Sold to Bastard Alpha after My Divorce! novel Chapter 214

Chapter 214: Chapter 214

Aria’s POV

I stared at him.

He stared back.

Neither of us moved.

"Kael," I said. Carefully. The way you speak to someone who has just drawn a line in concrete. "I’m not asking to fight. I’m asking to be present. To use whatever this is—this gift, this ability—to help the people who are bleeding for your territory."

"Our territory," he corrected. Quietly.

"Then let me help protect it."

"You are helping." He turned away, pacing toward the window. His shoulders were tight, that particular rigid line I’d learned to read like weather. Storm coming. "You’re helping by being safe. By carrying our child. By being here when—"

"When what?" I stepped forward. "When you come home exhausted at two in the morning smelling like blood? When you sit in that chair and stare at the wall for ten minutes before you can even speak? When I watch you carry all of this alone and I’m supposed to just—what? Smile? Make tea?"

He turned around.

His eyes were dark. Not angry. Something worse than angry. Afraid.

Kael Blood Crown, who had taken his father’s title by force, who had fought in underground pits since he was barely old enough to shift, who commanded an entire territory with a voice that could buckle knees—was afraid.

Of losing me.

It was written all over him. In the tightness of his jaw. In the way his hands hung at his sides, fingers slightly curled, like he wanted to reach for me but was holding himself back. In the way his breathing had gone shallow and controlled, the way it did when Fenrir was pushing at the edges and Kael was pushing back.

"I watched them carry you into a hospital nine days ago," he said. His voice was low. Rough at the edges. "You were unconscious. Your leg was—" He stopped. His jaw worked. "I didn’t know if you were going to wake up. I didn’t know if the baby was—" Another stop. Harder this time. Like the words had physical weight and he couldn’t lift them.

My chest ached.

"Kael—"

"So no." He met my eyes. "You don’t go to the checkpoints. You don’t go to the front lines. You don’t go anywhere near the places where people are getting hurt and dying, because I cannot—" His voice cracked. Just barely. Just enough. "I can’t do that again. I won’t survive watching that again."

The room was very quiet.

I could hear the clock in the hallway. The faint hum of the house settling around us. The distant, barely-there sound of two small girls breathing in their beds down the hall.

I took a breath.

"I hear you," I said. "I do. And I understand why you’re scared."

"I’m not—"

"You are. And that’s okay." I moved closer. Close enough to touch him, but I didn’t. Not yet. "But Kael, I’m scared too. Every day. Every time you leave this house, every time your phone rings at three in the morning, every time I see that look on your face when you think I’m not watching." My voice was steady. Mostly. "You could die out there. Any day. Any mission. And I’m supposed to sit here and just—accept that?"

He didn’t answer.

"You’re asking me to let you carry everything," I said. "And I’m telling you I can’t watch you break under the weight of it. Not when I might be able to help."

"You can help from here."

"I healed someone today, Kael. With my hands. I stopped his bleeding just by touching him." I kept my voice low, but the urgency bled through anyway. "There are forty-two more people in that ward who are suffering because wolfsbane is eating through their systems faster than their wolves can fight it. If I can figure out how to do it again—if I can learn to control it—I could save them."

"Or you could overextend yourself and hurt the baby."

The words landed like a slap.

Not because they were cruel. Because they were true. Because I’d thought the same thing on the drive home and hadn’t wanted to look at it directly.

"I would never—"

"I know you wouldn’t mean to." His voice softened. Just a fraction. "But you don’t even know what this ability is yet. You used it once and it worked. You tried five more times and nothing happened. What if next time it takes something from you? What if it pulls from the pregnancy? We don’t know the rules of this, Aria. We don’t know what it costs."

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