Kael’s POV
My phone detonates at 6am. Two hundred and seventeen missed calls.
Emergency family meeting, the text says. Like we're a functional family that has meetings instead of bloodbaths.
I show up anyway. Mistake number one thousand and something in a long line of mistakes.
Mother's screaming before I'm even through the door. Her voice hits that pitch that makes my skull ache, and Vera is already crying.
I should feel sympathy. Instead, I feel a white-hot, suffocating rage. At them. At myself.
That sound. Her screaming. It snaps me back, and suddenly I’m not twenty-eight. I’m eight years old, standing in this same hallway.
I'd accidentally broken one of her favorite vases. She didn't hit me. She did something worse.
"Dareths do not make mistakes, Kael," she'd said, her voice terrifyingly calm as she locked me in my room. "And when they do, they certainly do not cry about it. Weakness is a disease."
I stayed in that room for two days. My father was on a business trip and never knew. I learned my lesson: when Mother gets this way, you don't fight. You don't speak. You feel nothing. I've been feeling nothing ever since.
I check my phone again, a pathetic addict needing a fix. No new messages. No missed calls from the only person who matters.
I just pull up the photo I've memorized for three days: Maeve's engagement announcement.
She's smiling—actually fucking smiling—in a way she never smiled for me. Not even at Princeton when I thought we were happy.
Caelen Rhys's hand is possessive on her waist. Claiming her. Protecting her. Everything I should've been doing instead of playing family martyr.
My coffee cup shatters against the wall. I don't remember throwing it, but the spray of ceramic shards across the marble feels right.
"Kael!" Mother's voice cuts through the ringing in my ears. "Are you even listening?"
No. Haven't been listening for days.
I'm drinking. Not socially, not casually—drinking like I'm trying to drown something that won't fucking stay down.
Three bottles of scotch in four days. The expensive kind Dad hoards in his office. The kind that's supposed to be smooth and refined.
Burns the same as cheap shit when you're drinking to forget.
My penthouse is a disaster. Takeout containers scattered across counters. Curtains drawn against sunlight that feels like an assault. Clothes on the floor because functioning like a normal human requires energy I don't have.
I can't think. Can't focus. Can't do anything except see her face everywhere.
On the news. In magazines. On every fucking screen in this city.
Always with Caelen Rhys's hand somewhere on her body. Her shoulder. Her waist. The small of her back.
Places my hands used to be when she was mine.
Night three hits and I'm drunk enough to call her. Liquid courage or liquid stupidity—same difference at this point.
Voicemail. Her voice, professional and distant: "You've reached Maeve." I call again, and again, the desperation clawing at my throat until I can't breathe.
My hands are shaking so hard I can barely type as I switch to texts. Easier than hearing her recorded voice telling me she's unavailable.
‘Maeve please.’
‘I can explain everything.’
‘Just talk to me.’
I'm sorry.
I love you.
Maeve.
Thirty pathetic messages sent into the void. She doesn't respond. Not once.
Night five, my phone rings. Unknown number.
I answer so fast I nearly drop it. "Maeve?"
"Stop calling me." Her voice is ice.
The same cold, distant tone I used on her for two months. Karma's a bitch with a sense of irony.
"I need to talk to you. To explain—"
"Explain what?" She cuts me off. Each word precise. Surgical. "That you married me knowing I was Welch's daughter? That your family's bankrupt and I was your meal ticket? Or that your father was involved in my mother's death? I know everything, Kael."
Silence. Heavy and suffocating.
What the fuck can I say to that? What words exist that could possibly justify what I've done?
"I was trapped—"
"So was I." Her voice doesn't rise. Doesn't crack. Worse—it's steady. "Difference is, I didn't trap you."
The line goes dead.
I call back immediately. Voicemail.
Again. Voicemail.
Five more times before I realize—she's blocked me.
The cold shoulder I gave her for weeks, she's giving back with compound interest. Every ignored call I made her suffer through, every night I stayed at the office, every time I walked past her like she didn't exist.
She learned from the fucking best.
Gia tries to be supportive. Shows up with food I don't eat and concern I don't deserve.
"Kael, you need to take care of yourself. The press coverage will blow over. These things always do."
She thinks I'm stressed about reputation. About the scandal of my first wife running to her billionaire father.
She has no idea I'm drowning in loss of something real I torched with my own hands.
I barely see her. Can't focus when she's talking. Can't pretend to care about damage control or public perception.
She leaves eventually. Disappointed but still trying.
My family has different ideas about solutions.
"You need to fix this," Mother demands during another emergency meeting I don't remember agreeing to attend. "Seduce her back. Make her remember why she married you. Get that money before Welch poisons her against us completely."
"She's already engaged to someone else," I say. Voice flat.
"So? You're her husband. You have rights. Legal claims." Mother leans forward. "Use them. Be romantic. Be desperate. Whatever it takes."
"She blocked my number."
"Then show up at her office. At Welch Industries. Make a scene if you have to." Father's emerged from his office, drunk and desperate. "We need that money, Kael. The company needs it. The family needs it."
Something in me snaps. The eight-year-old boy who learned to feel nothing, who learned to be silent, finally stands up.
"No." They both stare like I've just spoken a foreign language.
"What?" Mother's voice hits that familiar, dangerous octave. But it doesn't work. Not anymore.
"I said no." I stand, the movement feeling foreign, powerful.
"I'm done. You created this mess. You turned my marriage into a transaction. You figure it out."
"You ungrateful—"
"I'm out." I head for the door.
Mother’s screaming behind me. Threats, demands, guilt trips about family loyalty and duty and everything I've heard since birth.
I don't look back. Outside, the air hits my lungs like the first breath after drowning.
I destroyed the only real thing I ever had for a company that was a corpse, for a family that never gave a shit about me. Maeve was real. And I burned her to ash.
I get into my car, my hands steady. She thinks I'm a monster. She's right. But she doesn't know the whole truth. She doesn't know why.
My phone is silent. She blocked me. I can't reach her. Just as I'm about to throw the phone across the street, the screen lights up. Not a call from her. A news alert from TMZ.
"EXCLUSIVE: Inside Maeve Welch and Caelen Rhys's A-List Engagement Party. The event of the season is happening tonight at the Welch Tower."
The article has photos of the preparations. Flowers. Security. Tonight. She won't take my calls. She won't read my texts. Fine.
I start the engine, a cold, desperate resolve settling in my gut. If I can't call her, I'll go to her. I'll crash her fucking party and make her listen to the truth, even if I have to burn that tower down to do it.