Free Web NovelChapter 129: Chapter 129 Riling Virella Up
_Rowena’s POV_
After a while of our staring competition, Virella finally smiled.
It was a wide smile, the kind that had been waiting for this specific moment for a long time and was finally getting to exist.
“Look at you,” she beamed, flipping her curly blonde hair. She’d dyed it, I noticed.
“Look at you,” I said back, pleasantly.
The smile faltered slightly at the edges. She had expected something different from me, I could tell. Maybe she wanted me to be shocked to see her. Or maybe scared to see her. Something that confirmed she had the upper hand in a visible and satisfying way.
I wasn’t going to give her that. She wasn’t even that big of a deal for someone like me.
“You have no idea how long I’ve wanted this,” she said again and I thought carefully. Why didn’t I think of her as the master mind behind this kidnap? Was it because I hated Kaelen now? So the first thought was that Kaelen was behind this.....
“There’s Drake too.” Kyra said weakly.
True.
“I have some idea,” I said. “You’ve been building toward something for a while. After you embarrassed yourself with the cheque. The club reveal, and the press statement through Kaelen.” I looked at her. “This feels like the escalation of someone who ran out of smaller options.”
Her jaw tightened and she clenched her well manicured fist.
“I’m going to break you,” she said in a low tone this time, finally losing the cool. “Properly. So you can’t come back from it.”
I laughed.
It came out genuine because it was. Not a performance, or a provocation, just the actual response to what she had said.
“Virella,” I said. “You’re not my match. I say that without malice. You’re just not. You’re forcing this whole villainess act. But in reality, you’re nothing but a scared homewrecker. That’s what you are and will always be. Beneath me.”
She stared at me.
I glanced past her to where the man from the room was standing. Theodore Ashford. I had been turning over what I knew about him since yesterday and the pieces had been assembling themselves. I’d seen him before. His family ran a big business in the capital. They also had the biggest grounds for werewolf shifting for those getting their wolf for the first time.
After that shock, his memories came to me instantly.
“Do you know that Theodore here loves you?” I asked, looking at him directly instead.
Theo’s expression didn’t change but something behind it did. He already figured I knew his name.
“The way he looks at you,” I said. “The fact that he’s doing this at all. Nobody takes this kind of risk for money alone.” I paused. “And the baby.”
Virella went still.
“Tell me Virella, was that babyKaelen’s?” I asked, it was a guess, but her reaction said otherwise. “Was it?”
The room was very quiet. Theo looked at the floor.
Virella’s face had done something complicated and she pulled it back together fast but not fast enough.
“That’s why the miscarriage was so hard,” I said, but not cruelly. Just observing it. “It wasn’t about Kaelen at all.”
Virella suddenly crossed the space between us and slapped me.
She slapped me so hard that my head turned with it.
Then again.
And again.
She slapped me five times. I counted them. My face absorbed each one and I did not look away from her between them. I did not give her the expression she was looking for.
When she stopped her hand was shaking slightly.
“Theo,” she gritted out. Her voice was tight. “Your men.”
Theo looked at me once, something in his eyes that I couldn’t name exactly, and then he made a gesture.
Three men came forward and pulled me up by the arms and tied my wrists above my head to something overhead, a beam or a hook, leaving me standing with my arms raised and my feet on the floor.
Then one of them produced a bottle of water and a piece of bread and they force fed me, tilting my head back, making sure I swallowed, the whole process mechanical and thorough. freewёbnoνel.com
I ate what they gave me because fighting it was pointless and I needed whatever energy it provided.
When they finished I hung from my wrists and looked at Virella and thought about why exactly they had fed me.
Virella needed me alive, obviously. That was clear enough. Dead me was a consequence she couldn’t manage. But the feeding was specific. She needed me to be functional. She needed me present and aware and able to respond to whatever came next.
Which meant whatever came next required my participation.
I thought about that. What was she about to do to me? I had to brace myself for it.
I was still thinking about it when I heard a sound.
A door opening at the far end of the gymnasium. The footsteps of the men coming back.
I watched them cross the floor and I watched what they were carrying. I understood all at once why she had fed me.
You fed someone before something that required them to have something left.
Three baseball bats.
The men stopped in front of me and rolled their sleeves and I looked at them and then at Virella standing behind them with that smile finally fully back on her face and I looked at what was coming and I breathed in slowly and I thought about Alaric and Kasper and the city outside these walls looking for me, and I held onto all of it as I set my jaw.
I wasn’t going to let them breakthrough me. They were going to have to work for whatever they wanted.
Every single inch of it.
