Sold to Bastard Alpha after My Divorce! novel Chapter 223

Chapter 223: Chapter 223

Aria’s POV

The house was too quiet.

That was the first thing I noticed when the security team walked me through the front door. Too still. Too orderly. The kind of quiet that happens when everyone is trying very hard to act normal and not quite managing it.

The soldiers posted at every entrance stood at attention when I came through. Eyes forward. Weapons visible. Faces carefully blank.

Selene met me in the hallway.

She took one look at my face and didn’t say anything useless. Didn’t tell me it would be fine. Didn’t offer reassurance she didn’t have. Just put her hand on my arm for three seconds, firm and warm, and then said: "The girls are in the sitting room."

I went straight there.

---

Lina had her blanket.

She was curled into the corner of the large sofa with it wrapped around her shoulders like a cape, her eyes tracking the doorway. When she saw me, she launched herself off the cushion and crossed the room at full speed.

I caught her.

Held her tighter than I should have, probably. Tighter than was comfortable. She didn’t complain.

Lilith came more slowly. She always did. But she came, and she pressed herself against my side, and for a long moment the three of us just stayed like that on the sitting room floor while the soldiers moved through the house outside and the night pressed against the windows.

Lina’s voice was small against my shoulder. "Where’s Kael?"

"He’s handling something," I said.

"Is it dangerous?"

I pressed my lips into her hair. Didn’t answer.

She took that as a yes.

"But he’s going to come back," she said. Not a question. The absolute certainty of a child who had decided something was true and was refusing to consider alternatives. "Right?"

"Right," I said.

Lilith made a small sound. Not agreement. Not disagreement. Something more careful than either.

She knew the difference between a real answer and a promised one.

She was five years old and she already knew the difference.

---

I got them to bed by nine.

Lina went through the whole routine with mechanical precision—teeth, face, water, story. She asked for the same one she always asked for when she was scared, the one about the mother wolf who crossed three mountains to bring her cubs home. I told it the same way I always did, same words, same rhythm, same ending.

By the time the mother wolf reached the third mountain, Lina’s eyes were closed.

I sat with her for a few minutes after. Just watching her breathe.

Lilith was already in her own bed when I came to say goodnight. Sitting up. Braid perfect. Hands in her lap.

She looked at me the way she always looked at me when she had something she wanted to say and wasn’t sure she should.

"Aria," she said.

Not Mommy. Aria. She’d started doing that recently. Testing it out. I didn’t know what it meant yet.

"Yeah?" I said.

She looked at her hands. "If something’s wrong—" She stopped. Started again. "If you feel like something’s wrong. With Kael." She looked up. "You should trust that."

I stared at her.

She stared back.

"Okay," I said quietly.

She nodded. Once. Then lay down and turned toward the wall.

I kissed her hair. Smoothed her blanket.

And left the room with her words sitting in my chest like a stone.

---

The next few hours were the longest of my life.

I sat in the kitchen with a cup of tea I didn’t drink. Then I moved to the sitting room. Then I tried to read something and retained approximately zero words. Then I stood at the window for fifteen minutes watching the guards move in the darkness outside.

Selene sat with me for a while. We didn’t talk much. She had her own quiet kind of worry, the maternal kind, the kind that had been running through her for decades. She knew what it was to love someone who walked into danger and couldn’t be stopped from it.

She brought me food I didn’t eat. Poured me water I didn’t drink.

Around eleven, she said goodnight. Squeezed my shoulder. Looked at my face with that expression she had.

"He knows what he’s doing," she said.

"I know," I said.

Neither of us said the rest of it.

I lay down sometime after midnight.

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