Chapter 173 CHAPTER 173
Not buying the lies
Ares looked at Lady Bianca then, as if trying to read the arc of her expression for a hint of subtlety. He was always the son in battles that were only ever about politics. But this, this was not about a boardroom or a treaty. This was blood and household secrets and the small tragic compromises that made private cruelty possible.
“You want answers,” Ares said finally, his voice low and controlled but dangerous. “We want answers.” He turned back to Tessa. “You will tell the truth. Everything.”
Tessa’s eyes flashed. “I told you the truth. Marcus slipped.”
Ares’ hand curled as if it would take her throat. Instead, he took a breath, one of the few he made public, a patient, measured inhale and stepped back. The room hummed with the reticence of people used to watching a king channel violence into policy rather than fist.
Lady Bianca slammed an elegant hand onto the steel table. “Autopsy,” she said, blunt as an edict. “I want it. A full autopsy. Nothing half done. I want the truth.”
The coroner looked surprised at the intensity, then reassured. “We can…” he started.
“No,” Bianca interrupted. Her voice had the brittle authority of a matriarch undoing pity. “Do not ask permission. Do it.” Her eyes were wet now, but they burned with a sharpened iron. “There will be an autopsy.”
Ares’ shoulders tensed. He glanced at his mother, at the woman who had always been the lodestar of his public composure and he realized, with the cold clarity of a man who had spent years threading politics into image, that an autopsy would open fissures. It would imply suspicion. It would be a statement that the household could not handle. It would also invite prying eyes and questions and a smear of scandal in a place that usually favored control.
“Autopsy,” he said finally, with a voice that folded into his mother’s. “Yes.” He did not say that he knew it would be messy, that he would have to push for decisions that would bruise reputations. He did not say the shape of his own unease, or that his hands still trembled with a need to know whether this had been an accident or engineered.
Lady Bianca looked satisfied, a small, vicious satisfaction that was grief put into motion. “Good,” she breathed. “If anything isn’t right, we will know.”
There was a beat of silence in which Tessa felt the full weight of the room’s scrutiny drop on her like a cloak. She should have been broken by then, but she found an angle of defiance that shocked even her. “You want proof?” she said, and the words were acid and brave all at once. “You want proof I’m guilty? Fine. Take it. Do the autopsy. If there’s blame, put it where it belongs. But I will not be blamed here for the things Marcus did and the choices he made. I am his widow, not his scapegoat.”
Her voice rang in the sterile chapel of that hospital waiting room, and for a moment the world outside the door felt like the storm it had always been. Ares’ face closed into a scowl that softened into something like reluctant respect. It was not the look of a man forgiving her; it was the look of a man acknowledging someone who refused to be simply swept aside.
Lady Bianca, however, was not mollified. “Do not play martyr,” she snapped. “You were his wife. You do not get to be ambiguous in the eye of his death.”
Tessa met her stare like a gauntlet. “You were his ex wife, I was his current and legal wife,” she said, voice steady. “And I loved him in the ways I could. That does not make me responsible for every falling stone on this roof. I will not allow my husband’s name to be dug through for convenient enemies unless there is reason.”
Ares’ jaw tightened. The funeral machinery for a man as public as Marcus would not be tidy. The autopsy would be the first public incision into a private life, and no ritual could prepare a household for how bone deep the consequences could be.
It was Lady Bianca who finally stood and turned toward the door. “Since you are so insistent…” she said, pinching her fingers together, “…we will have the autopsy. We will know what killed my… And until then, no one leaves this hospital until they have answered reasonable questions.”
Ares, at her side, nodded. He had command now. He would control the narrative. He would ensure the story stayed within their orbit.
As Lady Bianca and Ares moved toward the door, Lady Bianca’s hand brushed Tessa’s shoulder in a movement that was hard to read, pity, command, disdain, maternal hostility all braided into one. “We will not be mocked in sorrow,” she said coolly. “If you stand where a widow should stand, then stand. If not, do not expect the family to bend for you.”
Tessa watched them go and felt the resolve in her bones harden in a new way. Ayisha, who had been small and fierce and watchful at her side, stepped closer and squeezed Tessa’s wrist. Her eyes were luminous with unshed tears but there was a fierce protective line to the set of her mouth.
“You stood up,” Ayisha whispered, proudness clear in her tone, not triumphant but steady. “You stood up for yourself.”
Tessa swallowed. The proud little fight was a thread in her that she had not known was still alive. The pain of the last night, the blow of Marcus’ sudden death, the raw humiliation of the house’s whispered whispers, these were all coals that now burned in her chest and, oddly, lit the small stubbornness she had used to survive.
Outside the room the murmur of the hospital life went on, phones, footsteps, the far off beeping of machines. The autopsy would happen. The questions would be asked. Ares and Lady Bianca had power and a vocabulary for damage control that would not be quiet.
In the small sterile room, Tessa and Ayisha were left with each other. Ayisha’s hand was warm, solid in Tessa’s. “We’ll face it,” she said simply. “We’ll answer what they need. But we’ll not be crushed.”
Tessa met her friend’s steady gaze and felt, for the first time since the night began, the trembling thing inside her gather itself like a fist. The world had turned violent and raw and terrible. It would get worse before it got better. But for now there was the small, stubborn dignity of a woman who refused to be the easy villain in another person’s narrative.
They did not know then how many more people would be dragged into the circle of blame, how the autopsy would unroll secrets like thread from an old garment, or how the echo of Marcus’ death would reverberate through lives already fragile with secrets.
They only knew that the next steps would be watched, weighed, argued over and that in the light of loss, the habit of cruelty and the
logic of survival often looked frighteningly alike.