Divorce me I'm done serving you (Ayla) novel Chapter 702

Draven looked at her, and the instinct rose in him immediately, the old habit of softening himself, of becoming easier and more agreeable than he actually was.

He let it pass.

It was harder than it sounded. But he had made a decision. He wasn't going to perform anymore. Whatever it cost him, she was going to see who he actually was.

"Ayla, the children are still with me. If you want to hear what I'm planning to do, Max needs to leave."

Ayla almost didn't believe she'd heard him correctly. She looked at his face to be sure. He meant it. The coldness was completely unguarded.

She had registered the strangeness of him all evening, had watched it from a distance, processed it secondhand. This was different. This was him speaking to her directly, and it landed somewhere deep.

It left her with an ache she couldn't name.

She found herself wondering whether the man she had known had ever been real. The warmth, the steadiness, the care he had shown her without being asked... Had all of that been real? Now, the man in front of her had the same capacity for coldness as Troy. It turned out he had simply never let her see his true color.

Since the breakup, he had become someone else entirely. He was still the same man she had spent eight months with, and yet the distance between who he had been and who he was now was so sharp that the memories themselves were starting to come apart.

Her face went still.

Draven's hand tightened in his lap. He had known this would happen. His nature wasn't one that made it easy for people to love him.

Showing Ayla the parts of himself he had always kept hidden was its own kind of suffering. It took everything he had. But without honesty, he had no idea how to be with her at all.

The silence between them hardened. Max stepped in. "Ayla, this is between you and Mr. Storm. I'll be outside on the lawn, get some sun, try the coffee and pastries. Call me if you need anything. I'm not going far."

Ayla looked back at him.

He gave her a warm smile, his eyes steady and calm.

He had found the exit that made it easy for her. The tension in the room shifted. Ayla didn't fight it.

Draven watched the two of them without a word. The understanding between them was effortless.

Draven's fist tightened until his knuckles ached. When he made the decision to take the children, he knew exactly how she would react. Seeing it now, knowing he had done this to her, filled him with a disgust directed entirely at himself.

He spoke through it. "Because I wanted you to come back to me."

Ayla was quiet for a long time.

She had considered the possibility. She had simply been unable to make sense of it. If he wanted her back, he could have said so. But he didn't. Instead, he had chosen a path that hurt them both.

"What makes you think that watching me and stealing my children would bring me back?"

The answer lived somewhere in his earliest years, in patterns laid down so long ago they had stopped feeling like choices.

When Ayla ended things, something in him had read it as abandonment, the same abandonment he had always known. The will to fight for something, to reach toward a person and ask them to stay, had never developed in him. It had been extinguished too early.

As a kid, he had probably asked why his parents never came. But the asking had changed nothing. Eventually he had stopped asking and learned to accept what was given, or what wasn't.