2026-05-29 06:30:21The regular ward on the fourth floor smelled like antiseptic and defeat, and Gwen stood in the doorway looking at the two beds and the shared bathroom and the thin curtains that separated one patient from another like she was staring into the open grave of her social aspirations.
"This is where you expect my son to recover?"
The nurse who had led them to the room didn't bother answering. She had been a nurse for twelve years, and she had learned that some questions from some people were not actually questions but performances, and the only winning move was to ignore them entirely. She adjusted Luigi's IV line, checked his vitals, and walked out without saying a word.
Gwen stood frozen in the doorway for another thirty seconds, waiting for someone to notice her suffering, but nobody did. The other patient in the room was an elderly man with a breathing tube who hadn't opened his eyes in three days, and his family had gone home hours ago. The only audience for Gwen's performance was Arya, and Arya had stopped watching.
"Sit down, Mother."
"Don't tell me to sit down like I'm the one who belongs in a common ward." Gwen's voice had dropped from its earlier shrieking register into something lower and more dangerous, the tone she used when she was calculating rather than performing. "Do you have any idea what this looks like? The Clarke family, sharing a room with some dying stranger. If anyone from the Gordon family hears about this, if Fred finds out we couldn't even secure a VIP suite for Luigi's recovery, what do you think that says about us?"
Luigi groaned from the bed, shifting his weight and immediately regretting it as pain shot up his leg. His face was pale and slick with sweat, and the painkillers they'd given him hadn't fully kicked in yet. "Mother, shut up. Just shut up for five minutes. My leg is broken."
"Watch your mouth, Luigi. I am not the one who got his leg broken by a prison rat and his whore."
"Whore?" Luigi laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough, and the cough made his leg move, and the movement made him hiss through his teeth. "That woman had four bodyguards who looked like they could bench-press a car. You called her a tramp to her face, Mother. You called her a cheap little tramp. And then you found out she's probably a Smith, and now you're standing here complaining about the quality of the curtains while that same woman could destroy our entire family with a single phone call."
The words landed on Gwen like physical blows, each one making her flinch. She opened her mouth to argue, to deflect, to blame someone else the way she had blamed everyone else for everything for her entire life, but for once nothing came out. Because Luigi was right, and they both knew it.
Arya watched the exchange from the foot of Luigi's bed with her arms crossed and her expression unreadable. The exhaustion she had been carrying since the prison parking lot had settled into her bones like cement, hardening with each passing hour until she could barely remember what it felt like to be light.
"Mother, sit down," Arya said again, and this time there was something in her voice that made Gwen obey. She lowered herself into the plastic chair beside Luigi's bed, and the surrender in that small movement was more revealing than anything she had said all day.
"Eddard needs to pay for this," Gwen said quietly, staring at the floor. "I don't care who his new friends are. I don't care if he's sleeping with a Smith. That animal broke my son's leg and he needs to pay."
Arya closed her eyes and pressed her fingers against her temples, where a headache had taken up residence and was currently redecorating. "You went to his house, Mother. You went to his parents' house, the day he got out of prison, to harass him about the villa. Did you really think that was going to end well?"
"You're defending him?"
"I'm not defending anyone. I'm trying to understand what actually happened because the story you told me in the hallway has more holes than a fishing net." Arya opened her eyes and looked at her mother with the flat, tired gaze of someone who had long ago stopped expecting honesty but couldn't quite bring herself to stop hoping for it. "You said you went to thank him. You and I both know you've never thanked anyone for anything in your life unless there was a camera present."
Gwen's jaw tightened, but she said nothing.
"The villa was never ours to take," Arya continued. "I told you that before you left. I told you that house belonged to Eddard's parents, that it was left to him in their will, that I had no legal right to offer it in the divorce settlement. But you went anyway, didn't you? You went to try to take it from him because Luigi wanted it and because you've never been able to stand the idea of that man having anything that you don't control."
"Fine," Gwen snapped, her composure cracking. "Fine, we went there to talk to him about the villa. But that doesn't justify what he did. That doesn't justify him having his thugs beat us and break Luigi's leg."
"And the woman? The one you called a tramp and an insect and told to rot in hell? Who was she?"
Gwen's face went pale again at the memory, and her voice dropped to something barely above a whisper. "I don't know. But if she's a Smith, if she's really connected to that family, then we have bigger problems than Eddard Collins."
Arya looked at her mother for a long moment, and then she pulled out her phone and walked to the window at the far end of the room, putting as much distance between herself and the bed as the small space would allow. She stared out at the city skyline, at the buildings that represented everything she had spent three years building, and she thought about the man she had divorced that morning.
She didn't know what she believed anymore. Her mother's story was obviously edited, polished in the places where the truth was inconvenient, but the bones of it felt real enough. Eddard had been with another woman. That part, at least, Gwen wouldn't have invented because it didn't serve her narrative. If anything, it made Gwen look worse, storming into a man's house to find him already moved on, but she had told the story anyway because she was too blinded by rage to realize how it reflected on her.
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
CHAPTER 607
The hall had never felt so cold.Arya stood at the head of the long table, her hands resting flat on the worn wood, her eyes moving slowly from face to face. Lily sat to her left, a half-finished diagram abandoned in front of her. Kaelen stood by the window, his arms crossed, his expression unreadable. Maren sat near the fire, her hands clasped tightly in her lap. Seam was in his usual corner, quill in hand, but he had not written a word since Arya had called them together.They were waiting.Arya had never called a meeting before—not once, in all the years they had known her. She had attended meetings, contributed to discussions, argued her points with a ferocity that had earned her the respect of every person in the room. But she had never stood at the head of the table and demanded their attention. She had never been the one to say: We need to talk.That was Eddard's role. That was what Eddard did—gather them, guide them, lead them. Arya was the heart, not the head. She was the one
CHAPTER 606
The Shadow did not answer immediately.Eddard stood in the center of the chamber, the spiral cold beneath his feet despite the warmth that now permeated every other corner of the valley. He had been standing there for hours—or what felt like hours—reaching inward, searching for the presence that had been with him since childhood, the presence that had saved him more times than he could count.I know you can hear me, he said. I know you're there. You always are.The silence stretched. The chamber hummed with the Primordial's quiet presence, but the Shadow remained still, withdrawn, as if it were deliberating something it did not wish to share.Please, Eddard said. She's dying. Whatever is inside her—it's growing. It's consuming her. And I don't know how to stop it.Finally, the Shadow stirred.You are asking me for something I do not know how to give, it said. Its voice was quiet, measured, almost reluctant. I have been with you for many years. I have seen many things. But I have never
CHAPTER 605
Arya woke to the taste of copper in her mouth.She lay still for a moment, her eyes closed, trying to place the sensation. It was not the taste of blood—not quite. It was sharper, older, like the air in a cave where something had died long ago and never been found. She swallowed, and the taste receded, and she told herself it was nothing. A dream. A lingering memory of the dark places she had walked beside Eddard.But the feeling did not go away.It was not a pain, not exactly. It was a presence—a small, quiet something nestled deep in her chest, below her heart, below her lungs, in the space where her breath began. It was not moving. It was not growing. It was simply there, patient and still, the way a stone is there at the bottom of a well.Eddard slept beside her, his breathing slow and even. He had been sleeping better these past weeks—deeper, more peacefully, as if the weight he had carried for so long had finally been lifted from his shoulders. She did not want to wake him. She
CHAPTER 604
The smell of roses woke him.It was not the season for roses. It was late autumn, and the gardens below the villa had gone brown and bare weeks ago. But the smell was unmistakable—deep and sweet and impossibly alive, filling the room like water filling a cup. Eddard lay still for a long moment, his eyes closed, breathing it in. Beside him, Arya slept on, her breathing slow and even, her hand resting loosely on his chest.He opened his eyes.The room was the same as it had always been. The same wooden beams, the same crack in the plaster, the same spiderweb near the window. But the light was different. It was softer, somehow. Richer. As if the sun had learned a new way to shine.He eased himself out of bed, careful not to wake Arya. His body still ached, still tired more easily than it should, but the weakness was fading. He could walk without the cane now, if he was careful. He could stand at the window and look out at the valley without his legs trembling beneath him.He crossed to t
CHAPTER 603
The first thing Eddard felt was the cold.Not the deep, primordial cold of the place beneath the weave—not the ancient dark that had nearly consumed him when he had severed the chain. This was an ordinary cold. The cold of linen sheets that had not been warmed by a body in too long. The cold of a room that had been kept dark and quiet and still. The cold of a world that had continued turning while he had been somewhere else entirely.He opened his eyes.The ceiling above him was familiar. Wooden beams, darkened by years of smoke and time. A crack in the plaster that ran from the corner toward the center, the same crack that had been there since he was a boy. A spiderweb, high up near the window, catching the pale light of early morning.His room. His bed. His world.He tried to move. His body did not respond. It felt heavy, distant, as if it belonged to someone else—someone who had been through something terrible and was only now beginning to remember what it meant to be alive. He tri
CHAPTER 602
The thread was not where he expected it to be.Eddard had spent hours—or what passed for hours in this place where time moved like honey and memory—searching the vast, dim expanse of the Primordial's domain for the connection that bound it to the older threat. He had expected something obvious: a chain of shadow, a cord of pulsing darkness, a visible tether stretching from the Primordial's heart into the deeper dark. Something he could see. Something he could cut.What he found instead was a whisper.It came from everywhere and nowhere, a frequency just below the threshold of hearing, a vibration in the fabric of the domain itself. It was not a sound. It was a presence, threaded through the Primordial like rot through old wood, so deeply embedded that separating one from the other seemed impossible. The chain was not wrapped around the Primordial's heart. The chain was the Primordial's heart—or at least, it had grown into it, the way ivy grows into the walls it climbs, the way poison
You may also like
Becoming A Trillionaire After Divorce
Esther Writes76.2K viewsThe Legendary Conglomerate
Lord MOH124.3K viewsThe Billionaire's Supremacy
Butter Cookies99.6K viewsThe Heir's Revenge
Twine Twin81.5K viewsThe Whisper of Deceit: My Life as a Walking Lie Detector
Yanto275 viewsThe Lived in son-in-law Wants Divorce
Daylight surprising 165 viewsDivorced by Five Beast Wives, I Awakened Godly Powers
Author Al-Wahhab276 viewsTHE LIES THAT BUILT MY FAMILY
Tianah 330 views