Healed by My Second Chance

Chapter 13 — Kane

The save-the-dates went out on a Tuesday.

I remember because I approved the final guest list between two other meetings, barely glancing at the names before initialing the bottom. It wasn’t until Roman mentioned it in passing three days later that I registered what I had actually approved.

Three hundred and forty people were coming to watch me marry a woman with whom I had exchanged perhaps two hundred words since the night I ended things in a storage room.

The wedding itself was still almost a year away, scheduled for a date on which the two families’ calendars had finally managed to agree. But the machinery was already grinding into motion regardless.

The guest list told its own story, if I had bothered to read it closely.

Business partners. Council members. Two senators. A handful of pack alphas from territories that had never once sent a personal note of congratulations in their lives.

No one on that list was coming because they cared whether Lilith and I were happy. They were coming because weddings were where alliances became official, where the right people were seen standing beside other people of equal importance.

Somehow, my own marriage had become another line item on that list.

I didn’t ask where Melody had gone.

That was the bargain I made with myself: no asking, no checking, and no allowing my curiosity to disguise itself as concern.

I kept that bargain for exactly nine days.

Then I broke it, telling myself it was merely due diligence, that I was making sure a former employee hadn’t left owing the company anything.

It was a thin excuse. I knew that even as I typed her name into the search field and waited for the results.

She had quit.

There was no forwarding address on file.

That was everything I found during the first search, and it was enough to make me stop looking.

At least on paper.

The rest came later, weeks afterward, in fragments I hadn’t gone searching for.

Priya, the server, had requested two weeks off beginning the day after Melody’s final shift. When she returned, something about her had changed. She was quieter and became sharper around the edges whenever my name came up in conversation near her—which apparently still happened more often than either of us would have preferred.

I learned that secondhand from a manager who had no idea what he was reporting when he mentioned it during an unrelated meeting about staffing.

I told myself that was the end of it.

I believed that for about as long as I had believed I wasn’t going back down to the kitchen.

A few months after the save-the-dates went out, Lilith came to my office. That alone should have told me something.

She never visited my office. She avoided anywhere I actually worked whenever possible.

She stood in the doorway wearing a coat that cost more than most people’s cars. Her arms were crossed, and her weight rested on one hip in the particular stance she adopted when she had already rehearsed a conversation twice during the drive over.

She looked at me as though I were a problem she had already half solved.

“We need to discuss the prenup,” she said. “My lawyer has some additions.”

“What kind of additions?”

“The kind that protect me if this marriage turns out to be exactly as loveless as it currently looks.”

She said it without malice, the way someone might point out a scheduling conflict.

“I’m not going to pretend either of us is walking into this starry-eyed, Kane. Let’s just be efficient about it.”

Her honesty should have relieved me.

Instead, something cold settled in my chest as I heard our arrangement described in language that stripped away every excuse I had given myself about duty, legacy, and doing right by three territories that didn’t care whether I was happy, only whether I remained useful.

“Fine,” I said. “Send the additions to my lawyer.”

Lilith didn’t leave immediately.

She remained in the doorway for another moment, studying me with a small, tired smile that held no warmth at all.

“You know, for a man who got everything he was supposed to want,” she said, “you don’t look like it agrees with you.”

She left before I could answer.

That was probably for the best because I didn’t have an answer.

I worked late that night, as I had begun doing most nights since the storage room. I told myself the merger, the wedding arrangements, and the Kastellan territory dispute were keeping me there. The dispute continued to escalate, regardless of how many concessions the council offered.

Roman didn’t find me standing at the window this time.

He caught me in the parking garage as I headed toward a car I had no real destination for. He fell into step beside me without asking whether he was welcome.

“Lilith wants a stricter prenup,” I said because the silence needed to be filled with something.

“Smart woman.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant.”

Roman kept pace beside me, watching me from the side with the same patient exhaustion he had worn for months, ever since the night he found the Dakelund property records and I told him to close the account.

“You want me to tell you it’s not too late,” he continued. “That you could still call this whole thing off, track down the girl, and do something that actually resembles courage for once in your life.”

“Could I?”

“Sure. You could burn the alliance to the ground, give Kastellan an opening that three generations of your family worked to close, and go looking for a woman who might not even want to see you again after what you said to her.”

He spoke evenly, without judgment, laying out the facts.

“Is that actually what you want me to tell you? Because I will if it’s true. I just don’t think it is.”

I didn’t answer.

The silence said enough, and we both knew it.

“You made your choice a long time ago, Kane. You’re just spending a great deal of energy pretending you haven’t finished making it.”

Roman stopped walking. His hands remained in his pockets as he watched me the way someone watched a man about to make a decision they already knew he would regret.

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think this marriage is going to fix whatever this is, whenever it actually happens. I think it’s only going to give it somewhere quieter to live.”

He didn’t wait for a response.

Roman turned and headed back toward the elevator, leaving me alone in the garage with a car I still had nowhere to drive.

I stood there long after his footsteps faded, my keys in my hand.

I thought about a woman who might have been three states away, or ten, or somewhere I had made sure I would never have a reason to discover.

I thought about the mark on her collarbone that I had seen for only half a second. It might still have been there, for all I knew, or it might already have been fading the way the rest of it was supposed to.

I wondered whether she had told anyone what I said to her or whether she carried it the way I imagined I would have—privately, like a wound whose shape you learned to hide rather than one you ever allowed to heal.

I told myself I had made my choice.

I repeated it until it began to sound true.

That was its own kind of surrender, quieter than the first and somehow worse.