Chapter 19 019

Chapter 19 019

KAELAN

I couldn't sleep.

I lay in the bed I shared with Isabella and stared at the ceiling and listened to her breathing even out beside me and thought about Meira.

That was the thing I couldn't stop doing. No matter what I filled the days with, meetings, pack business, the endless cycle of duties that came with running a territory, she was there underneath all of it. Quiet and persistent like a sound you can't unheard once you've noticed it.

I had told myself it would go away. That the guilt was just adjustment, the natural discomfort of a man who had made a hard decision and was living with the fallout. I had told myself that what I'd done was necessary. That the pack needed an heir, that Isabella had come back, that the bond with Meira had never been what it should have been anyway.

I had told myself a lot of things.

None of them were working anymore.

I got up at four in the morning and went to the study and sat in the dark for a while without turning the light on. The packhouse was quiet around me, everyone asleep, nothing moving outside the window.

I thought about the morning she'd walked into my office.

The file in her hand. The way she'd stopped in the doorway. The sound of her voice saying my name, that small broken sound, like something inside her had cracked clean through.

I had told her to go home.

I had stood there with Isabella pressed against me and looked at the woman who had spent four years loving me through everything and I had told her to go home.

I pressed my hand over my face and sat there in the dark.

She had been pregnant. She'd been carrying my children and I hadn't known, hadn't asked, hadn't given her the space to tell me anything because I had already decided what I wanted and she wasn't it anymore.

That was the truth of it. That was the thing I couldn't dress up no matter how many times I tried.

I had chosen Isabella. Not because Meira wasn't enough. Not really. Isabella had come back and something old and unfinished had pulled at me and I had followed it without thinking about what I was dismantling to get there. Without thinking about her.

And now she was in Darius Vael's house.

The Lycan King.

I had looked into him after Nicholas came back empty handed. Spent two days pulling everything I could find about who Darius Vael actually was, where he'd come from, what he'd built and how. The picture that came back wasn't a comfortable one. He wasn't just powerful in the way most Alphas were powerful. He was the kind of man who moved quietly and thought long and didn't do anything without a reason behind it.

He had a reason for Meira. I didn't know exactly what it was yet but I knew enough about Nicholas's history to understand that Meira being in that house was not coincidence. It was a move. A careful, deliberate move.

And she was in the middle of it carrying my children.

I got up and went to the window.

The packhouse grounds were dark and still, the tree line at the far edge just shapes against the night sky. I had grown up here. Taken over from my father at twenty six, built on what he left me, made decisions I believed were right for the pack even when they cost me personally.

That was what I had told myself about Meira. Pack first. Heir first. The bond had been there but it hadn't been producing what the pack needed and Isabella had come back and the timing had felt like an answer.

But standing here now at four in the morning I couldn't find the version of myself that had believed that. Couldn't locate the logic that had made it feel clean.

All I could find was the look on her face in that doorway.

I had never seen Meira break. Not really, not fully. She was the kind of woman who held things together even when everything around her was falling apart. Four years of his mother's cruelty, four years of pressure and criticism and being told she wasn't enough, and she had never once fallen apart in front of anyone. She had just gotten quieter and steadier and kept going.

She had broken in that doorway though. For just a second, before she pulled it back. I had seen it and I had looked away and told her to go home.

That was what I couldn't forgive myself for. Not the rejection itself, not even Isabella. The looking away. The deliberate choice to not see what I was doing to her.

I sat back down in the chair.

I thought about the twins. My children, growing up in another man's house, in another territory, under another name. Vael's protection, Vael's roof, Vael's rules. They would come into the world not knowing me. Would grow up with a version of events I had no control over. Would hear about their father from a woman I had broken and a man who had reasons to make me look as bad as possible.

That thought sat in my chest like something physical.

I had not thought it through. That was the honest truth. I had been impulsive and selfish and I had not thought past the moment I was standing in and now the consequences of that were somewhere in another territory getting bigger every day.

I needed to fix this.

The thought arrived simply, no drama to it, just a clear flat certainty. I needed to fix this. Not all of it, I knew that. I couldn't undo the rejection, couldn't take back the words, couldn't give her back the four years or the morning she'd walked into my office or any of it. Some things couldn't be undone.

But my children were out there. And Meira was in a situation that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with other people's agendas, mine and Nicholas's and Vael's, and she was in the middle of it alone.

That I could do something about.

I didn't know what exactly. I hadn't worked that far yet. Going to Vael's territory wasn't simple, it wasn't the kind of thing you did without preparation, without thinking through every angle. Vael wasn't a man you walked up to and made demands of. I understood that much.

But I also understood that sitting here doing nothing while my children grew up in another man's house wasn't something I could keep doing.

I heard footsteps in the hall.

Isabella appeared in the doorway in her nightwear, hair loose, looking at me the way she'd been looking at me since our argument. Careful. Measuring. Trying to figure out where she stood.

"You didn't come back to bed," she said.

"Couldn't sleep."

She came in and sat on the arm of the chair across from me. Looked at me for a moment.

"You're thinking about her," she said.

I didn't deny it. There was no point.

Isabella was quiet for a moment. I watched her face, the way she was holding herself together, the particular composure she wore when she was working something out.

"I know what I did," she said quietly. "I know how this happened. I'm not pretending otherwise."

I looked at her.

"But she's gone, Kaelan," she said. "She's in his house and she's not coming back. Whatever you're sitting in here thinking about it's not going to change that."

"My children are there," I said.

She flinched. Small, quick, but I caught it.

"I know," she said.

"They're mine. Whatever happened between me and Meira, whatever I did, those children are mine and they're going to grow up in Darius Vael's house if I don't do something about it."

Isabella looked at her hands. "And Meira."

I was quiet for a second.

"I hurt her," I said. "I know that. I'm not going to sit here and pretend I didn't or that it was justified because it wasn't. I handled everything badly and she paid for it and I have to live with that."

"But," Isabella said softly.

"But I need to see her," I said. "I need to look her in the face and say what I should have said and I need to know my children are going to know who their father is."

Isabella looked up at me. Her eyes were very still.

"And if she doesn't want that," she said. "If she's done with you and happy where she is. What then."

I thought about that. Really thought about it, not the version where I got what I needed but the honest version where Meira looked at me and felt nothing except the particular cold of someone who had already moved past you.

"Then I respect it," I said. "But I have to try. I have to at least try."

Isabella was quiet for a long moment. She looked at the window, the dark outside it, and I watched something work through her face that she didn't let out all the way.

"You loved her," she said. Not an accusation. Just a fact she was saying out loud for the first time.

I looked at her.

"Maybe not the way you should have," she said. "Maybe not enough. But you loved her."

I didn't answer.

She nodded slowly, like that was answer enough. She stood up and smoothed her nightwear and looked at me one more time.

"Don't do anything stupid," she said quietly. "Vael isn't someone you walk into blind."

She left and I heard her go back down the hall and the house went quiet again.

I sat in the dark for a long time after that.

I had made a mess of everything. I knew that. I had taken something good and thrown it away for something that felt urgent in the moment and was turning out to be a lot more complicated than I had bargained for.

But I was still my children's father. And Meira was still the woman I had spent four years with, the woman I had broken without fully understanding what I was breaking, and she was out there in the middle of something that was bigger than both of us.

I owed her more than I had given her.

And even if it was too late for anything else, I was going to find a way to tell her that.