Chapter 148 Chapter One hundred and forty-seven
ARA
I went after Thayne, yelled his name thrice, but he kept walking.
He was heading for the elevator with ong, furious strides.
Me? I was waddling like a pregnant penguin, breathing heavily as I tried to catch up with him.
“Thayne, stop!”
He didn’t.
If anything, he moved faster, stabbing the elevator button like it had personally offended him.
The doors slid open immediately, waiting. Just like his anger had been waiting for years.
“If you truly love and respect me as your wife,” I said, my voice steady despite the tremor inside me, “turn around and listen to me.”
That did it. He froze. Thank fucking goodness. I was worried I was going to have to hurl my shoe at the back of his head.
The elevator stood open behind him, and I hoped to God he wouldn't step inside.
Slowly, he turned around. And the sight of him almost undid me.
The broken look in his eyes shattered something inside my chest.
Thayne, my controlled, impenetrable, always-composed husband, had tears gathering along his lashes.
He looked like a man holding back an explosion.
“Thayne,” I said softly, stepping closer. “You deserve to be angry. Your feelings are valid.”
“I watched her spiral for years,” he said hoarsely. “I watched her starve herself. Cut herself. Fade in front of me and I couldn’t do anything.”
Each word sounded like it cost him blood.
“I know,” I whispered.
“She never told any of us,” he continued, his voice rising now. “Not me. Not even Ursula. She couldn’t think to say something? To trust me with it?”
I bit my lower lip. “Actually,” I said carefully, “she did.”
Thayne blinked. Confusion cut through the rage.
“What?”
“She told Ursula.”
His expression shifted, anger giving way to something colder.
“Ursula knew?” he asked. Each word was clipped.
“Yes.”
“She trusted Ursula but she couldn't trust me? Me who was there the whole time?!” He sounded angry enough to rip something apart, and I prayed inwardly the muscle ticking in his jaw didn't mean he was about to do it.
“It's not like that. Ursula found your mother reading one day and figured out she wasn't mentally sick. She kept the secret and used it.” I explained, fiddling with my thumbs.
The muscles in his face hardened.
“Used it how?”
“As leverage,” I said. “As insurance. As power.”
For a moment, I thought he might punch the wall.
Instead, he laughed.
“All these years,” he said, running a hand through his hair, pacing once before stopping again, “I thought Ursula just hated my mother because she wasn’t like other women. I thought she was embarrassed by her. I had no clue it was because she knew. She knew all along.”
His laugh was jagged.
“To say I’m frustrated barely scratches the surface of what I’m feeling right now. All my life I’ve been lied to. To my face.”
“I’m sorry,” I said softly. “She’s sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t fix anything!”
The words ricocheted off the hallway walls.
I snapped my mouth shut. He was right. Absolutely right. Sorry didn’t undo childhood memories.
It didn’t unwatch the years he’d spent guarding a mother he thought was lost.
It didn’t unshape the man he had been forced to become too early. All those sacrifices he'd had to pay, signing that stupid contract with his father only to get played dirty in the end.
“I feel like I’ve lived my life wrongly,” he continued, his voice lower now. Rawer. “From the moment I believed she was mad.”
I wanted to cry for him. Nothing would have ever prepared me for the moment Thayne would admit he'd ever done anything wrongly.
“You didn’t live it wrongly,” I said, crossing the distance between us. “You lived it like a hero would.”
He looked at me then. His eyes were rimmed red.
“Why do heroes have to suffer?” he asked softly.
That question…. It wasn’t angry. It was tired. I'd asked myself that question almost everyday since Neil escaped through the window and left my sisters and I at Thayne's mercy.
I swallowed, searching for something worthy of the pain in his voice.
“Because heroes choose to carry what others drop,” I said quietly. “You carried your mother. You carried your family name. You carried betrayal, humiliation, responsibility.”
I placed my hand on his chest.
“You didn’t suffer because you were weak. You suffered because you refused to abandon the people you loved.”
His breathing slowed, but his eyes remained stormy.
“I didn’t protect her,” he whispered. “I thought I was protecting her, but I wasn’t. I was just… reacting.”
“You were a child,” I said firmly. “You weren’t supposed to protect her. She was supposed to protect you.”
The words seemed to hit him then, because he looked away, his jaw flexing as he fought whatever emotion threatened to break through.
“And now?” he asked.
“Now,” I said, holding his gaze, “you get to choose differently. You’re not that helpless boy anymore. You’re a man who knows the truth.”
A beat passed.
“And Ursula?” he asked quietly.
His voice had changed. He sounded less hurt, more calculating. I recognized that shift.
“That,” I replied, “is where the hero stops suffering and starts fighting back.”
The elevator doors slid fully closed behind him.
“Fuck,” he exhaled, a broken laugh escaping him. “I’ve never said this before, but I kind of like that Neil tried to defraud me.”
I blinked. What was it now?
“What?”
“Because if he hadn’t,” he said, his eyes locked on mine, dark and alive with something fierce, “I would never have met you.”
The air shifted. All the anger, all the grief, all the betrayal, it melted into something else. Something dangerously intimate.
He tugged me closer, his hand sliding around my waist first, then higher, his fingers curling at the side of my neck.
His forehead brushed mine for half a second.
Just enough to breathe me in.
Then he crashed his lips onto mine. It wasn’t a gentle or polite kiss. It was a desperate kiss.
Like he needed to feel something real after years of living inside a lie.
I gasped softly against his mouth, my hands fisting into his shirt as he deepened the kiss, pouring everything into it. Frustration, relief, fury, and gratitude.
His thumb pressed lightly beneath my jaw, tilting my face upward as if he wanted to memorize the shape of me.
“You’re the only thing in my life that has ever made chaos worth it,” he murmured against my lips.
The hallway around us disappeared.
“Forgive your mother,” I whispered against his lips.
“I have done that.”
“Then you need to tell her. You need to say it to her face.”
Thayne sighed exaggeratedly.
“We need to tackle your step-father, Neil, together,” he said. “We’ve hit him now.”
“Your mother comes first,” I insisted softly. “She needs to know she is loved. Not in the assumed or implied sense.”
He searched my face, and whatever he found there made him nod once.
“I told you she’d save the day,” Sasha’s hushed whisper floated down the hallway.
We both froze.
“They’re not done,” Stuart’s deep rumble followed.
“Those idiots,” Thayne muttered under his breath.
I giggled despite everything.
The sound of hurried footsteps retreating down the corridor sent me into quiet laughter.
“Unbelievable, those two,” he murmured, but there was warmth in his voice now.
Together, we headed back to where his mother was still waiting for us.