across from him and watched him stare at his drink and talk about Cole and the frozen accounts and the declined request from Alaric’s office, and she had kept her face perfectly arranged the entire time, and it had been, if she was being honest with herself, one of the more satisfying evenings she had spent in this house in a very long time.
He looked terrible.
Not just tired, but hollowed out. The m kind of exhaustion that came from having too many things go wrong in too short a period with no clear way through any of them.
She had done that.
She changed into her nightclothes and sat on the edge of her bed and picked up her phone.
She found a text from Theo, sent forty minutes ago.
*How is everything going.*
She typed back. *Better than I expected. He’s falling apart nicely.*
Three dots appeared. Then: *Good. You deserve to watch that happen.*
She smiled at the screen.
Another message came through a moment later. *I’ve been thinking about something. Now that she’s out of the city.*
She read it and waited.
*Rowena,* he wrote. *She went to that city with the Alpha King. She’s not at home, not at the mansion, not anywhere with her usual security setup.* he pause between messages, then: *I could have her picked up and handled. Make sure she never comes back to cause you problems again.*
Virella sat with the message for a moment.
She thought about Rowena’s face in that club. The calm of it. The way she had looked at Virella without flinching, without performing anything, just looked, which had been somehow more infuriating than any expression she could have chosen. She thought about Kaelen’s eyes following Rowena across the room like he couldn’t help it, like gravity was involved.
She typed back. *I would be very grateful if you made that happen.*
Theo replied immediately. *Consider it done. I’ll make the arrangements tonight. I’d do anything for you. You know that.* ƒreeωebnovel.ƈom
She thought for a moment about what to offer him in return. Something real enough to keep him motivated but not so large it cost her too much.
*The Moonreign Pack,* she typed. *When this is all finished and Kaelen has nothing left. I’ll make sure it goes to you.*
*That’s more than enough. I love you, Virella.*
She looked at those three words on the screen.
She typed back: *Thank you, Theo.*
She put the phone face down on the nightstand and lay back against the pillows and stared at the ceiling.
Theo was useful. He was devoted and well-resourced and he would do exactly what he said he would do because he had been doing exactly what he said he would do for her since they were nineteen years old.
But love was a different conversation. She didn’t love him.
She turned off the light and went to sleep.
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On the other side of the country, the hotel pool was quiet at this hour.
The water was lit from underneath, and the surrounding area was empty except for two people sitting at the edge with their feet near the water, talking.
Rowena had her arms resting on her knees and her eyes in the distance. Alaric sat beside her with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled to the elbow, relaxed in the way he was always relaxed, like no environment had ever made him uncomfortable enough to show it.
“Tell me what you saw,” he said.
“The road,” she began. “I stood there for a long time and I looked at every part of it.”
The road where she lost her precious family members. She had been there most of the afternoon. She had walked the full length of the stretch where the accident had been recorded, measured it in her own steps, looked at the angles and the surfaces and the gradient of the road.
“It’s a straight road,” she said. “That’s the thing that doesn’t make sense. There are no sharp corners, no blind spots, no significant elevation changes for at least half a kilometer in either direction from where the crash happened.” She paused. “The official report says the vehicle lost control. But that road doesn’t produce loss of control accidents. It’s flat, it’s wide, and the visibility is clear in both directions.”
“Weather?” Alaric asked.
“Dry conditions that day,” she said. “I pulled the historical records before we came. No rain, or no ice, absolutely nothing.”
“Mechanical failure?” he asked again.
“That’s what the report attributed it to,” she said. “Brake failure. But my father’s vehicle was serviced four days before they made that journey. I have the service records. Everything was checked and cleared.”
Alaric was quiet for a moment.
“What about service center,” he said.
She looked at him.
“The vehicle was serviced four days before,” he said. “That’s close enough for someone to have interfered with the service and far enough that the failure wouldn’t appear immediately.” He turned slightly toward her. “Who did the service?”
“A center in the capital,” she said. “It’s standard. The one the family had always used.”
“Find out who owned it years ago,” he said. “And find out if ownership changed in the months before or after the accident.” He paused. “Brake failure that doesn’t show up in a routine service check four days earlier isn’t mechanical failure. It’s an installation. Someone would have had to get to the vehicle during or after that service appointment.”
Rowena stared at the pool.
She had been approaching it from the road outward, working from the crash site and trying to reason backward. He had approached it from the vehicle inward, looking at the chain of custody of the car itself.
They arrived at the same point from opposite directions.
“The service records list the individual technician,” she said quietly. “I didn’t look at that specifically. I was looking at the overall clearance.”
“The technician is the door,” he pointed out. “Either they were involved or someone accessed the vehicle after they signed off. Either way, that’s where the thread starts.”
She looked at him.
He was looking at the pool calmly and working through it the way she imagined he worked through everything without rushing to a conclusion before the reasoning supported it.
She had known he was capable. She had always known that. You didn’t hold the position he held without being capable of it. But knowing it abstractly and sitting beside him while he pulled a thread she had missed in weeks of her own investigation in about four minutes were different experiences.
“You’re good at this,” she sighed.
He glanced at her. “It’s pattern recognition. You were doing the same thing from a different angle.”
“You found the angle I missed,” she said lazily.
He said nothing to that, which was somehow a more comfortable response than if he had deflected it or agreed with it.
She looked back at the water.
She was going to get Kasper to pull the service records with the technician detail first thing tomorrow. She was going to cross reference the center’s ownership against every name that had appeared in Alice’s network documentation.
“Don’t forget he’s also very handsome and hot,” Kyra said, from somewhere warm and completely unbothered at the back of her chest. “And the way he thinks. A hot and handsome Alpha King who can actually keep up with you. That’s rare.”
“Stop it,” Rowena groaned inwardly.
“I’m just saying what you’re thinking.”
“I’m not thinking that!”
“Your pulse says otherwise.” Kyra chuckled.
“Kyra.”
“Fine,” Kyra said, settling back, feeling satisfied.
