Free Web NovelChapter 23: Chapter 23 Sign It
_Kaelen’s POV_
The hall had not recovered.
People were still in their seats, mostly, but the wedding had stopped being a wedding the moment Alaric walked in. Now it was something else, a gathering of wolves watching a situation resolve itself in real time, some of them trying to look like they weren’t watching, most of them failing.
Rowena was gone.
The doors had closed behind her and the room had stayed quiet for a full ten seconds afterward, which in a hall full of pack members was a very long time.
I was still standing at the arch.
The dissolution document was on the table beside me, Alaric’s assistant had placed it there after Rowena signed, quietly, the way you set something down that you know is going to be looked at. The King’s signature on the bottom caught the light every time I moved.
I hadn’t touched it.
“Kaelen.” Grandmother’s voice came from the front table. She had recovered faster than the others, she always did. “Come and sit down.”
“I’m fine where I am.”
She gave me the look she reserved for when she had decided patience was no longer an option. “That was not a suggestion.”
I crossed to the table and sat. Virella was beside me, still holding her bouquet, her expression composed in the careful way it got when she was thinking hard and didn’t want it to show.
Maelis leaned forward. “Sign the document,” she said, quietly enough that only the immediate table could hear. frёewebηovel.cѳm
“No.”
“Kaelen.....”
“She went to the Alpha King behind my back,” I said. “Without telling me. Without giving me the chance to.....”
“To what?” Maelis’s voice was sharp. “To talk her out of it? You had weeks, boy. Weeks of chances.” She pressed her lips together. “This is not a battle you can win by refusing to pick up the pen. Sign it and let it be done with dignity. Rowena told you she’d result to another measure, and you know it was King Alaric.”
“Still, it’s my marriage.”
“It was your marriage,” she said. “The King has ruled.”
From across the hall, Alpha Pierre suddenly stood.
He didn’t move toward me. He just stood, which was somehow worse, the particular weight of a respected Alpha rising to his feet in a room full of people who would notice.
“I’ll say what I think most people here are thinking,” Pierre said, in the calm carrying voice of a man who had addressed packs his entire adult life. “Alpha Kaelen made a commitment to a woman. He left on their wedding night. He spent three years away and came back with someone else. His Luna held his pack together, funded his household, and asked for nothing in return.” He looked at me directly. “Refusing to sign a dissolution decree the King himself has issued is not strength. It’s a man who knows he behaved badly and doesn’t want the paperwork to say so officially.”
The murmur that moved through the room was not sympathetic.
I felt Shade shift in my chest, not in disagreement. The bastard approved.
“He’s right,” Shade said. “And you know it.”
“Shut the hell up.” I ranted in return.
Alaric’s assistant appeared at my elbow. Young, precise, with the manner of someone who had delivered difficult messages before and had developed a very efficient approach to it.
“Alpha Kaelen,” he said. His name was Reid, I remembered that now, from previous King’s office interactions. Reid had the energy of someone who would be an Alpha himself in fifteen years and was currently learning patience. “I want to make sure you understand the position clearly. The decree has been issued under pack law, section forty-two, dissolution on grounds of incomplete bond and compromised Luna standing. The Alpha’s signature is a formality, not a requirement. However....” he paused briefly. “refusing to sign constitutes non-compliance with a King’s decree. That carries its own consequences for Moonreign’s standing with the King’s office. Sanctions, potentially. Reviewed alliance agreements.” Another pause. “I’d encourage you to consider that carefully.”
From the end of the table, my brother stood up.
His jaw was set and his eyes were direct and he looked more like our father than I had noticed before.
“Kaelen,” he said. “Please.”
Just that. No argument, no lecture. Just his voice and his eyes and the word please. He had always been angry about my decision of marrying Virella. He liked Rowena a lot, so seeing him say please to let her go, I felt unease settle in my chest.
The hall waited.
I looked at the document on the table.
Rowena’s signature at the bottom. Clean and steady, the handwriting she used for formal documents.
I thought about her face when she’d said I don’t want you. The absence of heat in it. The way she’d said it the way you state a fact, because it had simply become one.
I thought about three years of her handwriting in the household ledgers, in the account books, in the vendor contracts she had personally negotiated because I wasn’t there.
“You want Virella, so let Rowena go.” Shade said patiently. And I soon realized he was right. Since I wanted Virella, what was the use of holding Rowen back?
She already made up her mind. And she embarrassed me in front of everyone. That was the height of it all.
Without a second though, I picked up the pen.
The scratch of it across the paper was very loud in the quiet room.
I set the pen down.
Done.
Reid collected the document with a professionalism that didn’t acknowledge what it had cost to get the signature. He nodded once to me, once to the room, and withdrew.
The hall began to breathe again.
I sat at the arch table of my own wedding with Virella beside me and the commendation from the King’s office in front of me. But I couldn’t help admitting the specific hollow feeling in my heart. The one of a man who has gotten several things he thought he wanted and is only now discovering the price. freēwēbηovel.c૦m
Virella touched my hand. I looked at her, at her face, at the warmth in her eyes, at everything I had chosen.
I didn’t move my hand away.
But it took me longer than it should have to look back at her instead of the door Rowena had walked through.
