Her Exiled Husband Is A Forgotten God

CHAPTER THREE

POV: Kael

The Morrison family sold me before breakfast.

I found out from Ava, who came to my room at 6 AM with red-rimmed eyes and shaking hands.

“They made a deal with some businessman,” she said. “Chen Wei. He’s supposed to take you away, handle the ‘legal complications,’ make the footage disappear.”

“Wait, Chen Wei?” Something flickered in my memory. “Wasn’t there a Mr. Chen at dinner last night? The one who looked at me and ran?”

“Different Chen. I think.” She bit her lip. “Kael, you have to run. Whatever they’re planning, it’s not good.”

“I can’t run.” I took her hands in mine. They were cold. “If I run, they’ll come after you. Call you an accomplice. Your family would—”

“My family is selling you to someone who wants to dissect you!” Her voice rose. “Don’t you understand? They’re scared of what you did last night. Feng’s hand is destroyed — the doctors said he’ll never use it properly again. And the security footage from the courtyard…” She shuddered. “They watched it fifty times. The way you moved, it wasn’t… it wasn’t normal.”

“Ava—”

“They think you’re some kind of government experiment. Or a spy. Or something worse.” She squeezed my hands tight. “Chen Wei is coming at nine. You have three hours.”

I should have run. I know that now. But at the time, I thought I could handle it. I thought I could explain, negotiate, figure out what was happening on my own terms.

I was wrong.

***

The drive took forty minutes. Industrial district. Abandoned warehouses converted into spaces that don’t appear on official maps. Chen Wei met us at the entrance — a slim man in an expensive suit, smiling with too many teeth.

Something was wrong with him.

I felt it before I saw it. This frequency beneath his words, a vibration in the air around him that made my skull ache. He looked human. He moved human. But my body was screaming warnings that my brain couldn’t interpret.

“So this is him,” Chen Wei said, circling me slowly. “The anomaly. The sleepwalker.” He leaned in close, and I caught a whiff of something that definitely wasn’t cologne. Ozone and ash. Lightning and burning. “Do you know what you are?”

“No.”

“Interesting.” He gestured to his men. “Bring him inside.”

They strapped me to a chair. Drew blood. Shined lights in my eyes. Chen Wei watched everything with that wrong smile, asking questions that made no sense.

“How much of the binding remains?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Do you dream of falling?”

“Sometimes. Everyone dreams of falling.”

“When you look at the sun, do you remember what it felt like to stand above it?”

“…what?”

His smile flickered with disappointment. “I had hoped for more. They said you were awakening, but you seem as ignorant as any mortal.” He snapped his fingers. “Bring the instruments.”

The instruments weren’t medical tools. They were something older — metal shapes that hummed with frequencies I shouldn’t be able to hear, covered in symbols that made my vision blur when I tried to focus on them.

“What the hell are those?” I tried to pull against the restraints. “What are you going to do to me?”

“Extract what remains,” Chen Wei said calmly. “The binding is failing. Whatever’s inside you is trying to wake up. We need to take it out before it fully emerges.”

“Take what out? What are you talking about?”

He didn’t answer. His men approached with the instruments, and something cold touched my forehead, and—

The thing inside me disagreed.

I didn’t black out this time. I stayed present, watching from somewhere behind my own eyes as my body took over. The chair restraints snapped like paper. My hands found throats and pressure points with precision I don’t possess. Men fell in sequences — unconscious before they hit the ground, neutralized with minimum force and maximum efficiency.

“Impressive,” Chen Wei said. He hadn’t moved. “But futile.”

His skin split down the center of his face.

Not tearing — opening, like a door, like a costume being removed. What emerged was geometry and light, angles that shouldn’t exist in three-dimensional space, a form that screamed in frequencies that made my nose bleed.

“Oh shit,” I heard myself say. “Oh shit oh shit oh—”

I know you, it said. The voice wasn’t sound — it was pressure, direct in my skull. I was there when they broke you. I volunteered to ensure you stayed broken.

My body stood without my permission. My hands rose. And the thing that lived inside me spoke through my mouth in a language I don’t know but understood perfectly.

“You failed.”

What happened next took less than ten seconds.

The being lunged. My fingers found gaps in its geometry — spaces between the angles where reality was thin. I pulled. The thing came apart like wet paper, shrieking in frequencies that shattered every window in the warehouse.

Golden liquid sprayed across the concrete.

Not blood. Something else. Something that evaporated before it settled, burning off into light and leaving nothing behind but the memory of heat.

“Holy fucking shit.” I was shaking. My whole body was shaking. “What was that? What the hell was that?”

No answer. Just me standing alone in a room full of unconscious humans and the dissolving remains of something that was never human at all. My hands were covered in gold that was already fading. My heart was beating normally.

And somewhere deep inside me, something felt satisfied.

Like scratching an itch that’s been building for centuries.

I found a reflective surface — a polished steel table. I leaned over and looked at my face.

The man in the reflection was older. Light wreathed his head like a crown — not gentle light, not warm light, but the cold radiance of something that burns without caring what it destroys.

He looked at me with recognition.

He looked at me with patience.

Then he was gone, and I was just Kael again.

Police sirens wailed in the distance. Someone had heard the screaming.

I stumbled toward the exit, stepping over bodies and dissolving gold.