Chapter 167
_Virella’s POV_
I had been having a good evening and that was the most infuriating part of it. I had eaten well, taken a long bath, and was sitting in the vanity doing my hair. I was even humming to myself because there was nobody in the house to tell me to stop and I was in that rare mood where everything felt like it was still salvageable.
Theodore had said he needed a few hours to arrange the next location and I had learned not to hover when Theodore was working. He worked better when I gave him the space.
I just sat in this small house trusting that when he came back he would have everything sorted.
I was thinking about where we might go next, maybe somewhere beautiful, or somewhere with no connection to either of our names. We needed somewhere we could sit still for long enough to regroup and rebuild the plan properly because I still had moves left and that island had been a setback not an ending.
I was actually smiling at my reflection when I noticed it, there was a shift in the reflection that my brain registered before my eyes fully caught up with it.
I slowed the brush without meaning to, my hand pausing, and I looked up properly into the mirror. My heart dropped into my stomach at the sight of people behind me. An actual room full of people standing behind me where there had been nothing a second ago.
My heart slammed against my chest so hard it hurt. I turned around fast, the brush falling from my hand and hitting the floor somewhere, and I pressed myself back against the vanity because my legs had gone unsteady. I needed something behind me.
My eyes moved across the faces in the room, The Alpha King, that guy named Kasper, people I recognized from the facility raid, and then found the face at the back of the group that I hated with my entire existence.
Rowena.
She was standing there with a small smile on her face that I had never seen from her before. She didn’t have the blank expression she always wore in that facility, or her careful neutral face she used like a weapon to frustrate my life.
Her face right now was enough to tell that she’d been waiting for this moment for a very long time and was enjoying every second of arriving at it.
“Hi, Virella,” she said pleasantly. “Long time no see.”
My mouth opened but nothing came out immediately, which had never happened to me before in my entire life. I was never without words, words were the one thing I always had, the one weapon that never failed me, and right now my mind was completely blank in a way that terrified me more than the people in the room did.
I forced myself to breathe In through my nose, I straightened up from the vanity and lifted my chin and pulled whatever composure I could find back around myself like a coat.
“Alpha King,” I said, directing my attention to him deliberately, away from Rowena. “I think there’s been some kind of misunderstanding here.”
Nobody responded to that.
“Whatever you think I’ve done,” I continued, keeping my voice normal, “I think if we sat down and talked through this properly, like reasonable people, we could…….”
“Shut up,” Alaric said. I immediately stopped talking.
He looked at me with an expression that had absolutely nothing in it. There was no anger, no satisfaction, not even the happiness of finally catching someone you’ve been changing. Just nothing, as if I was a task he was completing, something to be dealt with and then moved past.
I hated that more than I would have hated rage.
My eyes moved to Rowena again despite myself. She had moved slightly forward from the back of the group, not pushing to the front but making sure I knew this wasn’t a fucking dream. She was here in person.
My wolf disappeared to the back of my mind uselessly.
I held myself together and focused on Rowena. She had changed a bit since the last time. Although she still looked pale, but she was still standing straight and looking at me with those steady eyes that had always made me want to hit her just to get a reaction.
“How,” I said, and I hated that the word came out smaller than I intended. “How did you find this place?”
Nobody answered that either.
My mind was running fast underneath the surface of trying to stay composed, going through everything, checking every angle. This property was Reid’s. Not mine, not Theodore’s, nothing connected to either of our names. Nobody should have been able to trace us here through the usual channels. Which meant…..
Theodore.
The thought hit me like cold water and I actually felt blood leave my face. Theodore had been gone for hours, the bastard said he needed time to arrange things and would come back soon. I had trusted him because he was the last person to betray me and this is what he’s done?
“He turned himself in, didn’t he?” I asked, but I wasn’t asking anyone in the room. I was just saying it out loud because my mouth was still moving even though my brain was somewhere else entirely. “Theodore the bastard turned himself in.”
I let out a bitter laugh, feeling the betrayal deep in my bones. Someone who claimed to love me with all his heart.
A liar.
“Of course he did,” I sighed. “Of course, I knew he was going soft. I told myself it didn’t matter, I told myself I could manage it, but I knew…..” I stopped talking, pressing my lips together, because I was starting to sound unhinged and I refused to give Rowena the satisfaction of watching me come apart. Tears burned my eyes as I looked at Alaric again. “Whatever he told you, whatever deal he made, I want you to know that Theodore is not innocent in any of this. He built that facility, it was his money, his connections, and his ideas originally. Whatever he said to you to make himself look like the lesser…..”
“We know everything,” The Kasper Guy said from beside Alaric, in a flat unbothered voice. “The facility, the funding, the trademark case, Reid, the photographs on the island. All of it.”
I went quiet and felt my heart drop again. Theodore fucking Ashford.
“What about photographs?” I managed to ask.
“The wall in the east wing,” Kasper said. “We spent a good amount of time in that room.”
Something cold settled in my stomach. Those photographs were lit months of tracking, every movement, every location, all of it pinned to that wall. I had forgotten about the wall in the rush to leave the island and it had clearly not forgotten about me.
I slowly turned to look at Rowena and realized she was still watching me with that expression, that calm irritating one. I just know that she had probably known about the photographs since they pulled them off that wall and she had been sitting with that knowledge this whole time, waiting for tonight.
“You should have just stayed out of it,” I said to her, and my voice came out with more feeling than I intended, the composure slipping at the edges despite everything I was doing to hold it. “From the very beginning. If you had just stayed out of Kaelen’s life and let things go the way they were going to go anyway…..”
“None of this is Rowena’s fault,” Alaric growled, his aura blasted the room in an instant, a sign of anger.
I looked at him, feeling my chest tighten. The way he was looking at Rowena, the way he said her name, everything screamed at one thing. He was in love with her.
The Alpha King was completely, thoroughly in love with Rowena Ashthorne.
I almost laughed again but it didn’t come out. That should have been me. Why does Rowena always get the powerful men?!
Reid wanted me to get together with Alaric, now Rowena got him!
First Kaelen, now Alaric!
Tears slipped free from my eyes as the hatred I had for her doubled. I just wanted her dead and thrown into the river for fishes to eat.
Only if I could escape from here, I would make sure she never sees the light of the day if I got the chance to snuff it from her.
But unfortunately, there was nowhere to go. Theo’s men had scattered around so I was left alone here.
Without feeling too much pressure, I straightened my spine. If this was how it ended then it was going to end with me standing upright, not crumpling in front of Rowena Ashthorne in a bedroom in this house that I had been hiding in like an animal.
“Fine,” I said quietly and held my wrists out in front of me.