Chapter 32 032
Thalia’s POV
I tried to breathe, but no air agreed to enter my system. I did it again, and it managed to make its way through sparingly. I maintained eye contact with my soon-to-be ex-mate, waiting for him to admit that this was nothing more than a poorly timed joke. But all he did was slightly avoid eye contact with me. Nevertheless, he seemed to have firmly made his decision.
I was instantly struck with so much emotion that I could not control my tone of voice. "You must be insane if you think you can take away my child’s birthright. You want him to be an outcast?"
He just shook his head. "Are we really going to have this conversation out here, Thalia?"
I thought about it, then I looked at the nurses and other people passing by who were beginning to stare at us. I bit down on my bottom lip, controlling myself—that was what I had been doing ever since this disaster began bringing my life down to rubble.
"Fine. Let’s discuss this somewhere else."
He nodded, and then I followed him to the parking lot of the hospital. He told me to enter his car. I had personal feelings about it, but Liam’s birthright and fighting for it was more important than how I felt about my soon-to-be ex-mate. So I entered, and as I did, he came in after me, closing his own door and then locking all of them.
"What do you think you are doing?"
He inserted his key, and before I knew it, the car was in motion. "I don’t want you to be any closer to Shelly for what I have to tell you."
I ground my teeth against each other. "So this isn’t even a conversation at all, is it? You have already made your decision and you’re going to replace my son with her baby, aren’t you?"
He took a turn on the road. "I hate the way you always misunderstand me. No, I am not replacing our son, but there is no way he can possibly take over now."
"If you are talking about him losing his rank, then you don't have to worry about that. I already have some friends who have promised to give me the money."
He looked at me, and out of every other thing that he had done, the singular look of pity that he gave me made my blood run cold. If he wasn't at the wheel, I might have just reached for his neck and strangled out some of my frustration.
"You really think you need to lie to me?" His words poured out like a sigh. "Thalia, we have the same friend group," he reminded me.
A flush of red hit my cheeks as he elaborated that almost everyone I had spoken to, he had more or less also interacted with, and so far none of them had even passively mentioned giving me cash. I started to feel nauseous and told him to stop driving the car, or rather, reverse and go back to the hospital.
"Not until we are done with this conversation," he said stubbornly.
"This isn’t a conversation! I am going to help my son and fight for his birthright."
Varian’s jaw got tight. "He is my son too, you know?"
"You don't act like it," I told him frankly. "You call him your son, but you have stopped being his father for a very long time—even before you stopped being my mate and my husband."
That seemed to strike a chord within him. It seemed like for half a second he was actually going to reflect on how poorly he had been treating the kids, but any sort of shame that might have been able to find its way up to the surface was quickly smothered down when he received a text from Shelly. I knew it was from her because as soon as he fished his phone out of his pocket and looked at the screen, his face immediately lit up. Then he remembered that I was in the car with him and that we were on the road.
Putting the phone aside, he said, "All right, let’s wrap this up. I won’t announce that he is losing his position as my heir yet. We’ll wait until he's older. Then, when he is mature enough to understand everything, the torch will be officially passed over to his younger brother."
I listened to him draw out this nonsense and just shook my head in regret of the kind of father I gave my son. "So your plan is to lie to him? Is that your go-to for everyone? Once a conversation is too heavy to have, you just avoid it and deceive the other person, but that doesn’t stop you from doing what you want. You know what they call people like that?"
"I didn’t bring you to this car to criticize me and my parenting. I know that I’m doing a good job, even though you like to paint everything I do wrong."
"I’m not painting anything, just telling you exactly what you’ve done. Now I’m going to tell you what I’ll do. No matter how hard it is, I’m going to get that treatment for Liam."
His fingers gripped around the wheel tightly until I could see his knuckles going white. "You won't be able to do that anymore."
At first, I thought he was threatening me that he would never allow me to do it, but then the way his face became so bleached as I kept looking at him told me otherwise.
"What do you mean I won't be able to?"
He kept driving for a while as if he didn't hear my question. To free him from that problem, I screamed at him, "What do you mean by that?!"
Finally, he confessed, "Thalia... I have already placed Liam on suppressants."