The MC President's Forsaken Wife (Zara and Knox) novel Chapter 148

Chapter 84-1

My father recoils as though Willow physically smacked him across the face.

“You know that isn’t what this is,” he rasps, his voice gravelly “You know damn good and well that I’m not abandoning you.”

“Isn’t it? Aren’t you?”

Willow’s voice drops into a quiet, eerie register, completely devoid of the sweet, breathless innocence she usually projects. That sudden, cold flatline is infinitely worse than if she’d started screaming at him.

She wipes a stray tear from her pale cheek with the heel of her hand, her movements stiff and mechanical. “You didn’t know I existed for thirty-four years. Fine. I made peace with that decades ago because it wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t search for someone you didn’t know was out there.”

“Willow, please -“Dad begins.

“But you know now,” she cuts in, her eyes locking onto his with an unsettling, laser-focused intensity. “And despite that, you’re standing here in front of me, telling me to pack my things and get out of your life.”

“No!” Dad says forcefully. “I’m telling you the absolute baseline of what I need from you if you want to be a part of this family.”

“You’re telling me to pretend that I don’t see what I clearly see,” she says, her tone hardening. “You’re asking me to to mute myself so everyone else can stay comfortable.”

“I’m asking you to leave Locke and Zara’s relationship alone.”

Her light eyes flash with a sudden, dangerous spark of heat. “I am leaving him alone.”

“You literally just sat here and told us that Locke belongs with you,” Dad retorts.

“I told you the absolute truth.”

“No,” Dad growls, leaning over the table, his scarred face inches from hers. “You told us what you delude yourself into believing.”

“It is the objective truth.”

“Maybe for you,” Dad snaps. “Not for him and not for Zara. Sure as hell not for anyone else in this room!”

Beside me, Locke shifts his weight, his entire posture coiling like a steel spring. I reach beneath the heavy table and close my fingers tightly around his wrist. I don’t do it because I’m afraid he’ll lose control – Locke is an expert at suffocating his impulses under a mountain of ice. I do it because my own hands are shaking so violently that I need something solid to hold onto.

Willow’s sharp eyes track the subtle movement beneath the table instantly. Something shifts in her features, a microscopic flicker of pure, unadulterated pain that quickly curdles into resentment. She looks away from my hand on his wrist, her jaw tightening

“I really thought you’d be different,” she says softly to my father, her voice dripping with disappointment

Chapter 84-4-

Dad’s dark brow furrows deeply. “Different from who, Willow?”

“From everyone else I’ve ever met.”

The quiet admission seems to crack something fundamental open in the heavy air of the room. Willow looks down at her trembling hands, her shoulders hunching inward as if trying to make herself physically smaller.

“My mother spent my entire childhood drumming it into my head that people will always leave the exact second you become inconvenient to them,” she says. “She told me every single day that I was far too much to handle. Too strange. Too intense. That I was broken because I saw deeper meaning in places where normal people saw nothing at all.”

Her voice trembles, cracking on the edge of a sob. “So I learned very early on to stop asking people to understand me. I stopped expecting them to see what I see. But when I found out who you were… when I realized that I was the daughter of a man who commands a dangerous place in the world… I thought finding you meant I finally had a family who wouldn’t force me to choose between being loved and being my true self.”

Despite the insane nature of what she’s demanding, I feel the sharp edge of my anger beginning to thin against my will. In this dim light, she looks so impossibly young and fragile. She isn’t younger than me in actual years, but she is vastly younger in her unhealed trauma. Willow is a walking, raw nerve that’s spent a lifetime being pushed to the margins.

Dad leans toward her across the table, his voice softening. “Willow, you don’t have to choose between those things here.”

“I clearly do,” she counters, looking up at him with tear-stained eyes.

“No, you don’t.”

“You are literally sitting here right now, forcing me to deny something I know to be absolute truth.”

“I’m asking you to respect another human being’s choice,” Dad insists.

“They don’t even know what they’re choosing yet,” she insists smoothly, as if explaining a basic fact to a child. “They think they do, but they’re completely blind to the larger pattern.”

Locke’s voice cuts through the room like a drag of cold steel over marble. “I know exactly what I’m choosing.”

Willow flinches at the sound of his voice, closing her eyes for a brief second as if the words physically burned her skin. Yet, Locke’s tone isn’t cruel or raised in anger; it’s utterly clinical, which somehow makes her visible suffering infinitely more pronounced.

“I know precisely who I care about,” Locke states, his gaze holding her frozen in place. “I know who I choose to spend my time with, every single day. There’s not a single element of uncertainty in my mind, Willow Not one”

Willow opens her eyes, searching his unreadable face with a desperate, heartbreaking hope that makes me cringe “You don’t have to be afraid of hurting her, Locke The universe doesn’t punish people for following the true path”