My Sister Stole My Mate And I Let Her (Seraphina) novel Chapter 454

Chapter 454: Chapter 454 THE MOTIVE

SERAPHINA’S POV

Even with all of us closing in and Kieran’s presence looming like a thundercloud, Thomas barely glanced at us.

He focused on Brett, who stood between him and the exit, shoulders squared, jaw tight, his expression carved out of something heavier than anger.

Brett’s eyes searched Thomas’s face as if he was still looking for some crack in the truth, some fragment of misunderstanding he could seize and turn into an explanation that would hurt less than what he had just heard.

“Tell me it isn’t true,” Brett said. His voice was low, but it carried through the room with devastating clarity.

Thomas’s throat bobbed. His composure slipped—just enough for me to see panic flash beneath his restraint, raw and desperate, before he buried it under that mask.

“Brett,” he said carefully, “you don’t understand what this is.”

Brett’s mouth tightened. “Then explain it.”

Thomas gave a humorless, thin laugh that sounded wrong.

“Explain what? That Seraphina Lockwood can dress herself in someone else’s face and put words in my mouth? That she set a trap and lured me here because she’s as much a vindictive bitch as her sister?”

Kieran took one step forward, and the temperature of the room seemed to drop. “Careful.”

Thomas glanced at him, but only briefly, as though Kieran’s warning mattered less than Brett’s accusation.

“That isn’t an answer,” Brett said.

Thomas’s jaw clenched. “It’s the only answer that makes sense. You know me, Brett.”

Brett’s face twisted, grief and fury warring so violently in his expression that it made something in my chest tighten.

He had come here ready to confront Thomas, but expectation and reality were never the same thing.

“I thought I did.”

Thomas flinched.

“I knew you didn’t like Celeste,” Brett continued, his voice roughening. “I knew you thought she was cruel. I knew you hated what she did to me, and you never forgave her for it, even when I tried to move on. But this?”

He shook his head, disbelief breaking through the anger. “A kidnapping, Thomas? Drugging her? Handing her over to people who would have destroyed her?”

Thomas’s features tightened at every accusation.

“Brett—”

“Don’t,” Brett snapped, and Thomas fell silent. “Don’t say anything that isn’t the fucking truth!”

The room held its breath.

I watched Thomas’ face, watched his composure begin to crack under the weight of Brett’s disgust.

It was almost unbearable to watch—not from pity, but because the fracture revealed something uglier than denial.

Something needy. Something possessive. Something that had been festering beneath years of loyalty and resentment.

“He used you,” I said, my voice steady despite the rage still burning in my veins.

I hadn’t even realized that I had tapped into Thomas’ mind. His emotions were so potent, it didn’t take much pressing to feel them.

“He took your pain and turned it into permission. He convinced himself your hurt belonged to him, that your forgiveness was weakness, that he had the right to punish Celeste because you wouldn’t.”

Thomas’s eyes cut to me. “Shut up.”

He turned to Brett. “I didn’t do anything to her, I swear. You can’t really think that—”

“I don’t know what to think of you,” Brett hissed.

Thomas’s face changed again.

Somehow, Brett’s uncertainty hurt him more than anger would have.

Thomas let out a soft, broken laugh. “After all these years, after everything I’ve done for you, you don’t know?”

Brett’s brow furrowed. “What—”

Thomas’s composure shattered so abruptly that I flinched.

“You still don’t see it!” he snapped, voice rising. “You never did. You let that bitch humiliate you, poison you, twist you around her finger, and even after everything, even after she nearly ruined you, you look at me like I’m the betrayal.”

Brett went still.

Thomas took a step toward him, and Brett did not move, though everyone else in the room tensed.

“I was there,” Thomas said, each word scraped raw from somewhere deep inside him. “I was the one who stayed. I was the one who watched you drink yourself sick because of her. I was the one who heard every bitter word you swallowed because you were too decent to let anyone see how badly she had cut you. I was the only one who cared about you enough to want to make it stop. You claimed to be over her, but as soon as she was in trouble, you went running. I couldn’t let you fall under her spell again.”

Brett’s face had gone pale.

“That didn’t give you the right to hurt her."

Thomas’s expression twisted. “For you? I would burn the world.”

The words struck the room with chilling force.

Brett stared at him as though Thomas had suddenly begun speaking in a foreign language.

Thomas seemed to realize there was no going back, or perhaps some part of him had been waiting for the truth to tear loose all along.

His eyes blazed, burning with fury and anguish, his breath ragged as years of restraint crumbled into something wild and exposed.

“It was never about her,” he said, quieter now, but no less intense. “It was about you. It has always been about you.”

The devastation on Brett’s face was terrible.

“You...” Brett’s voice failed him once before he forced it steady. “You did this because you wanted me?”

Thomas’s gaze burned. “I did it because she didn’t deserve to still exist in the parts of you I couldn’t reach.”

A cold, nauseated silence gripped the room.

There it was—the motive.

Jealousy masked as concern, obsession as loyalty, Celeste’s suffering as the price of unrequited love.

Brett recoiled as if Thomas had struck him.

“You’re insane,” he whispered.

Thomas’s face crumpled for half a heartbeat.

Then it hardened. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

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