Free Web NovelChapter 135: Chapter 135 Rowena was extraordinary
_Virella’s POV_
At midnight, Theo came in.
I had been sitting in the chair by the window for two hours doing nothing useful. Just sitting and watching the city lights and waiting for an update that I hadn’t known I was anxious about until he walked through the door with that look on his face.
I had never seen that look on Theo before.
He was usually very even. It was one of the things I had always relied on about him. Whatever was happening, whatever needed doing, Theo approached it with the calm of someone who had decided a long time ago that emotional reaction was useless and he couldn’t afford to do anything useless thing. It was part of why he was good at what he did.
The look on his face right now was not that.
“What happened?” I asked.
He sat down slowly. Like he was thinking about how to say it rather than just saying it.
“She banged her head on the bedframe,” he said.
I stared at him, my jaw dropping.
“On purpose,” he said. “To stop the chemical response. She couldn’t manage the pain anymore and she couldn’t stop it from the outside so she gave herself a different pain to focus on instead.” He paused. “She split her skull open, Virella. She did it deliberately.”
I said nothing for a moment as the words sank in.
I turned that over in my head.
The room she had been in, the fucking metal bedframe. The chemical compound that Theo’s people had been using, which I knew was serious because Theo had told me it broke people reliably inside of three days. No one he had used it on had held out past day two without giving something up.
Rowena had held out more than two days and then, when she couldn’t hold out anymore, she had found another way.
I know her to be many things but not this strong. Rowena never ever raised her voice, she never lost her composure, and never gave anyone the thing they were waiting for when they pushed her deeply.
I had hated that about her.
Not the surface version of hate.
The deep kind. The kind that lived in your chest and didn’t have a clean reason and was really just the shape of everything you wished you were and couldn’t figure out how to become.
How could she be so calm even in chaos?
No matter what I did, her composure never slipped. Her eyes remained calm. I hated to admit, but she was indeed a Luna. A born leader cause what the fuck?
Banging her head just to split her skull open and feel that pain rather than begging me?
She was too dangerous and crazy.
I had never come across anyone like that. Which such crazy willpower.
I would never even think of harming myself, never had and never will. But she did it in a heartbeat.
“Crazy bitch.” I murmured under my breath.
She had done it without flinching.
I was fairly sure of that. I couldn’t know it, I hadn’t been there, but I knew her well enough to know she hadn’t flinched.
“She’s at the hospital,” Theo said. “Family wing, the closed section. I moved her as soon as the guards reported what happened.”
“Is she stable?” I asked through gritted teeth. I needed her alive a little longer. Her death should be swift and painful, this one wasn’t enough. freeωebnovēl.c૦m
“Yes. The gash needed proper stitching. Seven of them. She has a concussion layered on top of the existing head injury from the beating situation and on top of the rib damage.” He paused. “She’s in a bad way physically. But she’s stable.”
“She needs to stay that way,” I sighed.
He looked at me.
“I mean it, Theo,” I said. “If she dies just like that everything we have built falls apart immediately. Alaric stops looking for a missing person and starts looking for a body and those are two completely different searches with two completely different levels of resource and rage behind them.” I held his gaze. “She stays alive. She stays recoverable. That is the only version of this that ends without both of us in a cell. We’ll kill her when the time is right, for now it isn’t.” freewebnoveℓ.com
He nodded. “I gave the instruction before I came here. Best care. Nothing permanent. She’ll be treated properly.”
He was quiet for a moment after that.
Then he said, “She’s more than I thought she would be.”
I almost laughed, not because I was amused. But because the recognition of hearing someone else arrive at something I had known for months and had spent months resenting.
“Yes,” I said. “She always has been.”
“People around her keep underestimating her, 8 guess.” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “I did too. For a long time.”
He looked at me carefully. “Are you scared of her?”
I looked at the window.
The city was still doing its city things out there. Lights and movement.
The question sat in the room and I let it sit there for a moment before I answered.
The honest answer was yes.
Not the kind of scared that came from authority or legal consequences, though those were real. Something different and harder to name. The kind of scared that came from recognizing that the person on the other side of a situation was genuinely more equipped for it than you were and was going to keep demonstrating that fact until one of you ran out of room.
“No,” I lied. I’d never tell the truth.
Theo gave me the look he gave me when he knew I was lying and had decided it wasn’t worth the argument.
He reached across the space between us and took my hand.
I let him hold it because his hand was warm and the room was cold and I had been sitting alone in that chair for two hours. Some part of me was very tired in a way I wouldn’t admit to him.
He leaned forward and kissed me and I kissed him back. I pushed every other thought from my head and stayed where I was, letting everything else sit outside the moment for a little while.
When he pulled back his eyes were warm in the way they always were when they were on me.
“What comes next?” he asked quietly.
“We wait,” I said. “She needs to recover enough to be useful. Once she’s stable and coherent we figure out what we actually need from her and how to get it.” I paused. “In the meantime we stay quiet and we stay invisible.”
“The Alpha King,” he said.
“Has Kaelen in a holding room,” I smiled. “Which means he’s been looking in the wrong direction since yesterday.” I almost laughed. “That’s more time than I expected us to get.”
Theo looked at me with the steady devoted attention he had always given me.
“I love you,” he said.
“I know,”
He leaned in and kissed me again, biting on my lower lip.
I responded to the kiss and moved to where he was seated, getting comfortable on his lap.
He pulled me close, deepening the kiss. In no time, his hands were all over me and our clothes completely gone.
“I love you so much.” He muttered as he lifted me slightly and entered me in one smooth motion. I moaned loudly, throwing my head backwards. Theo’s hot tongue latched onto my already hard nipples, sucking them hungrily.
I let myself enjoy every bit of what we were doing because he was the only one who could give me the type of pleasure I wanted.
Kaelen could never, and that’s why he deserved what he was getting.
