CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO #2
“No, I don’t. She’s been around for months,” he continued, voice clipped.
“It’s all on camera. Every entry, every exit, every conversation logged.
If you want to watch the footage, I’ll pull the files myself.
I never touched her before tonight and hardly even then.
I know I fucked up; I have nothing to dress it up in. ”
I couldn't look at him anymore. Something inside me splintered with an almost audible crack. I wrapped my arms around myself as if it could serve as a barrier. His gaze lingered on my hand, the one Santos had bandaged when we got back. The split-second shift in his expression was so subtle most would have missed it, but I’d spent years learning to read every micro-expression that crossed his face.
“You need to see Doctor Lark about that,” he stated, his voice taking on the concerned tone that once would have melted me.
“Oh, now you’re worried?” I bit out. “After what just happened, you want to talk about my hand?”
“Listen to me— you witnessed something you shouldn’t have, but that hasn’t changed anything. Not for me. I still care about you deeply. I still respect you as I always have.”
Care. Respect. I turned the words over, waiting for the third one to follow the way it should have, the way it always should have. It didn’t come. How often had he actually said those three words to me?
I searched my memory, frantically sorting through the moments we’d shared.
There had been gifts, protection, devotion even.
But love? The word itself seemed conspicuously absent from his vocabulary, but not mine.
What did he say when those words left my mouth?
I had filled in the blanks, given meaning to his silence, his actions, his possessive touches.
I had accepted those responses, wrapped them around myself like a security blanket because the intensity in his gaze had seemed like enough. Because his actions had spoken louder than any words could.
Now I wondered if I had been a fool all along, creating a fantasy that existed only in my mind.
“Do you love me?” The question escaped before I could stop it, my voice small and raw in the quiet room.
He looked genuinely taken aback, his perfect composure cracking for just a moment. It was the most vulnerable I’d seen him since I’d walked in, and somehow that hurt me more than anything else.
His hesitation lasted only seconds, but it felt like an eternity.
“I care about you, your wellbeing, your happiness. But Selene...” He paused, and I watched something shift in his eyes—not cruelty, but a terrible honesty. “I’m not in love with you. That’s not what this marriage is.”
The words hit me with physical force. I felt them like a blow to my chest, stealing the air from my lungs.
“This isn’t—“ I couldn’t finish the sentence.
“This was about many things. Protection. Partnership. Mutual respect. But love?” He shook his head, and I saw regret there, but not remorse. “We never promised each other that.”
I laughed, a hollow sound. “Is that why you could let her touch you? Because we’re not in love?”
“You’re twisting my words.”
“No,” I refuted, my voice steadier now as a cold clarity washed over me. “I’m finally hearing them clearly.”
His eyes searched mine. "The way you're looking at me now, like I'm a stranger, I deserve that."
"You think so?" I asked softly, sarcastically.
I could already see it then, this being our future as more of my mother's whispered lessons came back to me.
"A Dominion wife never begs, never pleads."
In the end she did beg and she did plea, and it got her nothing but those lectures she then gave to me and Amara. The same way I’d refused back then was the same now, I wouldn't become the reincarnation of that woman because of him. Not for anyone.
"So, what we do now, is what half the Dominion does."
His eyes narrowed, but he said nothing.
"We pretend. You will sleep in your wing, I'll sleep in my own. We'll attend events together because our families expect it, but that's where it ends."
I swear his mouth twitched as if I’d just said something amusing and I knew to move past him and put distance between us before I clawed his face off.
I’d never been outwardly violent; I wasn’t allowed to be.
All those ideas of bloodshed or inflicting pain had always been kept within the confines of my mind.
Hidden far beneath the demure woman people expected me to be.
Every year of my life spent learning to keep them buried, to fold them down into something small and quiet and acceptable, to be the woman in the room who never raised her voice and never raised her hand.
His eyes tracked my every movement.
“Any other rules you think you’re going to impose?”
My hand flew to my chest, fingernails digging into the fabric of my cardigan. The physical pain gave me something to focus on beyond the torrent of emotions threatening to drown me.
“You think this is a joke?” My voice trembled.
“No.” He shifted and his arms crossed, that maddening calm still intact. “I think you’re making declarations about our future that I haven’t agreed to, but go on,” he prompted, voice neutral. “I’m listening.”
I stared at him, trying to read the subtle shift in his expression. Was he mocking me? Did he think this was a moment of feminine hysteria he could weather and then move past? The way he looked at me—patient, almost indulgent—sent a fresh wave of fury through my veins.
“You think I’m being dramatic. That this will pass.”
“I think,” he replied carefully, “that you’re hurt. Rightfully so. I think you need to say what you’re feeling.”
His words were reasonable, almost understanding, but something in his tone felt wrong. Like he was placating me now rather than confronting the gravity of what had happened.
“I don’t want to have a heart to heart about what I’m feeling.
I want you to know that whatever whore comes next—and we both know there will be a next—keep her far from this house.
Bring her here while Niko is under this roof and I promise you, you will be the one cleaning up what’s left of her.
That is the only thing I will ever say to you about it. ”
I held his gaze and let the silence do the rest.
“Outside of our son and whatever I owe the Kostas name, you and I are done speaking.”
The silence that followed was absolute.
If I hadn’t been watching him, I would have missed it—the smallest fracture in his expression. I wasn’t finished either. What he didn’t know was that none of this mattered. I already. This conversation would soon be nothing but noise.
His voice came low and controlled. “There are no whores or mistresses and there won’t be. You are the only woman I have—who I want. You think I’m going to stand aside while my wife pretends she lives alone? That you won’t be in our bed at night?”
“You gave up your spot in my bed the moment you let her touch you. So yes. That is exactly what you’re going to do.”
“You don’t get to unilaterally decide how our marriage continues.”
I shifted my weight. He was not my father. I had to keep reminding myself of that as little alarm bells started going off in my head because though I knew every line of that face, had memorized it in the dark, right now he was more like a stranger wearing my husband's face.
“I’m not deciding anything. I’m telling you what is.”
“You believe we can live separate lives under one roof? No. That’s not fucking happening.”
“No? We already do.” My voice cracked on the last word and I hated myself for it. “You are never here. You have not been here. Apparently you’ve been somewhere, with that whore, and I have been—“ I stopped. Swallowed. “I have been here every day waiting for you.”
The plastic of the taser dug into my palm through the fabric of my pocket. He was looking at me the way he always did—straight through me, unflinching—like a man who had decided the truth was the only weapon worth carrying.
He kept advancing. “That little bitch doesn’t mean anything, Selene. She never has. I chose you. I choose you every single day. You and our son. That’s why I’m not here. I’m not fucking losing you over doing what was necessary to keep you safe.”
My eyes stayed locked on his.
The words landed somewhere between a lifeline and a detonator. Every instinct I had screamed to close the distance and claw them out of the air, to unhear them, because I knew what they were doing to me.
My pulse was a fist against my ribs. I hated him for saying it.
I hated myself more for the way something in my chest went quiet and treacherous at the sound of it—a relief so shameful I would sooner have swallowed glass than let him see it cross my face.
Even if he was protecting me, that had nothing to do with what I’d walked in on tonight.
I could argue that was the very opposite of what he claimed he’d been doing.
“You don’t love me,” I repeated, the fact of it laid flat between us as I stepped back. “You don’t respect me either. Not the way you claim to. I could survive without love, I’ve been doing it my entire life. I cannot survive without that.”
I loved for the door, and he moved too.
He stepped into my path. “Where do you think you’re going?”
His hand rose between us and I reacted instinctively.
The taser was already in my grip before I’d made any decision at all—the plastic slick with sweat, my sister’s voice somewhere in the back of my skull, her hands closing mine around it the day she gave it to me.
I didn’t warn him. I didn’t say his name.
I drove it into his side and pressed the button and held it there.
The blue arc was ugly and small and it dropped him.
His knees hit the floor hard. The sound he made—I had never heard him make a sound like that. His hand shot out and caught his body, his suit jacket bunching at the shoulder. He stayed there, one knee down, head bowed, breathing through his teeth.
I stood over him, momentarily frozen as my stomach dropped.
"Alaric, I'm —." I cut myself off, because I wasn't sorry.
He remained on one knee, palm pressed against the floor, muscles rigid as electricity coursed through him.
His gaze never left mine. His eyes darkened, a familiar storm brewing behind the icy blue.
I’d seen this look before—when he was hunting, when he was about to make someone disappear.
The realization that he might turn that same intensity toward me now made my knees weaken.
I retreated toward the exit, my cardigan brushing against the doorframe, watching for any movement, any twitch of those powerful shoulders that might signal he was recovering.
His mouth opened, words forming, but I couldn't bear to hear them.
I slipped away, easing the door closed behind me.
The heavy mahogany door closed with barely a whisper against the frame, the latch catching with a sound so small it was almost nothing— a soft click, barely a period, barely an end.
I stood in the hallway for a suspended moment with my hand still on the handle, and then I moved.
I fled down the hallway, my footsteps silent, heart hammering against my ribs as I got further and further from the sound of him breathing through his teeth on the floor of that room.
My hands would not stop shaking.
I pressed one flat against my sternum as I walked. As if that could do anything. As if there were something left in there worth holding together as everything I had built from the inside out for a man I had been foolish enough to love, came crashing down in ruins.