Chapter 172 CHAPTER 172
Lies to cover up
They arrived at the hospital as the night bled into a bruised, early morning. The emergency room smelled of antiseptic and stale coffee; the fluorescent lights gave everything a pallid, unkind wash.
Lady Bianca moved through the sliding doors like a storm contained in an elegant body, her shawl twisted about her shoulders, the nerves at the corners of her mouth taut as wire. Ares was a taut, silent shadow at her side, anger coiled tight in him, the kind of anger that made people stop talking and take a step back.
The nurse at the reception desk had the tired, practiced calm of someone who had seen too much human drama for one lifetime. When Lady Bianca’s name flashed on the clipboard and her voice cracked through the antiseptic air—“Where is he? Tell me!”—the nurse’s placid face tried to stay neutral but the worry behind her eyes had depth. She led them down a corridor with framed certificates and tired plants toward the forensic waiting room. The fluorescent lights here reflected off the linoleum with a sterile insistence.
“It’s in the examination room,” the nurse said softly, and when she spoke the room seemed to tilt.
They were ushered into a small, clinical chamber where the coroner stood by a steel counter, his face the professional gray of someone practiced at delivering bad news. He had that slow, deliberate cadence that tried to blunt the knife. When he finally looked up, the entire room held its breath.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Despite our efforts—Mr. Marcus didn’t survive.”
The words landed like a physical blow. Lady Bianca’s hands flew to her face; the shawl slipped from her shoulders and fell to the floor without ceremony. The world narrowed to a soundless, ugly ache. Her knees folded as if some invisible force had removed the ground beneath them. Ares moved in a single swift motion, chopping the nurse’s offered reassurance with a sharp, almost animal growl of disbelief.
“No,” Bianca said, as if saying the word could conjure another outcome. Her voice came out thin and sharp. “No. He can’t be…”
Tessa…and Tessa looked like she had stepped out from a nightmare. Her face was pale, mascara streaked by tears, her hands clenching and unclenching at her sides. She had collapsed into a chair when they brought her into the room, her breath shallow and fast. Her eyes were rimmed in red but defiant; grief and the solidity of a hard life had carved them into someone who could not be broken easily.
“Marcus slipped,” she said in the small, brittle voice of someone rehearsing a defense. “He slipped and hit his head. It happened fast. He was alone. I tried to… I called…”
Her words snapped off as Ares’ hand tightened into a fist. He had always been controlled in public, his anger usually a low, precise instrument. But in that moment his control fractured. He stepped forward until there was no space between them, the hospital light catching the hard planes of his face.
“You expect me to believe that?” Ares demanded. He did not shout; he didn’t need to. The quiet in his voice made the walls lean in.
Tessa straightened as if someone had propped her up with a rod. “Yes,” she said. “Yes. That’s what happened.” Her voice trembled but did not break.
Lady Bianca staggered, finding footspace again, her expression raw and open. “My husband doesn’t just ‘slip,’” she said through the veil of grief. “He doesn’t—he was careful. Precise. He…” Her sentences crumpled under the weight of denial. She was a woman who had once commanded rooms with a single look; tonight she seemed suddenly small. “There was something else. He… he wouldn’t…“
Ares’ face hardened. He turned on his heel and crossed the room with the economy of the practiced predator. He leaned in until his face was inches from Tessa’s. “Why weren’t you with him?” he asked. The accusation in his voice had no cushion.
Tessa swallowed, the sound raw. She could have told him a hundred small justifications: she had been asleep, she had been in the shower, she had been dressing for some meaningless charade Marcus demanded of her. All of them felt thin and inadequate. “I was— I was getting ready. I—” She broke off. Tears wet her lashes again. “I’m his wife. I tried to help. I called for help.”
Ares’ jaw worked. “You called for help?” He turned toward the coroner, his voice clipped. “When was the call logged? Who answered?” His questions came fast, urgent, like a storm. The coroner answered with numbers and times and procedures, the bureaucratic latticework of a hospital and Ares took it in but it did not soften him.
Lady Bianca’s grief bled into fury. Her voice rose, brittle with accusation. “You lie,” she snapped at Tessa. “But don’t lie to us. Not with my husband dead.”
Tessa lifted her chin. There was shame in her face, yes; there was also a fierce, stubborn line that had always been there even when she had resembled the fragile parts of herself least. “I didn’t lie. Marcus was… Marcus was his own worst enemy sometimes. He drank. He had bad nights. I can’t explain everything.” She had the look of someone who had recited these truths until they had lost their edge, someone who had tried to survive on defensive reflexes for too long.
Ares’ eyes flickered, and for a moment the tenderness he once reserved like a private thing for certain quiet nights passed over his expression. It was as if he saw the small, fragile woman inside the fighter and wanted to cradle her, wanted to tear open the world and fix its rawness. “You were married to him. You were supposed to keep him from harm,” he said, the accusation softening to a near-entreaty that slid off something harder inside him.
Tessa’s lip quivered. “I tried,” she whispered. The room felt suddenly tilted on an axis only she could sense. “I tried everything I could. You don’t know the things I had to do. The things I had to swallow. The orders. The…”
Lady Bianca’s face twisted. “Orders?” she echoed, incredulous and outraged.
Tessa did not answer. The hospital’s fluorescent lights seemed to spotlight he
r in a way that made every faultline obvious.