Free Web NovelChapter 99: Chapter 99 He hit her
_Author’s POV_
The Varkos mansion had not been a peaceful house for a long time.
It had the specific atmosphere of a place where two people were coexisting in the same rooms without actually being in the same place. Kaelen and Virella had made the place unbearable to live in.
Kaelen now spent most of the morning in his study.
He told himself he was working. There were pack matters that needed attention, correspondence that had been sitting for days, the ongoing financial situation that required decisions he had been postponing because the decisions were all bad and choosing between bad options required an energy he didn’t currently have.
He stared at the desk and thought about none of those things.
He thought about the competition footage he had watched three times since yesterday, not because he wanted to watch it but because he kept returning to it the way you returned to something that had lodged in your thinking and wouldn’t release. Rowena in the staging area pulling her helmet off. Rowena’s car making his look like it was standing still on the straight. Rowena looking at him with that expression that had no anger left in it, just a clean and final absence of everything he had been hoping was still there.
And then he thought about Virella.
That was the thought he kept arriving at after all the other thoughts had run their course and there was nowhere else to go.
He had thought, when she offered to help rebuild the Varkos family, that he loved her. He had felt something warm when she said it, something that resembled the thing he had been telling himself was love. He had held onto that for months.
“That wasn’t love,” Shade said from somewhere flat and tired. “You know what that was.” free𝑤ebnovel.com
Kaelen knew what it was.
It was relief. She just offered to help and then she got pregnant, so he felt he’d loved her.
“You’ve been lying to yourself for a long time,” Shade said. “The difference is that now you’re running out of things to hide behind.”
“Enough,” Kaelen grumbled.
Kaelen pushed back from the desk.
The afternoon started with Virella in the corridor outside the sitting room, which was where most of their exchanges happened now, the neutral territory of spaces that didn’t belong to either of them specifically.
She said something about the household accounts. He responded about the pack schedule. She said something about that.
“Keep your damn voice down!” He yelled at her, surprised she didn’t respect him anymore.
From the sitting room doorway, Maelis watched them for approximately ninety seconds.
Then she turned around and walked to her bedroom without a word.
The door closed.
Kaelen and Virella stood in the corridor and the argument continued without the moderating presence of anyone who might have redirected it.
He wasn’t sure afterward what the specific thing was. He had been thinking about it. And he never wanted to tell her but now, he didn’t care anymore.
He said it during a pause.
“I want a divorce.”
Virella went still.
He said the rest of it because the first part was out and stopping now didn’t serve anything. He said it plainly and without softening it, “The child is gone, the thing that had been holding us together is gone now, since this isn’t love, let’s just end it.” He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Continuing is not something I am willing to do.”
He said it without thinking about how it sounded.
He found out how it sounded from her hand.
The slap came fast and hard. His head turned with it and the corridor was very quiet after it landed.
He turned to look at her.
She was shaking, not from fear but from the physical reaction of a person whose body had moved before their thinking caught up with it and was now processing what it had done.
What came next he could not fully explain afterward. Before he could hold himself back and let Shade speak sense into him, he moved. freeωebnovēl.c૦m
He hit her back.
It was not the same as her slap. It was harder and it caught her across the side of the face and she went off her feet and hit the floor. The sound of it was a sound he had never made in his life before and would hear for a long time after.
Virella lost her balance and fell. She lay on the floor and realized there was blood from where her head had caught the edge of the skirting board.
He stood over her and looked at her and felt something in him that he couldn’t name. He didn’t try to because the alternative was standing there in silence with what he had just done and that was what he did.
“Useless,” he spat without remorse. “You couldn’t keep a child. You can’t manage this family. You can’t do anything Rowena could do.”
The words left his mouth out of anger and the fact he’s been thinking of his ex-wife.
Virella looked up at him from the floor with blood on the side of her face and an expression he had never seen from her before.
But he didn’t care, he just walked away.
He left her there and walked down the corridor and out of the mansion into the cold afternoon air.
“You’re going to have to live with that,” Shade sighed.
Kaelen drove and said nothing.
“There is no version of what just happened,” Shade said again, “that you get to explain away. You hit her. You said those things. That’s who you were in that corridor today.”
