Chapter 177 CHAPTER 177
Regrets
Tessa sat at the small round table in her apartment with a glass of expensive whiskey she had not truly earned. The ice clinked like a metronome. She had been trying to imagine the way Chloe’s laugh would sound, sharp, mocking, then bright and failing.
Chloe had been complicated and cruel, she had also been a companion in the way that only messy history could make two women. Tessa replayed the memories unspooling: late night fights that ended in cigarette smoke and apologies made of half lies, the shared contempt for people who thought themselves above pain.
The bottle was half empty before she recognized that she had been drinking to forget rather than to remember. Ayisha had been there all night, moving like a nervous halo around Tessa’s sorrow, offering tissues and hot tea. She had made offers to go to the police and had made offers to do nothing at all. Her hands had become a steady presence, not an answer but a witness.
“You can’t blame yourself,” Ayisha said quietly, watching Tessa’s palms blot their tears into the napkin. “You were fighting as you always fought. You didn’t kill anyone. Chloe… she had enemies. People with more to gain from her silence than you ever did.”
“I killed Marcus and Lady Bianca…”
Tessa dropped her head into her hands. The room smelled faintly of whiskey and old perfume, remnants of lives that had once been carefully curated. “Marcus,” she whispered, voice hollow. “Lady Bianca…Chloe was pregnant. The way she looked at me when she laughed… it wasn’t what it used to be.”
Ayisha moved to sit beside her. “You miss the old version of her,” she said. “The one before masks and threats. It’s alright to grieve even what you hated.”
Tessa shook her head. “I don’t know who I am supposed to be without her. And now Bianca’s heart has given out, and Marcus is dead… everything’s collapsing.”
Ayisha reached for Tessa’s hand and squeezed. “You’re allowed to breathe, even if everything else is on fire.”
The simplicity of that comfort made Tessa laugh through her tears. It was a thin sound, but it was something. She let herself be steadied for a moment, then felt the old instincts, the ones brought on by years of not asking for help rise like a tide. She would not let the world see her broken. She would learn to mask grief in a new way, as her mother had, as Lady Bianca had with a polished face and a menace that promised ruin to anyone who underestimated her.
At the hospital’s sliding doors, Ares stumbled into the night air like a man waking in a foreign land. The cold wrapped around him, a small correction to a chest that felt raw. Julian stayed close, his presence a muted anchor. They had to appear composed; the press and the public would need directions. But composition felt flimsy. Ares had never known how to be anything but fierce in public, and now he needed to be tender in private; a skill he was only just learning.
He walked the short span to the car, each step weighted. People murmured, clustered around the steps, their faces a mosaic of pity and curiosity. Cameras flashed like distant lightning. For a moment, the show of grief had all the trappings that made lives public currency. He found it distasteful and yet undeniably comforting, Lady Bianca’s life had always been a spectacle, and now her death would be another performance they would dissect.
Julian slid into the passenger seat and felt the vibration of Ares’ hands as they gripped the wheel. When they were moving, the world outside the car’s windows seemed to blur, but the steady drip of reality remained. Ares’ phone buzzed with incoming condolences and with the logistics that always followed loss: messages about funeral plans, calls from officials, the unending shuffling of people who needed to be told first.
Tessa’s masion—Marcus’ mansion lay on the route back toward the house where gossip already thickened like molasses. Julian suggested they stop by, a practical decision rooted in the need to consolidate alliances. Ares nodded, swallowing the urge to be alone and to collapse into the quiet that grief sometimes demanded.
When they entered, Tessa stood, glass in hand, looking as if she had been cut by the day’s events. She held herself like someone who had just been given a script she had not wanted to read. Ares noticed the tremor in her jaw and the hollow set of her eyes. He said nothing for a long moment; words felt like poor instruments.
“Are you okay?” he asked at last, simple and blunt.
Tessa laughed, a small, pained sound that seemed to surprise even her. “Define okay,” she said.
Ares took off his coat and hung it with a kind of gentle deliberation. “Are you okay now that you’ve killed my parents?” he said, “You should be damn happy…”
Ayisha watched them with a complexity of emotion written across her face: worry, fear and a small, wary hope. Tessa’s lips trembled as she looked at Ares. There was anger in the look, and a fragile acknowledgment of the world continuing on, even if it had been turned inside out.
Outside, the evening gathered its darkness, but inside there were voices and plans, the mechanics of funerals and autopsies and legalities that would take days to sort. Nobody could say yet how the scandals would settle or who would be indicted in whispers. All anyone knew, in the hollow, immediate hours, was that the world had shifted, and people had to find new ways to stand.
Somewhere in the city, life moved forward with its soft cruelty, markets sold bread, taxis drove, people argued over trivial things. Yet in these rooms, the hospital’s corridor, Tessa’s big kitchen, the car speeding under sodium lights, grief assembled itself into a new architecture. It would be long before the ruins cleared. For now, there was just the pounding, the ache, the small gestures of care: a held hand, a poured glass, a shared silence that said, without words, I am here.
And for Ares, his world was crashing. He walked over to his father’s mansion and knocked.
“Ares?” Tessa said, opening up.
“How are you able to sleep at night knowing you killed them?” Ares asked, letting himself cry for the first time. “She died because you killed her husband.”
Tessa shook her head. “No I didn’t…You accused me earlier and I let it sl
ide. I won’t anymore.” She banged the door in his face.