The den was warm, soft-lit, serene, and built for quiet nights and safety, but nothing felt safe or silent anymore.
Alaric entered the room and closed the door behind him, quietly.
I looked at him; at the man I married and trusted. The man who wasn’t supposed to turn into every story my mother had whispered as warnings.
His shirt was no longer undone at the collar, but his hair was slightly disordered in the way a man tries to fix himself too quickly.
Or maybe that was from Coraline and I missed it.
My stomach twisted at the thought. My mother’s voice came for me then, the way it always did when I least wanted it—low and certain and merciless. “You knew better, foolish girl.”My mother had taken careful inventory of every weakness, each unguarded moment, and every soft place in me, cataloging eachof them so she could return to strip me of them later, after she learned her craft on herself first.
It wasn’t only the cheating. It was that it felt like a forgery—like someone had taken everything I knew of him and made a crude copy, close enough to recognize but wrong in every way that mattered. It didn’t belong to the life we had built.
Or so I thought.
My voice still wouldn’t come, so my thoughts spilled in the silence instead.
This is the man who held my hair back when I was sick in the early months of pregnancy. Later his hand steady over mine during labor. The man who planned impromptu trips and gave me small gifts that actually meant something versus trinkets bought just because of wealth. How we often simply sat together in peaceful silence, his arms around me.
The man who whispered Greek endearments into my skin when he thought I was asleep. Who guarded my life with an obsession the Dominion praised. So possessive he barely tolerated men from our extended family close to me, let alone a stranger.
How could he do this?
I thought I knew heartbreak. I had been through grief before—the cold, clean kind that leaves you hollowed out. I had survived things that should have broken me. This was different. Nothing hadeverfelt like this, as if something inside my chest had literally cracked and pain was burrowing its way into every place I had ever quietly reinforced and ripping it apart.
I straightened, refusing to let him see how utterly ruined I felt inside.
I wasn’t my mother who would have screamed and raged until my father struck her down—always learning the hard way. I wasn’t the women the Dominion whispered about behind closed doors who found themselves in this position andstillbeggedtheir husbands to choose them when they were the ones who should have been begging.
Alaric studied my face, and something in his expression made the crack widen.
His eyes traced my features as if preparing for a blow, and the fleeting hint of anguish tightening his expression only stoked the flames of my fury. What right did he have to pain when my heart was the one torn open?
Alaric never rushed his words. Never let emotion push him into speaking before he chose to. Which meant the silence stretching between us right now was deliberate and that hurt more than anything Coraline had done. He took another step toward me—slow, testing, like approaching a cornered animal he wasn’t sure would bite or break.
The words clawed out of me. “Why?”
“Selene...” His voice had lost its edge, but not its weight, my name hanging between us like a confession.
“You can’t tell mewhy? Then how about you tell me how long this has been going on? How many more are there?”
“Sel, I have never cheated on you. Not so much as a graze of my hand against another woman.”
His eyes locked onto mine—icy blue, burning cold, unwavering as a predator’s. “I need to tell you first that Coraline is nothing to me. She’s not a lover. Not close to a mistress. Not even a temptation. She’s a means to an end.Was.”
I wanted to believe him, but I knew Dominion wives who had stood exactly where I did now, broken by a man's excuses and reassurances, learning to swallow betrayal like medicine. Mistresses were allowed; they were simply meant to be discreet. Other times women were precisely what he was stating Coraline was.
A means to an end.
I hated that I understood this better than I wanted to—that to my father, the man we’d both orbited for so long like moons trapped in a cruel gravity, that’s what I was too. Just another tool in his arsenal, something to be wielded when useful, and then discarded.
Somehow, impossibly, she’d been kept in his orbit longer than I had, his own daughter. I didn’t envy her hell—a life spent as my father’s favorite instrument; her body and mind bent to his will.
I thought I’d made peace with my escape from him, had convinced myself the scars had finally healed over.
Now she’d gotten my husband too, had placed her dirty fucking mouth on what was mine, and the old wounds gaped open, raw and bleeding. I didn’t understand how this poison had seeped back into my life carrying the same rot.
“She’s gone now. I was putting an end to it when you walked in,” he continued when I didn’t say anything.
