Substitute Bride, Stolen Heart

Chapter 7: What He Doesn't Say

Neither of us spoke on the drive back to the estate.

Killian sat beside me in the back of the car, jaw tight, eyes fixed on the passing city lights like he could burn a hole through the window if he stared hard enough. I watched his hands instead, clenched once on his knee, then deliberately, visibly, forced open again.

"You're angry," I said quietly.

"I'm always angry after seeing my father." His voice was flat, controlled in that way that told me the anger was very much still there, just leashed. "Tonight wasn't different."

"He didn't seem angry with you. Not really."

"That's what makes it worse." Killian finally looked at me. "My father doesn't get angry. He calculates. Tonight he was deciding whether keeping you costs him more than losing the Whitmore merger would. That's not a father worrying about his son's happiness. That's a man running numbers."

"And Selene?"

Something shifted behind his eyes not quite discomfort, but close to it. "Selene doesn't calculate. She just enjoys watching things burn."

The car pulled through the estate gates, gravel crunching under the tires, and neither of us moved to get out right away.

"You should have told me about her," I said. "Before tonight. Before I had to hear it from her mouth in front of your father."

"I know." He exhaled, some of the control slipping. "I didn't think it mattered anymore. She's not part of my life. Hasn't been for years."

"She clearly thinks otherwise."

"She thinks a lot of things that aren't true." His voice hardened. "That doesn't make them my responsibility to fix."

"It does when I'm the one sitting across from her, being measured against a woman I didn't even know existed until an hour ago." I hadn't meant to raise my voice, but it came out sharper than I intended, and I saw something flicker across his face surprise, maybe, that I'd pushed back at all.

He was quiet for a long moment.

"You're right," he said finally. "I should have told you."

I hadn't expected that either. Not an argument, not a deflection just a plain admission, the same steady honesty he'd given me on our wedding night when I'd braced for rage and gotten patience instead.

"There isn't anything between us," he said, quieter now. "There never really was, not the way my father assumed. Selene wanted the name. The company. I was never more to her than an asset worth acquiring." His eyes met mine, something raw flickering underneath the control. "You're the first person who's ever looked at me like I was more than what I could give them."

The words settled somewhere deep in my chest, warm and unfamiliar.

"I didn't marry you for what you could give me either," I said. "I didn't marry you at all, really. I was handed to you."

"And yet." His mouth curved, just barely not quite a smile, but close. "Here we are."

We got out of the car in silence, the cool night air doing nothing to settle the strange, electric quiet that had settled between us. At the door to my room, he stopped, hand braced against the frame, close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off him.

"For what it's worth," he said, voice low, "you handled my father better tonight than anyone I've brought into that house in years. Including people who were born into this world instead of thrown into it."

"Is that a compliment, Killian Voss?"

"It's an observation." But his mouth curved further this time, something almost boyish breaking through the careful control he wore like armor. "Careful. If you keep surprising me like this, I might start thinking I got lucky, marrying the wrong sister."

My breath caught somewhere in my throat.

He didn't move closer. He didn't have to. The air between us had already gone thick with something neither of us had a name for yet.

"Goodnight, Avalene," he said instead, stepping back before either of us could do something we weren't ready for.

I stood in the doorway long after he'd disappeared down the hall, one hand pressed flat against my chest, trying to understand how a man everyone in this city feared kept managing to make me feel like the safest thing in it.