Her Exiled Husband Is A Forgotten God

CHAPTER TWO

POV: Kael

Eight men. Batons. And apparently, legal permission to beat the shit out of me.

The Morrison patriarch didn’t waste any time. Within an hour of Feng’s screaming, private security showed up — the expensive kind, you know? The ones corporations use when they need problems to disappear without any paperwork. They wore matching black uniforms and carried themselves with the relaxed confidence of guys who hurt people for a living.

They took me to the courtyard behind the main house. The family watched from the upper balconies, silhouettes against lit windows, like spectators gathering for a goddamn execution. Someone had actually brought champagne. I could hear glasses clinking.

“So,” the team leader said, cracking his knuckles. Big guy. Bald. Had the look of someone who enjoyed his work. “You’re the one who broke Mr. Feng’s hand.”

“It was an accident.”

“Sure it was.” He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Here’s the thing, Mr… what do they call you? Kael? Here’s the thing, Kael. Mr. Feng is very upset. The family is very upset. And when the family is upset, we make the problem go away.”

“I didn’t—”

“Shut up.” He nodded to his men. “Make it look like self-defense.”

The first baton swung for my ribs.

And then I woke up standing.

That’s the only way I can describe it. One second, I was watching the baton arc toward my body, bracing for impact. The next second, I was in the center of the courtyard, breathing normally, and eight men were unconscious on the ground around me.

Not scattered. Arranged. A perfect circle with me at the center.

“What the fuck?” I looked at my hands. My knuckles were split and bloody. My shirt was torn. There was dirt on my knees and someone else’s blood on my collar.

I didn’t remember any of it.

The gap was bigger this time. Not three seconds but three minutes — a void where memories should be, filled with nothing but this faint sensation of movement. My body had done something while my mind was elsewhere. Something precise. Something trained.

I turned slowly, looking at the bodies.

They were all breathing. All positioned carefully — arms crossed over chests, heads turned to prevent choking. Whoever did this wasn’t just violent. They were methodical. Professional. They’d neutralized eight armed men and then arranged them for recovery like a medic securing patients.

That wasn’t me. I don’t know how to fight. I’ve spent three years avoiding confrontation, making myself small, learning to absorb humiliation without response.

But my hands were bloody. My muscles were warm. And somewhere deep in my brain, there was this echo of satisfaction — a sense of completion, like a machine that finally got to perform its function.

The balconies had gone dead silent.

No more champagne glasses. No more murmured entertainment. The Morrison family stared down at me with expressions I’d never seen before. Not contempt. Not mockery.

Fear.

“Jesus Christ,” someone whispered. “Did you see how fast he moved?”

“That’s not possible. That’s not humanly possible.”

The patriarch’s face had gone the color of old paper. One of the aunts was crying. Someone had pulled out a phone but their hands were shaking too badly to dial.

I did this. Whatever this was, I did it.

The thought should have terrified me. It did terrify me, in some distant way, like hearing about a car accident that happened to someone else. But there was another feeling underneath the fear — something darker and older that whispered this is right, this is correct, this is what happens to those who raise hands against you.

I pushed that feeling down hard enough to bruise.

I needed Ava. I needed to find my wife and explain that something was wrong with me, that I wasn’t safe, that she should probably run far away from whatever I was becoming.

I walked toward the main house. Nobody tried to stop me. The servants pressed themselves against walls as I passed, avoiding eye contact, radiating that particular stillness of prey animals hoping the predator won’t notice them.

The stairs creaked under my feet. Each step felt heavier than the last, like gravity was increasing the closer I got to Ava’s room. Or maybe that was just exhaustion. My body had done something impossible while I wasn’t watching, and now it wanted to sleep.

I reached her door.

I raised my hand to knock.

And I realized I couldn’t remember her face.

“No,” I whispered. “No, no, no.”

Ava. My wife. Three letters I’d spoken every day for three years. Her voice was there, soft and careful. The scar near her ear. The way she held herself.

But her face — the specific arrangement of features that made her Ava and not anyone else — was gone. Blurred like a photograph left in water.

I stood frozen with my fist raised, bloody knuckles inches from wood, and I focused everything I had on remembering my wife’s face.

Ten seconds passed.

Twenty.

Thirty.

Her face finally returned, sliding into place like a photograph developing in slow motion. She was there again, complete, real.

But thirty seconds was longer than ten.

The gaps were growing.

I knocked on the door anyway. “Ava? It’s me. Please open up.”

No answer.

“Ava, I know you’re scared. I’m scared too. Something’s happening to me and I don’t understand it, but I need to see you. Please.”

Still nothing.

I tried the handle — locked, of course. The Morrisons had probably secured her the moment security arrived.

I should leave. I should walk out of this house and disappear into the night and figure out what was happening to me before I hurt someone else.

But my hand was still on the doorknob, and something inside me disagreed with the concept of locked doors.

There was a sound like whispering metal. The lock mechanism shivered, then clicked, then fell apart — components separating with surgical precision, gears and pins scattering across the floor like startled insects.

“What the hell?”

I didn’t do that. I don’t know how to do that.

But my hand was warm where it touched the metal, and there was that feeling again — satisfaction, completion, rightness.

The door swung open.

Ava was standing on the other side, eyes wide, hands raised defensively. “Stay back!”

“Ava, it’s me—”

“I saw what you did!” Her voice cracked. “I watched from the balcony. You took out eight men in three seconds, Kael. Three seconds. That’s not… that’s not normal. That’s not human.”

“I know.” I held up my hands, tried to look harmless. Hard to do when you’re covered in other people’s blood. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. I swear I don’t.”

She was breathing hard, trembling, but she didn’t run. She stood her ground and studied me with eyes that were terrified but also something else. Curious. Searching.

“That thing you did to the lock,” she said slowly. “How did you do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know a lot of things.”

“Yeah.” I laughed, but it came out broken. “That’s kind of the story of my life.”

Ava didn’t laugh. But something in her expression softened, just a little.

“There’s something wrong with you,” she said. “I’ve been watching you for weeks. The way you move when you think no one’s looking. The way you react to things before they happen.” She paused. “The way you float sometimes. When you’re in the garden at night.”

I stared at her. “You saw that?”

“I see everything, Kael. I’m your wife. Even if we’ve never…” She trailed off, looked away. “I notice things.”

Before I could respond, I caught my reflection in the mirror behind her, and the words died in my throat.

The man in the mirror wasn’t me.

He was standing where I was standing, wearing my clothes. But his eyes were wrong — too bright, too deep, lit from within by something that didn’t need external light. His posture was straight. Certain. The posture of someone who had never knelt for anyone.

He looked at me through the glass.

He smiled.

And then he was gone, and it was just my reflection again — bloody, exhausted, confused.

“Kael?” Ava’s hand touched my arm. “Kael, what’s wrong? You went pale.”

I focus on her hand. 

“I think something or someone else lives inside me,” I heard myself say.