Chapter 30
Chapter 30:
The bodyguards moved with the unhurried efficiency of men who had done this before.
Declan fought. Of course Declan fought — he was a racer, a man whose entire career was built on the refusal to yield, and the idea of being physically removed from a building while the woman he loved watched was the kind of indignity that his nervous system could not process without resistance. He twisted. He shouted. His bloodshot eyes found Lara’s across the narrowing distance between them.
“Lala! You can’t go with him! Come back to Halcombe — we’ll be different, I swear. We’ll treat you the way we should have. We can go back to how we were.
Can’t we? Lala — can’t we p>
The words came out raw and ragged, stripped of everything that made Declan charming — the wit, the ease, the racing driver’s grin — leaving only the voice of a man who was losing something and had no strategy for it because he’d never imagined this scenario.
Declan had driven through walls of rain at two hundred miles per hour. He had walked away from crashes that should have killed him.
But he had never, in twenty-eight years, had to confront the possibility that wanting something badly enough wasn’t the same as deserving it.
Lara looked at him.
“No.” The word was simple.
Complete.
A period at the end of a sentence that had been running for twenty years. “Thornfield is where my family is. My friends are here. Halcombe…” She paused, and the pause contained an entire city — the jasmine on Privet Lane, the skylight that leaked, the hallway where a trophy had shattered, the living room where she’d nearly died breathing flower pollen. “I’m tired of it p>
Callum had stopped fighting. He stood between two bodyguards with the rigid stillness of a man whose pride would not permit him to struggle in front of an audience — especially an audience that included Edmund Blackwell, who was watching the scene with the composed interest of a man attending a play he’d already read the script for.
Callum laughed. It was a short, sharp sound — not amusement, but the noise a man makes when his operating system encounters an error it can’t resolve. His face, which had been cycling through variations of desperation for the past ten minutes, went cold. Ice-cold. The boardroom face. The face that had made grown men reconsider their positions across negotiating tables.
Your imagination thrives at Fiuntocom
“Fine, Lala.” His voice was level.
Controlled.
A blade lying flat. “I’ll make you regret this. I’ll make you come back to us p>
It was the wrong thing to say. He knew it as the words left his mouth — knew it the way you know you’ve overpaid for something at the exact moment the contract is signed.
But Callum’s response to losing had always been the same: reframe the loss as a temporary setback. Promise a reversal. Project confidence until the confidence becomes real.
Lara’s response was immediate and surgical.
“You won’t need to. I won’t give you the opportunity p>
Edmund raised his hand — a small gesture, two fingers, like a conductor cueing the brass — and the bodyguards completed their work.
Callum’s hands were bound with zip ties.
Declan’s followed. Neither man was handled roughly, exactly — but neither was handled gently, either. They were lifted, guided, moved toward the helipad on the registry building’s roof with the professional indifference of men relocating furniture.
Edmund watched them go. Then he turned to Lara, and for the first time since she’d met him, his composure showed a hairline crack — not fear, not regret, but the specific anxiety of a man who has just revealed something about himself and is waiting to see if it changes things.
“Lala.” His voice was quieter now. Private. “Does it scare you? That I handle things this way p>
The question was genuine.
Edmund Blackwell’s position in the Blackwell family — a family whose influence in Thornfield operated on a scale that made Callum’s corporate empire look like a lemonade stand — had not been built on gentleness. He knew this about himself. He was not ashamed of it.
But he hadn’t intended to show it on the morning of his wedding, standing in a registry office that smelled of printer toner and institutional cleaning fluid, in front of a wife he’d known for five days and wanted, very much, to keep.