The Alpha Who Never Loved Me (Serena and Kieran) novel Chapter 90

Chapter 90

Serena

My phone buzzed all morning with messages. Colleagues, friends, nurses from the ward, people I shared lunch with twice and somehow remembered the date, all of them typing the same words in different arrangements: happy birthday, long life, happiness, prosperity, joy.

I scrolled through them; my thumb moved on its own but my chest was tight and the words blurred together because the only image in my head was my mother’s face.

The photograph Kieran sent sat in my gallery and I opened it again. My mother stood in a hospital corridor; she wore a scarf over her hair and her pace was slow and her arm gripped the strap of her bag and the fluorescent light above her washed her skin pale. Behind her, the hospital walls stretched long and sterile.

And Josh. The school called Kieran and told him Josh left campus and nobody knew where he went.

Kieran was a liar; his mouth produced lies the way a factory produced goods, efficient and endless. This could4

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me back home. But the photograph was real; my mother’s face was real, the hospital walls behind her were real, and a lie needed a reason and I could not find one that explained why he would fabricate that image.

I picked up my phone and called my parents.

My father answered on the third ring. “Happy birthday, sweetheart.” His voice was warm and easy. “What are you doing today? Are you celebrating?”

“I’m fine, Dad.” My fingers pressed harder into the phone. “But Kieran called me.”

“Ah.” A pause. “We saw Kieran too.”

My stomach dropped; the weight of it pulled my spine forward. “Where did you see him?”

My mother’s voice came through from the background; she took the phone from my father. “We ran into him when we went to buy some things. It was nothing.”

My jaw locked so hard my teeth ached.

Kieran showed me a picture of my mother in a hospital:44

corridor. Not a shop, not a market, not the street. A

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hospital. And now she told me she ran into him while buying groceries.

She was lying to me, and my mother did not lie unless she was protecting someone.

If she lied about where she saw Kieran, then the hospital visit was real. If the hospital visit was real, then her

health was worse than anything she told me over the

phone these past months. Every time I asked how she was doing, she said fine. Every time I pressed, she changed the subject.

My chest caved in; the air in my lungs turned thin and my eyes burned and the guilt was a hand around my throat that squeezed tighter with every breath. I should be there. I should be beside her, making sure she ate, making sure she slept, making sure she took her medication and rested and did not carry anything heavy. My father should not be handling this alone and my mother should not be walking through hospital corridors by herself with nobody to hold her arm.

But I was here. In another country, behind another desk, hiding from a man who ruined my life while the people who gave me that life suffered without me.

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I pressed my palm against my eyes and swallowed the sob before it reached my mouth.

“Is Josh at home?” I asked; my voice held but barely.

“Josh is in school,” my mother said.

“Mom.” My hand dropped from my face. “Kieran called me and told me Josh left school. Nobody knows where he is. Not the school, not the teachers, not anyone.”

The line went quiet; the silence pressed against my ear and my pulse climbed.

“We didn’t know,” my mother said; her tone shifted from casual to tight. “Kieran called us too but we didn’t take his calls. We didn’t realize it was anything serious.”

“Call him,” I said. “Please. Find out what happened with

Josh.”

“We will.”

I pressed my fingers against my forehead; the headache throbbed behind my left eye and spread across my temple. “Kieran also told me he’s going to agree to the 2:44

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My mother’s voice turned sharp. “He told us the same thing but we don’t know if we can believe him. That man is a snake, Serena.”

She was right, but her lie about the hospital sat in my chest and pressed against everything she said. My parents did not want me to come home because they did not want me to know how sick my mother was. They shielded me just like they had done my entire life, absorbing the damage so I would not feel it.

And the cost of that shield was my mother walking through a hospital alone.

“I’ll make a decision soon,” I said.

My mother’s voice dropped. “Serena. When you come back, you’ll come back with a stomach that’s already showing.” She paused. “How are you going to hide the pregnancy from him?”

My hand flew to my belly; the fabric of my shirt pressed thin against the small curve that grew rounder with every week. The baby moved inside me, a flutter so faint I almost missed it, and the reality crashed through me.

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birthday, happy birthday. Every notification was a bell that rang in an empty church.

I stood and walked down the corridor to Misha’s office.

He sat behind his desk with a file open in front of him; he looked up when I knocked and his face shifted the second

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