CHAPTER 426: RELIEF

KAEL

The silence in the suite after the door closed behind Ash and Sylas was not an absence of sound, but a presence. It was a heavy, living thing that pressed in on my eardrums, thick with the ghosts of their warnings and the terrifying reality of what was to come.

I stood at the window, my knuckles white where they gripped the sill, staring down at the city without seeing it. My mind was a relentless reel, playing and replaying the sound of Aria’s voice as she spoke... that fragile, trembling thread of steel as she’d agreed to meet the woman who had tried to annihilate us.

Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes until she walked into a room and sat across from a predator.

The soft click of the bathroom door opening behind me was a gunshot in the quiet. I heard her footsteps, the whisper of fabric as she gathered her things to shower.

My gaze drifted from the skyline to the chair in the corner, to the clothes she had discarded there. The simple, worn jeans and the soft sweater she’d been wearing when she appeared in the hospital hallway... a miracle I still couldn’t fully believe.

A compulsion, raw and instinctual, pulled me across the room. I didn’t think. I just reached out and gathered the fabric in my hands.

It was soft, worn from use. And it held her scent.

Not perfume. Just her. The essential, undeniable truth of her.

It broke me.

I crushed the material to my face, inhaling deeply, my eyes squeezing shut as the reality of it... the sheer, staggering relief... slammed into me with the force of a physical blow. A shudder wracked my entire frame. She was here. Not a phantom of my grief, not a hallucination born of sleepless nights and a breaking mind. Her scent was on my hands, in my lungs. Aria was back.

And the vow solidified in my soul, a cold, hard diamond of certainty: I was never letting her go again. I would burn the world to cinders before I allowed her to slip from my grasp. It was selfish. It was monstrous. It was the only truth I had left.

With hands that were suddenly, surprisingly steady, I folded the clothes. A deliberate, reverent ritual. I placed them on the dresser, a monument to her return.

Then, the other face intruded. My father’s. Pale and waxy amidst a nest of tubes and wires. The doctor’s placating voice: mechanical failure.

I didn’t believe in coincidences. I believed in ambition. I believed in my brother.

I pulled out my phone, my thumb finding the contact without conscious thought.

Steven Chen. A ghost from a past life. A man who knew how to make other ghosts talk.

He answered on the second ring, his voice a low, calm river in my chaos. "Mr. Roman. It’s been a while."

"I need you to look into something." No greeting. No preamble. "My father’s plane crash. The report says mechanical failure."

"But you don’t believe that." A statement, not a question.

"No." The word was a slab of granite.

A pause. I could feel him assembling the pieces, calculating the fallout. "You think it was sabotage."

"I think someone wanted a crown, and my father’s head was in the way. I need to know who."

"The authorities are already—"

"I don’t trust the authorities," I cut him off, my voice sharp. "Not when Roman money can line pockets and silence tongues. I need someone outside. Someone who can’t be bought or frightened."

"You’re talking about your brother."

"I’m talking about the person responsible. Andrew is the most logical place to start."

Another silence, this one heavier. "This kind of inquiry... it will be expensive. And it will be dangerous."

"I don’t give a damn about the cost. And danger is a Roman heirloom. Will you do it?"

"Seventy-two hours. I’ll have a preliminary report. A full dissection will take longer, but I’ll know in three days if there are teeth marks on the wreckage."

"Good. The report comes only to me. No one else."

"Understood."

The call ended just as the bathroom door opened again.

I turned.

And the world stopped.

Aria stood there, haloed in the steam from the shower. Her hair, dark and wet, clung to her neck and shoulders in slick waves. A small, white towel was wrapped around her body, a flimsy barrier that did nothing to hide the delicate lines of her collarbones, the gentle swell of her breasts, the incredible, heartbreaking familiarity of her.

The reality of her presence detonated inside me all over again.

Here. Real. Mine.

A tsunami of emotion... relief so profound it was a pain, a love so fierce it was a violence, a lust so raw it was a need, a hurt so deep it was a canyon, a possession so absolute it was a madness, and a joy so blinding it threatened to scorch me from the inside out.

She saw the storm in my eyes. Her golden gaze widened, her lips parting on a silent question. Are you okay?

Because I knew she was drowning in her own guilt. She believed this was all her fault.

And a part of me, the better part, wanted to gather that guilt and hurl it into the sun. To tell her till she got sick of it that I would walk through this fire a thousand times if it led me back to her.

But the wounded, feral part of me, the part she had left bleeding and alone, wanted her to feel the echo of that pain. Just for a second. Just enough to know the shape of the hole she’d carved in me.

Before she could speak, I crossed the room and lifted her into my arms.

"Kael!" Her hands flew to my shoulders, her body a light, perfect weight against me. "What are you—"

"What do you want to eat?" I asked, my voice a low growl, cutting off her protest.

"I—you don’t need to worry about me. You have so much—"

"That’s bullshit," I said, carrying her to the bed. "And you know it."

I set her down on the edge, and the movement loosened the towel.

We both froze.

The fabric had slipped, revealing the smooth, pale curve of her breast, a landscape I had traced in my dreams until the memory had become a torture.

Her hand fluttered up to cover herself, her mouth opening in a protest I swallowed whole.