Free Web NovelChapter 53: Chapter 53 Her Power
_Rowena’s POV_
I should have known he wouldn’t leave quietly.
I was halfway up the stairs when I heard him behind me, not following exactly, more the sound of a man who had been sitting with something and had finally decided he couldn’t sit with it anymore.
“Rowena.”
I stopped. Didn’t turn around.
“Was the divorce about Alaric?”
I turned around.
Kaelen was standing at the bottom of the stairs with his hands at his sides and his jaw set.
“Say that again,” I said.
“The Alpha King,” he said. “The petition. The decree. The way he looked at you at the wedding.” His voice had taken on the specific flatness of someone who has built a theory and is confronting the person it’s about. “Was the whole thing designed to get you closer to him? Was that the plan from the beginning?”
The staircase was very quiet.
Celeste had appeared at the top of it. I was aware of her presence the way you’re aware of a storm system, not here yet, but building.
“You think I manufactured a three-year marriage,” I said, “navigated a dissolution through the Alpha King’s office, and arranged to be publicly humiliated at my own husband’s wedding, as a strategy. To get closer to Alaric.”
“I think you’re ambitious,” Kaelen said. “I think you always knew what you were doing.”
“I think,” I said, “that you have run out of ways to make this my fault and have landed on the craziest one available.”
“You want to be Luna Queen,” he said. The words came out with the specific edge of something that had been sitting in bitterness for a while. “You always wanted more than what I could give you. Admit it.”
I came back down the stairs.
Not fast.
But when I got close to him, my hand connected with his face before he finished processing that I was moving. freewebnσvel.cøm
The slap was harder than the one in my room at Moonreign. That one had been reflex. This one was decided.
The sound of it carried through the entrance hall.
Kaelen’s head turned with it. He straightened slowly, the way he had before, pressing his tongue against his cheek, his eyes going dark.
“You want to do this,” he said. Quietly. The Alpha coming through in his voice, full and pressing. “Here. In your family’s house.”
“You called me a social climber in my family’s house,” I said. “Yes. I want to do this here.”
And then he actually moved.
He was fast, his hand caught my wrist and he turned, intending to pin, the way he had moved in my room at Moonreign before Velvet’s threat had stopped him.
It didn’t work this time.
Because I was not the same person I had been in that room.
The seal broke.
I had been carrying it for three years, my mother’s final request, delivered through my old trainer Master Corwin. She had told me to be soft and be safe. Let Kaelen lead.
I had honored it because she asked me to, and because I had been nineteen and grief-hollowed and willing to do almost anything she asked.
I was not nineteen anymore.
The warmth moved through me like something that had been held underwater finally breaking the surface. Not violently though.
Kyra rose beside it, fully, for the first time since before the marriage, and she was not the half-present wolf she had been at Moonreign. She was herself, primal and clear and entirely awake.
I reversed the hold.
Kaelen’s expression shifted, surprise moving through the arrogance before he could manage it.
He was strong. He was an Alpha with three years of combat experience and a wolf that had been tested in real territorial disputes.
He was not prepared for me.
And I put him on the floor of the entrance hall with his arm at an angle that communicated clearly that I could take it further and was choosing not to.
He was breathing hard. I was not.
Maelis was standing in the sitting room doorway.
She had not moved during any of it. Had not said stop, had not stepped between us when Kaelen moved toward me, had not done the thing any person watching a man advance on a woman should have done. She stood in the doorway and watched and said nothing, and I filed that away in the place I was keeping things about the Varkos family that I would not forget.
I let Kaelen’s arm go and stepped back.
He got up slowly. The arrogance had gone. What was left was something rawer and less composed, a man who had just been physically overmatched by the woman he had dismissed for three years and was sitting with what that meant.
“How,” he asked in utter dismay.
“I unsealed something,” I said. “Something I should have unsealed a long time ago.”
He looked at me. At the way I was standing, different from before, different from anything he had seen from me in three years. Upright in a way that wasn’t about posture.
“Rowena.” His voice had changed again. The flatness gone, something underneath it that was more honest than anything he had said in the past hour. “Did you ever love me?”
The entrance hall was completely still.
I looked at Kaelen.
I thought about the wedding night. About the way he had said wait for me like it was a promise rather than an instruction. About three years of hoping the silence meant something other than absence. About the earrings I had worn for a man who didn’t notice them.
“I was ready to,” I said. “That’s the honest answer. I wasn’t there yet, but I was
moving toward it. And then you came home.”
He flinched slightly, guilt flashing in his eyes.
“That’s all,” I said. “That’s the entirety of it.”
I turned to Maelis.
“I want you to hear this clearly,” I said. “Both of you.” I looked between them. “You are not welcome in this house anymore. Not today, not to make scenes at my gate, not to ask for dowry items, not to revisit decisions that have been finalized by the Alpha King’s office.” I kept my voice even and unhurried. “If there are legitimate financial matters, the loan, the medical endowment, the dissolution documentation, those go through attorneys from now on. Nothing else needs to come through this door.”
Maelis opened her mouth.
“I’m not finished,” I said, raising a finger and closed it.
“You came here today to convince me to return to a household I built and was pushed out of, to a man who chose someone else, to a position that was mine by right and was taken by someone who decided my feelings were irrelevant.” I looked at Kaelen. “I’m a Marchioness. I have my family’s name, my family’s estate, and work that matters more than anything the Varkos family can offer me. I have my wolf back.” I paused. “I have myself back. And I am asking you, for the last time, to leave.”
Kaelen was looking at me with the expression I had no name for, the one that was too large and too late and had nowhere to go.
“Rowena......” he started.
“Kasper,” I cut him short.
Kasper materialized from the east corridor with two security staff. He looked at Kaelen and then at Maelis and then at the door, and his expression communicated clearly and without words that the next movement in this room would be in the direction of the exit.
Kaelen looked at me one final time.
I looked back at him.
Not with anger but with complete, finished clarity.
He walked to the door.
Maelis followed, her cane striking the floor.
The door closed.
The entrance hall exhaled.
Kyra settled beside me. “Motherfucker.” She cursed and I almost bursted out laughing.
I looked at my hands.
“Velvet,” I called.
“My Luna.” ƒгeeweɓn૦vel.com
“Cancel whatever I had this afternoon and reschedule it.” I turned toward the stairs. “Then find Kasper. I need to brief him on the sourcing contact meeting.”
“Yes, my Luna.”
