Sold to Bastard Alpha after My Divorce!-Chapter 191

Aria’s POV

I lowered my arm.

And then I just stood there.

For a long moment I couldn’t do anything except breathe. In. Out. In. Out. My legs were shaking. My cut was still bleeding. The room was destroyed—upended furniture, broken glass everywhere, a painting hanging crooked from the wall. And in the middle of it all, Lucian was lying on the floor like a man who’d simply run out of whatever fuel was keeping him going.

Unconscious. Completely still.

I pressed my hand to my chest and waited for my heartbeat to slow down.

It took a while.

Finally I moved. One step, then another, checking the doorway behind me out of habit, making sure he was actually out and not just waiting. But no—Lucian wasn’t moving. His breathing was even. Whatever had taken him over, it had let go. For now.

I exhaled.

Then I heard Selene.

A soft, desperate knock. From somewhere down the corridor.

"Aria?"

Her voice was thin. Barely above a whisper.

"I’m here." I called back loud enough to carry. "It’s okay. He’s down. Don’t open the door yet."

I grabbed a decorative throw from the couch that was still, miraculously, mostly upright. Pressed it against the cut on my leg. Hissed through my teeth. That was going to need looking at later. Later. Right now there were more important things.

I limped into the corridor.

Selene’s door cracked open an inch. One silver eye appeared in the gap.

"Is he—"

"Unconscious," I said. "He’s not going to hurt anyone right now."

The door opened all the way.

Selene looked terrible. Her silver hair was disheveled. She was still in her nightgown, a pale cream thing that had been beautiful this morning and was now wrinkled and damp at the collar from crying. Her hands were shaking against the doorframe.

She took one look at me—my leg, the blood soaking through the fabric, my torn slacks, my overall state—and her eyes filled up immediately.

"Oh God. He hurt you."

"It’s not bad," I said automatically.

"Aria—"

"I’ve had worse." I reached out and took her hand. Cold. She was freezing. "Are you okay? Did he touch you?"

She shook her head. "No. I locked myself in when you told me to. I heard everything but I couldn’t—I couldn’t do anything, I just—" Her voice broke. She pressed her free hand over her mouth.

"Hey." I squeezed her fingers. "It’s over. We’re both okay."

She looked at me like she wasn’t sure she deserved that word from me.

"Come on," I said. "Let’s get him somewhere safer."

---

Between the two of us, it took almost twenty minutes to move Lucian.

Selene wasn’t physically strong enough to do much of the lifting, and I was working with one good leg and two arms that were still slightly shaky from adrenaline. We half-dragged, half-carried him down the corridor and into his bedroom—far enough from the destruction that it felt separate from it. Clean. Quiet.

His room was sparse. Military neat, even, in the way that people get when they’re used to controlling the small things because the big things are already out of control. Plain duvet. Plain walls. A single photograph on the nightstand that I didn’t look at too closely.

We got him onto the bed.

I straightened up. Pressed my hands to my lower back. Breathed.

Selene immediately started tucking the blanket around him. Her hands moved over his hair, smoothing it back from his face. The same gesture she’d probably made a thousand times when he was a child.

I watched her for a moment.

Then I went to the bathroom. Found a washcloth. Ran it under cold water until it was good and soaked. Wrung it out and brought it back.

"Here." I handed it to her.

She looked at it. Then up at me.

I nodded at Lucian’s forehead.

She placed it gently. Like she was handling something fragile.

He didn’t move. Just kept breathing. In. Out. That slow, even rhythm that was the only reassuring thing in the room right now.

I found a chair in the corner and pulled it closer, dropping into it carefully. My leg was really not happy with me. I’d deal with it. Later.

For a few minutes, neither of us said anything.

The room was quiet. The house—what was left of it after Lucian’s rampage—had gone still. Outside the window, afternoon light was starting to turn golden.

"He’s never been this bad before," Selene said finally.

Her voice was so quiet I almost missed it.

"Never?" I looked up at her.

She shook her head. Still watching Lucian’s face. "There have been episodes. Bad ones. When he was going through withdrawal, when he was trying to stop—" She swallowed. "But this. This was different."

I already knew why. But I waited.

"That girl." Selene’s voice changed. Just slightly. Went flatter. Harder. "Serena. She contacted him again."

My stomach dropped about three inches.

"She wanted money." Selene smoothed a nonexistent wrinkle from the blanket. "She told him she needed more of the—" She couldn’t seem to say the word. "She didn’t have enough left. So she wanted him to pay for more."

I didn’t say anything.

Inside, I was doing something very controlled and deliberate with my hands, which involved pressing them flat against my thighs to stop them from clenching.

"When I found out, I told him absolutely not." Selene’s jaw was set. "I told him if he went out that door, I would—I didn’t know what I would do. But I stood in front of it. I told him no." A pause. "That was when he started."

I exhaled through my nose.

I made myself unclench my hands.

My sister knew exactly where to put the knife. She always had.

"I’m sorry," I said. And I meant it, even if the apology felt inadequate. Even if apologizing for Serena was starting to feel like trying to bail out a sinking ship with a teacup.

Selene looked at me.

Then she shook her head.

"Don’t apologize," she said quietly. "You’re not her."

"She’s still my family."

"And Lucian is still mine." She turned back to her son. "But that doesn’t mean I hold you responsible for his choices."

I was quiet for a moment.

"I’ll talk to her again," I said. "I’ll make sure she understands that she can’t keep doing this."

What I didn’t say: I would do more than talk. I would make sure Serena couldn’t reach Lucian again if I had to go to Kael and explain the whole situation. I would figure it out. Because this—whatever this was—couldn’t keep happening to Selene, couldn’t keep happening to Lucian, and couldn’t keep being something I stood on the sidelines of.

But I’d figure out the how later.

Right now there was a different kind of mess to deal with.

I got up. Found the cleaning supplies Selene pointed me toward. And I started putting the house back together.

---

It was slow, methodical work.

The sitting room was the worst. Glass everywhere. Furniture overturned. One of the shelves had been pulled clean off the wall and lay in the middle of the floor like a fallen tree. I swept the glass into a dustpan, righted the furniture, picked up the objects that could be salvaged and moved the ones that couldn’t out of the way. The shelf I couldn’t rehang alone, but I pushed it flat against the wall where it wasn’t a hazard.

Selene tried to help. I kept redirecting her back to Lucian’s room.

"Stay with him," I told her. "In case he wakes up."

She went. Reluctantly. But she went.

I worked through the corridor next. Picked up the shards of the lamp. Righted the hallway table. The damage here was less catastrophic—more evidence of movement than destruction.

By the time I was done, the house wasn’t fixed. But it was livable.

I washed my hands in the kitchen sink and stood there for a moment with the water running over my wrists.

Through the window, Selene’s small garden was bright in the afternoon sun. Ordinary. Peaceful. A pot of herbs on the windowsill. A bird doing something on the fence.

Like none of this had happened.

I turned off the tap.

When I came back to Lucian’s room, Selene was sitting beside the bed in the chair I’d vacated, her hand resting lightly on the edge of the mattress near his arm. She looked exhausted. But calmer. Like having something to sit beside helped.

Lucian was still unconscious. Still breathing steadily. The wet cloth on his forehead had warmed up; I went to the bathroom, ran it under cold water again, wrung it out, and placed it back. Selene watched me do it without saying anything.

I sat on the edge of the bed, not too close. Just present.

"Thank you," Selene said.

"You don’t have to keep saying that."

"I keep meaning it." She looked at her son’s face. "He’s going to be so ashamed when he wakes up."

"He’s going to be okay," I said. "That’s the part that matters."

She was quiet for a moment.

"You should come stay with us," I said. "At least for a little while. Kael’s going to—I mean, we have room, and after what happened today—"

"No." Her voice was soft but absolute.

I stopped.

"I know why you’re asking." She looked at me. "And I know you’re right that it might be safer. But he’s my son." She glanced at Lucian. "Both of them are. I’m not going to leave Lucian alone in this house. Not like this. Not when he needs someone here."

"Selene—"

"I know." She held up a hand. "I know. And I’m not being foolish. But a mother doesn’t abandon her child because he’s struggling." A pause. "Even when the struggle is this bad."

I looked at her. At the lines around her eyes, the set of her mouth. The way she held herself—worn through, but upright.

There was no moving her on this. I could see that clearly.

I nodded.

"Okay," I said. "Then at least—if anything happens. Anything at all, any time of day or night. You call me."

She blinked. Like that surprised her.

"Not Kael first?" she asked.

"Me first," I said. "Kael can’t always pick up. I’ll come."

Something moved across her face. Hard to name. She looked at me the way she might look at someone she was seeing properly for the first time.

Then she reached out and covered my hand with hers.

"Good child," she said quietly. "I said terrible things to you. Weeks ago. In this house." Her fingers tightened around mine. "I said things about your family, about your blood, about who you are. And none of it was fair to you. You and your family—you are not the same." She pressed her lips together. "You are nothing like them. You are kind. You are—" She stopped. Composed herself. "I hope you can forgive an old woman for what she said."

My throat did something it wasn’t supposed to.

I pressed my other hand over hers.

"I understand why you said it," I told her. "And I forgave you a long time ago."

Her eyes filled up.

She squeezed my hand once. Then let go.

We sat in the warm, quiet room. The cloth on Lucian’s forehead. The light turning softer through the curtain. Selene watching her son breathe. Me watching her watch him.

It felt peaceful. Improbably, unreasonably peaceful, given everything.

I was glad I came.

Even with the leg. Even with the terror. Even with Serena’s name still sitting in my chest like a stone.

I was glad I came.

I glanced at the window. The light had shifted more than I realized—that deeper, stretched-out gold of late afternoon.

Then I looked at my watch.

My heart stopped.

3:47.

*Three forty-seven.*

School pickup was at three twenty-five. I was—I was twenty-two minutes late. More. The school had a thirty-minute grace period before they started calling parents, and I was sitting in Selene Blood Crown’s house with a cut on my leg and dried cleaning product on my hands while my daughters were standing outside the school gates wondering where their mother was.

"I have to go." I was already on my feet.