Chapter 114 Old Wounds
Kane stepped into the lobby.
Victoria Blackstone stood in the center of the marble floor like she owned it.
She was dressed in a tailored cream wool coat that cinched tightly at the waist, the fabric structured and immaculate. Beneath it, a fitted black dress disappeared into knee-high boots, sharp and deliberate. Her blonde hair fell in polished waves over one shoulder, makeup flawless, expression unreadable.
She didn’t look nervous.She didn’t look uncertain. She looked amused.
The kind of amusement that came from someone who had walked into a room knowing they held the one thing nobody else in it was prepared for.
“Kane,” she said smoothly.
He stopped several feet away from her. Close enough to strike. Far enough to remain deliberate.
He took her in without making it obvious. She looked composed. Put together. Like the last two months had been a minor inconvenience rather than a disappearance.
“You seem to have a death wish,” he said evenly, “because that seems to be the only reasonable explanation as to why on earth you would step foot here ever again.”
She smiled faintly.
“You look well,” she said. “Considering.”
The guards shifted subtly behind the desk. Kane didn’t look at them. His eyes stayed on her.
“I’m only going to say this once,” he said. “You have exactly thirty seconds before I have you escorted off my property.”
Victoria let out a soft, almost nostalgic laugh. It was the kind of laugh that belonged to someone who found other people’s patience genuinely entertaining.
“Straight to threats. I suppose some things never change.”
“What did you expect huh, Victoria?” Kane said flatly. “That I would welcome you with open arms after you tried to kill me?”
Her eyes glinted mischievously. “And you humiliated me in front of an entire city.” She flipped her hair with a casualness that was entirely performed. “If you ask me, we’re even.”
“Even,” Kane repeated. The word came out with something close to disbelief. “You helped your father weaponize a disease against my pack. You stood next to him and said nothing while my people suffered. You poisoned me when I exposed you for the fraud you are. And you think we are even?”
“I think it’s a start,” she said pleasantly.
She crossed the floor toward him slowly. Unhurried. Heels striking marble in a rhythm that echoed through the quiet lobby. She stopped at a distance that was deliberately too close for a conversation between enemies.
“I, however, came to offer you something,” she said. “Consider it a courtesy. For old times’ sake.”
“You don’t have old times’ sake with me anymore,” Kane said. “You burned that.”
Something moved across her face. Fast. Gone before it fully formed.
She recovered without missing a beat.
“Leave Seattle,” she said. The pleasantness dropped out of her voice entirely. What replaced it was clean and cold and completely serious. “Pack up whatever you’ve built here. Take your people. Take your pack. Take your…” she paused, just a fraction, “pathetic little omega of a mate, And go. This war is bigger than you. My father is not coming to warn you. By the time he arrives, the window to leave quietly will already be closed.”
“So he sent you,” Kane said.
“He doesn’t know I’m here,” she said. “This is mine. Not his.”
“Why.”
She looked at him directly. “Because despite everything, I’m not without a conscience. Consider yourself warned.”
Kane studied her for a long moment and burst out laughing. “Was that warning supposed to scare me? How about you tell your precious father to come and face me. Instead of sending his daughter because he thinks I still have a soft spot for her.”
Hurt flashed across her face but she pushed past it quickly.
“You don’t leave,” she said, her voice sharpening again, “and you will regret it. I don’t use that word loosely. You know me well enough to know that.”
“I know you well enough,” Kane said, “to know that you didn’t drive here out of conscience. So tell me what you actually came for.”
Victoria looked at him. Really looked at him. The performance dropped by a fraction, just enough to let something through that she clearly hadn’t intended.
“You’re so fast to act like the victim. When in fact it’s you who made me this way,” she said, and her voice was slightly less steady than it had been for the entire conversation, “ I spent years believing in something. In us. In what I thought we were building.” She stopped. Her jaw tightened. “And you threw it away like it was nothing. Like I was nothing. In front of everyone.”
The lobby was very quiet.
For one beat, she looked exactly like what she was underneath all of it. A woman who had loved someone and had not recovered from what he did with that.
Then she blinked.
And it was gone.
Her chin lifted. Her shoulders settled. The coldness came back twice as hard, the way it always did when someone was compensating for having shown too much.
“But that’s neither here nor there,” she said smoothly. “What’s done is done.”
Kane said nothing.
Her expression didn’t crack this time. She had locked it down completely. “I hope she’s worth the trouble that’s coming.”
“Don’t,” Kane said. His voice dropped. “You don’t say her name. You don’t speak about her. That’s the only warning I give you.”
Victoria tilted her head. Something shifted in her expression. Slow and deliberate.
“Actually,” she said. “I’ve said what I came to say. Consider us even.”
She turned.
Her heels struck marble once, twice, and she reached for the lapels of her coat, pulling it closed as she moved toward the door.
“Victoria.”
She didn’t stop.
“Victoria.”
Kane crossed the floor in three strides and his hand closed around her arm.
She spun on him immediately, fury rising in her face. “I already told you…”
But the momentum of her turning had caught the coat. The fabric swung open.
And Kane went completely still.
His hand dropped from her arm.
His eyes were on her midsection. The fitted dress beneath the coat. The small but unmistakable curve that hadn’t been there two months ago.
The lobby was silent.
Victoria’s fury evaporated. Something else replaced it. Something she hadn’t prepared for. Her hands moved to close the coat and she took a step back.
“Are you pregnant?”
Kane’s voice came out differently than anything he had said in the entire conversation. Not cold. Not controlled.
Just quiet.
Victoria said nothing. Her jaw was tight. Her eyes moved to somewhere past his shoulder, away from his face, away from the question sitting between them.
“Victoria.” His voice dropped further. “Look at me.”
She didn’t.
And that was answer enough.
The lobby doors opened.
Neither of them moved.
Aria stepped inside.
She read the room in under a second. Kane standing in the middle of the floor. Victoria two steps away from him, coat pulled tight around her, jaw set, eyes bright with something she was refusing to let fall.
Aria’s gaze dropped.
The coat had not closed completely.
She saw what Kane had seen.
The silence that followed was the kind that didn’t need words to fill it.
Victoria finally looked up.
Her eyes found Aria’s and she held them without flinching. Without apology. The mask was back in place, harder than ever, sealed shut over everything that had just been visible.
“Well,” she said quietly. “Now you both know.”
She pulled her coat closed, turned, and walked out.
The lobby doors swung shut behind her.
Kane stood exactly where he was.
He didn’t look at Aria.
Aria didn’t look at him.
And the space between them, which had never felt like distance before, felt very wide.