Chapter 29
Chapter 29:
Something ignited behind Callum’s eyes.
It wasn’t rage — not yet. Rage would come later, in hotel rooms and on flights back to Halcombe, in the weeks of sleepless nights that awaited him. What ignited now was something rawer: the specific, animal refusal to accept a loss that the rational mind has already acknowledged. The refusal of a man who builds empires being told that the one thing he couldn’t acquire was standing in front of him, wearing someone else’s ring.
“Lala, stop this.” His voice was tight, controlled, but the control was costing him — Lara could see it in the muscles of his jaw, in the tendons standing out on his neck, in the way his hands kept opening and closing at his sides as though reaching for something that wasn’t there. “You’re jealous. I understand that. I deserve it.
But this — this isn’t the answer.
Come back to the registry.
Get divorced. We can fix this. We can fix everything p>
He reached for her hand. The gesture was reflexive — twenty years of reaching for Lara’s hand, coded into his motor cortex like a reflex arc — and for one moment his fingers touched hers, warm and familiar, and the contact produced a jolt of recognition that traveled through both of them like current through a wire.
Lara pulled her hand back.
Declan, operating on a different frequency entirely — louder, more chaotic, propelled by the same energy that made him drive at three hundred kilometers per hour into corners that would kill a more cautious man — stepped forward and positioned himself between Edmund and Callum, as though the physical arrangement of bodies could somehow rearrange the facts.
“Mr.
Blackwell.” He was breathing hard. His eyes were bloodshot, his voice cracking at the seams. “What right do you have to marry Lala? Do you understand her? Do you know what she eats for breakfast? Do you know she’s allergic to pollen? Do you know she reads with the lamp tilted fifteen degrees to the left because the angle hurts her eyes otherwise? Do you know she can’t sleep without the sound of rain? Do you love her p>
The questions tumbled out in a cascade — each one a piece of evidence in a case Declan was building on the fly, each one a fragment of the twenty years of accumulated knowledge that he and Callum possessed and Edmund didn’t. It was the argument of a man who believed that knowing someone was the same as deserving them.
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He put his hand on Edmund’s shoulder. Not a push — a claim.
A gesture that said: step aside.
Edmund didn’t step aside.
He looked at Declan’s hand on his shoulder the way a man looks at a stain on a new jacket — with faint surprise, less faint displeasure — and with a movement so smooth it barely registered as motion, he disengaged. Not violently. Not with force. Just a rotation of the shoulder, a half-step back, and Declan’s hand was holding air.
“Mr. Thorne.” Edmund’s voice remained conversational. Pleasant, even. The voice of a man ordering wine at a restaurant. “Lala and I can still develop our feelings for each other.
A marriage where love comes later is still a valid marriage. Plenty of great ones have started with less.” He paused. Let the words settle. Then, with the precision of a surgeon locating a nerve: “But you two — Mr. Hargrove and Mr. Thorne — still have unfinished business with a woman named Bridget.
As I understand it, you remain…
Entangled p>
He brushed his shoulder where Declan had touched it — a small, deliberate gesture, theatrical in its disdain, the kind of motion a man makes when he wants you to know that your contact was unwelcome and your presence is tolerated rather than accepted.
“So I have to wonder,” Edmund continued, his amber eyes moving from one man to the other with the gentle devastation of a closing argument, “what right either of you has to dispute anything with me p>
Bridget. The name landed between Callum and Declan like a grenade with the pin already pulled. They flinched — both of them, simultaneously, the same flinch — and in that flinch was everything: the birthday party, the trophy, the flowers, the asthma attack, the Midsummer Night, every moment they’d chosen Bridget over Lara condensed into a single involuntary contraction of the face.
“We only feel sorry for Bridget,” Declan said. The words came out too fast, too rehearsed, the verbal equivalent of a man tripping over his own feet. “There are no other feelings. It’s not what you think p>
Lara extricated herself from Callum’s orbit — pulled her hand free, stepped sideways, placed herself beside Edmund with the deliberate finality of a chess piece moving to its final square.
“Enough p>
Her voice was quiet. Not cold — she was past cold. She was somewhere beyond temperature, in the clear, airless space that exists after all the heat has been spent.
“Callum.
Declan. You don’t need to explain anything to me. Not anymore p>
She looked at them. Really looked — at the rumpled suits and the red eyes and the desperation that she would have given anything to see a month ago, when it might have mattered, when it might have changed something.
A month ago, this scene — two men flying through the night, arriving breathless, begging her to stay — would have been the answer to a question she’d been asking for years.
A month ago, she would have wept.
Now she was standing in a registry office in Thornfield, wearing a wedding ring, and she felt the sadness of it — the waste, the timing, the spectacular, preventable tragedy of two people who loved her showing up to the fire after the house had already burned down.
“From the moment I left Halcombe,” she said, “we had no relationship. Whether you like Bridget or not has nothing to do with me.
Don’t come looking for me again p>
She paused. Let the silence do its work.
“Thornfield isn’t your territory p>
Edmund, beside her, lifted his hand and snapped his fingers. The sound was crisp, almost musical — a single, clean note — and from the periphery of the registry office, from doorways and corridors and the building’s entrance, a line of men appeared. Uniformed. Identical. The kind of men who communicated through posture rather than speech and whose presence transformed any room into a room with a clear hierarchy.
“Escort these gentlemen back to Halcombe,” Edmund said. His tone suggested he was requesting a table at a restaurant rather than ordering the removal of two grown men from a government building. “And keep an eye on them for a while. I’d rather they didn’t find their way back here before we’ve had a chance to settle in p>
Lara didn’t intervene. She didn’t object, didn’t soften the order, didn’t look at Callum and Declan with the apologetic tenderness of a woman who still cared what they felt. She stood beside her new husband and watched the bodyguards advance, and the absence of her protest was, in its own way, the loudest thing she’d said all day.