Chapter 185 CHAPTER 185
Loud rejection
He shouldn’t have gone, Richard told himself as he walked the long block to the bus stop, the city a washed out ribbon of lights. But he could not leave it. He had to try again, to knock another door, to wait for the right moment when the past might make room for him. He had not expected the barbed reply that came later from a number he had not dialed in months: a cold-lipped voice that suggested a bargain.
Ethan had been in custody two days prior. The arrest had been noisy, paternal and full of teeth. Richard had gone to the precinct to give his statement, to help Tessa in whatever way he could, and caught Ethan’s eye across the room, malevolent, amused, the look of a man who didn’t scare easily. After the hearing, Ethan had laughed, a sound like a rough tide.
Later, when the acrid scent of fear had faded, Ethan found him outside the courthouse and made a proposition as calm as a buy back. “You help me,” Ethan had said, voice low and oily. “Help me get revenge on Ayisha. You do that, and I’ll leave Tessa alone. I’ll go somewhere far away and never come back.”
Richard had almost laughed at the absurdity of it. The man who had stood accused of threatening Tessa now wanted a pact? But the look in Ethan’s eyes was not a jest. It was menace. The kind that had calculated cost and benefit for a table of consequences.
He told Ethan that he would never trade Tessa’s safety for anything, that he would never aid cruelty. Ethan had smiled then, all crooked charm and rotten teeth, and his words spilled electricity: “You always were moral, Richards. Maybe too soft. Think about it though. Everyone’s got a price.”
Richard shook his head. Ethan’s laugh echoed in the alleyways of his conscience, the memory of it a warning that the city’s predators hunted in packs.
At that exact hour, Ayisha crossed the marble threshold of Ares’ temporary office like she had done dozens of times, confident, purposeful. She had the look of a woman who could ask for small mercies and big favors in the same breath. The news about the footage had made the rounds; the whole of their neighborhood was simmering. She had chosen to go to Ares because people went to him when they wanted things done right. He was an island of certainty; it had always been his nature. Besides, the whisper of a DNA test had gone out into the air like a paper plane and landed at her feet. She couldn’t leave it there.
She found him at a desk, the crown of his authority visible even in the way he sat. He had a distance about him since the coronation, a principle he wore like armor. He looked up as she entered, framed by the window where the twilight clung to the glass.
“Ayisha,” he said, not rising. His voice was soft, guarded, as if he didn’t want the corridor hearing their words. “What is it?”
She didn’t sit. She stood, hands clenched at her sides. Her voice was steady but not unshaken. “Have you, have you seen the footage? The masquerade?”
He didn’t flinch. “I saw it.” The words were paper-thin. They did not carry the shock she had expected.
“And, will you do a DNA test?” Her question dropped between them like glass, fragile and sharp.
He looked at her like a man who had been asked to betray his own bedrock. “No,” he said. “Absolutely not.”
Ayisha’s chest constricted. “But…” She reached out, desperate. “Ares, you’re her, the children could be…”
He cut her off with one of those cold, decisive looks he used when a fight was on the line. “Listen to me. Tessa is not my concern. She is not a part of what I protect anymore. She is the reason my parents are…” He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. The history between them was an open wound. “I have no interest in proving anything to anyone.”
Ayisha’s face went white. The words hit like a slap: raw and unvarnished. It explained a lot, the indifference, the decisions, the way he had refused to be dragged into anything resembling compassion. She had come for resolution and found instead a wall.
“But…” she tried.
“No,” Ares said again. He stood now, the movement deliberate, the moral distance between them widening. “I won’t be part of tests or paternity disputes. Not for her. Not ever. I want nothing to do with a woman who killed my parents.”
Ayisha’s jaw trembled. She had come to him not as a supplicant but as someone trying to protect children she had grown fond of. She had hoped he would see it differently. Instead he shut his door on the possibility of a clean answer.
She straightened, swallowed the sting forming in her throat, and left with the quiet dignity of someone who had been refused but not broken. Outside, the corridor swallowed her and the city hummed on, uncaring.
When Richard walked away from Tessa’s door, the evening folded into itself like a page half turned. He carried the echo of his failed attempt like a stone in his pocket. Ethan’s bargain, offered like a curse, rolled in his mind like thunder.
People had told him that family could be taken when you needed them most. He had believed that once. Tonight the notion was raw and jagged and impossible.
Tessa sat on her floor in the dark, hands clenched, the name Richard had called to her clattering around her skull like a coin that wouldn’t land.
She had been a soldier of survival for so long that the notion of being someone’s sister now felt like a luxury she had not earned. She had built herself from small, hard things. Her life was an atlas of closed doors and quiet rescues. A brother’s sudden claim did not alter the map.
Across the city, Ethan laughed once more in the humid night, sure of his bargains. He did not know the stubbornness that simmered like a coal in Richard’s chest. He did not know how fiercely people sometimes clawed at chance when it promised redemption.
And Ares sat in his office, the weight of his decisions pressing down like winter, certain that he would not give Tessa the chance to rewrite what he had lost. He had stories he burned into his bones, and they did not include her.
In the dark, Tessa rolled onto her back and let the ceiling watch over her like an uncaring witness. She had survived worse. She would survive this. But she would do it on her own terms, no family dinners, no shared childhood recollections, no sudden salvations.
Outside, the city moved on, full of the small cruelties and minute mercies of its daily life. Inside the house the night gathered close, and Tessa held herself against it like a wom
an holding a fragile thing she was determined not to give away.