Chapter 208 A Willing One

Chapter 208 A Willing One
Chapter 208: A Willing One 

Lizzie 

Breakfast was like a loaded gun left on the table.

The dining hall felt wrong the moment I stepped into it. Too quiet. Too careful. The kind of quiet that meant everyone had woken up carrying something sharp and no one wanted to be the first to bleed. 

It didn't take long to figure out that we all woke up on the wrong side of the bed. 

Lauren and Quentin were seated today, which was also another point to take into consideration. Their presence shifted the air, as if the house had decided the usual audience was not enough for whatever was about to unfold.

The maids had prepared a full spread—eggs, fruit, warm bread, the kind of presentation they always did when they tried to pretend that this family was normal. 

No one was actually eating like it. Forks scraped. Knives clicked. The sounds were small and loud at the same time. 

Only Ryan looked genuinely pleased with the morning, that little half-smile of his suggested he was either oblivious or entertained by the undercurrent. 

Randall’s chair was empty. That, at least, was a mercy.

Reese had woken already burning. 

Last night he had let the anger settle. This morning it was back, fully formed, sitting behind his eyes. A glass of whiskey stood beside his plate. 

He had already sent the maid for a refill twice. He was not eating. He was drinking the way men drank when the alternative was putting their hands on someone.

Charlotte kept glancing at him. River too. Their concern was clear but useless. Ramsey was present in body only, trying so hard to shrink that I almost felt sorry for him. 

The guilt from the videos still clung to him. Every time someone shifted in a chair he flinched like the sound might be an accusation. Riley looked like she would have preferred any other circle of hell to this table. 

And Reginald—Reginald ate with the calm of a man who had long ago decided other people’s discomfort was just… seasoning.

I slid my hand under the table and rested it on Reese’s thigh. A reminder. Roman was supposed to be here already. Whatever was holding him, it needed to end soon.

“The food isn’t to your liking, Zachary?” Reginald asked without looking up. “You haven't touched your food.”

Reese’s grip on the glass tightened. He swirled the amber liquid once. “No. I’d rather drink.”

Reginald glanced at him the way a man glances at a child testing boundaries. “Good choice.” Then he returned to his plate as if the conversation had never been worth having.

Reese took another sip. “Your boy, Randall. He’s not joining us?”

Ramsey made a strangled sound and dissolved into a fit of coughing so violent that Rosalie thrust a glass of water at him while Riley thumped his back. 

Across the room Bella stood pale and still, head bowed, hands clasped in front of her apron. The sight of her made my fingers curl. 

She had been in our room. She had handled the flowers. She had moved through our private space. She was a part of it. My palm itched with the desire to leave a mark on her face.

“Randall is busy searching for—” Reginald began.

The doors opened.

Randall walked in, and the entire hall seemed to hold its breath. Every pair of eyes found him at once. It was not subtle.

Did they all know? Why were they looking at him?

He dropped into his chair looking irritated, a faint crease between his brows, something unfinished still chasing him. Bella was at his side in an instant, leaning closer than necessary as she set his plate down. The intimacy of it turned my stomach.

“Good morning,” Randall said to the table at large, to no one in particular.

He began eating. Reese refilled his glass without looking away from him. The rise and fall of my husband’s chest had gone dangerous.

Randall pointed his fork toward Ryan. “I’m missing a flash drive. It's an important one. Did you see it?”

Ryan stared at him like the question itself was evidence of his madness. “No. I don’t know what you’re talking about—”

Reese’s free hand came down on the table hard enough to make every piece of cutlery jump.

The sound cracked through the hall.

“Why did you do it?” Reese’s voice was almost calm. The kind of calm that lived one breath away from violence. He was looking straight at Randall. “You could have had anyone. Why my wife?”

Randall’s expression shifted into something practiced and actually very dismissive. “Your wife?” A short scoff. “What exactly is she claiming I did this time?”

The smugness in his tone made heat flood the back of my neck. He was performing innocence for an audience, and he was enjoying the performance.

Reese laughed under his breath. He kept swirling the whiskey. Charlotte’s hand found his forearm in an attempt to calm him. It was not going to be enough. I could feel the break coming the way you feel weather change in your bones.

“You don’t know what I’m talking about, Randall?”

Randall actually laughed, sounding very much unbothered. “I don’t know what story she’s told you, but the truth is I didn’t—”

The glass left Reese’s hand before the sentence finished.

It crossed the space between them in a hard, glittering arc and shattered against the side of Randall’s head. 

Crystal exploded. Blood followed immediately, bright and fast, running down from his hairline into his eye and onto the collar of his shirt. 

Randall’s chair scraped backward as he surged up with a raw shout, one hand clapped to the wound. “Reese—what the fuck?!”

A scream cut through the hall. Riley or River or Rosalie—someone’s voice high and startled. 

Reginald had stopped eating. He watched the blood with the detached interest of a man observing an experiment.

Reese’s breathing had gone audible. Heavy. Controlled only by force of will that was already failing.

“Zachary.” Reginald’s voice was still measured. “What is going on?”

He got no answer. Only the sound of my husband rising.

Randall was still on his feet, grabbing at napkins, pressing white linen to the cut while red bloomed through it. 

Reese was already moving. He slammed both palms flat on the table, leaning forward like a man about to climb over it.

“You don’t know?” The volume climbed. “You put cameras in my room. You watched my wife undress. And you sit there and tell me you don’t know what you did?” 

Gasps rippled outward. Alex’s voice cut through them, sharp with clear revulsion. “Jesus Christ. Randall. What the fuck, bro?” 

Reginald did not flinch. Did not look surprised. He simply observed, as if the violence unfolding between his sons was a matter of internal housekeeping.

The next moment collapsed into pure chaotic motion. Everything happened too fast. 

Reese launched across the table. Plates and glasses and half-eaten breakfast went flying in a chaotic scatter of porcelain and food. 

He hit Randall with his full weight and they went down hard onto the floor between the chairs. The impact knocked the air out of the room. 

Then the sound changed. We all began to hear the sound of fists on flesh, the wet, brutal rhythm of someone being beaten without restraint.

“You don’t know what I’m talking about?” Reese’s voice cracked open with every punch. “You watched her shower! You fucking dared—”

Rosalie’s scream was the first coherent one. “Reese, stop! Let him go! Let my brother go!”

Reese’s head snapped toward her, one fist still raised. Blood from Randall’s face had already marked his knuckles. “Shut the fuck up before I knock your teeth out.”

Rosalie recoiled as if he had actually struck her, both hands flying to her mouth. 

The table had become a wreckage of shock. No one seemed to know whether to intervene or freeze. Reginald remained seated, expression unchanged, watching his bloodline tear itself open in real time. 

“You put your eyes on my wife,” Reese snarled, and the next blow landed with a sickening finality. “Maybe I should take them.” 

I saw Bella then. 

She had drifted a few steps from the chaos, face bloodless, body angled as if she might slip out of the room unnoticed. 

The same girl who had carried flowers into our bedroom at one in the morning. The same hands that had almost certainly placed whatever device had stolen our privacy. She was an instrument. A willing one.

Something in me that had been holding steady since the night before finally snapped.

The violation. The tears I could not stop. The crawling sense that my body had been made into content. All of it funneled into a single, clean point of fury with her name on it.

I was out of my chair before Charlotte’s voice even reached me. “Lizzie—wait—”

I did not wait.

The dining hall had become noise and blood and the sound of Reese’s fists. I walked straight through it toward Bella, every step sharpening the certainty that she did not get to stand there looking afraid after helping make me feel uncomfortable in my own body. 

She saw me coming. Her eyes widened. She took one backward step and then another, but the wall was behind her and the exits were suddenly very far away.

“You helped him,” I said. My voice did not sound like my own. “You walked into our room. You touched the vase. You made it possible.”

Bella’s mouth opened. No sound came out.

I closed the last of the distance. Bella’s back hit the wall.

I raised my hand.