CHAPTER 423: GRATITUDE AND GUILT

ARIA

My fingers dug into Kael’s back, clutching at the fabric of his shirt like it was the only thing tethering me to this world. If he let go, I would dissolve.

I would become nothing more than the static noise in my own head, a permanent silence. His arms encircled me, not just an embrace but a containment field for my splintering self. It was a shelter I had burned down and now begged to hide within.

The guilt was not an emotion. It was a physical substance, thick and black, pouring into my lungs and hardening. Each breath was a struggle against its weight. My ribs were a cage too small for the animal grief thrashing inside.

I was so grateful to be held by him it was a kind of agony. To feel the solid, living proof of him under my hands, to press my ear to his chest and hear the steady, reliable drum of his heart. It was a mercy I had forfeited.

And the guilt ate the gratitude alive.

I had left him. I had hurt him. I had been so blind.

His pain had a history, a landscape of wounds I had never bothered to map.

I had to look at him. I pulled back just enough, my hands moving to his shoulders, needing to anchor myself in the reality of his face. The exhaustion there was monumental, carved into the skin beneath his eyes, a fatigue that sleep could never touch. But when his gaze found mine, it softened. That tenderness was the final, killing blow.

"Ash showed me," I whispered, the words scraping my throat raw. "Everything. About Sarah. What she did to the others. To Cain."

Kael’s jaw flexed, a minute, controlled spasm that sent a jolt of nausea through me.

"But she didn’t tell me what Sarah did to you." My voice shrunk to a thread of sound. "She said... that had to come from you."

And there it was. A fracture in his composure, so fast I would have missed it if I weren’t memorizing him. A shadow of something violated, something shamed, flashing behind his eyes before he could lock it away.

The dreadful suspicion I had been smothering in my own heart suddenly roared to life, stealing the air from my lungs.

Kael was silent. The quiet between us was a living, painful entity.

His hands on my waist tightened, a faint, bracing pressure.

He drew a breath that sounded like it cut him on the way in.

"The details..." he began, his voice graveled and distant. "They are blurry. It started that night. The anniversary of Ivan’s death."

My heart stalled in my chest.

"I saw a video." His tone went dead, hollow. "Of you. And Sylas. Kissing."

The world tilted. A wave of scorching shame and horror washed through me, so potent I felt dizzy.

"I went to find you," he continued, the words dragging. "You were gone. So I went somewhere else. Anywhere else."

I could hear it now... the bottomless loneliness, the shattering heartbreak I had caused.

"I drank." A simple, devastating sentence. "Far too much."

"Kael—" I tried to stop him, to spare him, but he was lost in the remembering.

"Sarah found me." His voice didn’t just falter; it broke, a small, sharp sound like a bone snapping. He was stepping back into a room he never wanted to enter again. "She took me to the penthouse. I could barely stand. Couldn’t keep my eyes open."

An ice-cold dread began to creep through my veins.

"She gave me water." He swallowed hard. "Said it would help."

His next inhale was a ragged tear.

"I drank it."

The silence that followed was absolute, a vacuum waiting to be filled with a horror I could already feel coming.

"But..." he tried.

His mouth worked, no sound emerging. The muscles in his throat corded, fighting the truth.

When the words finally came, they were stripped bare, whispered into the space between our mouths.

"She drugged me." His voice shattered on the second word. "And then she... she climbed on top of me."

Something inside of me broke. Not my heart. Something deeper. The very foundation of who I was gave way. My mind went blank and white with the force of it.

Because in that instant, I understood everything. The haunted vacancy in his eyes at the hospital. The way he’d flinch from a sudden touch. The profound, isolating shame that had wrapped around him like a shroud. A man of immense physical control, rendered helpless. A man of fierce pride, stripped of his dignity.

He had endured that. Alone. And I had been the catalyst.

"I didn’t know where I was," he whispered, and his voice was so empty it was terrifying. "I couldn’t move. I couldn’t... think. It was all thick and slow. I remember trying to push her off. My body wouldn’t... it wouldn’t work." He stopped,the sentence dying in a wave of remembered paralysis.

The air between us was grief, made solid.

"I kept coming back," he continued, each word a struggle. "Waking up in flashes. And every time... she was still there. Still—" He drove the heel of his hand against his closed eye,a brutal, punishing gesture. Like he was trying to scrub the memory out physically.

"The next morning... I didn’t know the person in the mirror. I thought... I thought maybe it was what I deserved. For everything I’ve done."

A sound tore from me, a choked, wounded thing. My chest felt like it was caving in, a sharp, tearing pain. "You didn’t," I gasped. "You didn’t deserve that."

He shook his head, a tiny, broken movement that was more devastating than any shout.

"I did," he said, his voice flat with a final, soul-crushing acceptance. "I thought the universe was just collecting a debt."

That broke me.

Because Kael lived his life expecting punishment. He saw love as a temporary reprieve, not a permanent state. And in his darkest moment, he believed the violation was just the world balancing its scales.