Chapter 61
Chapter 61:
At the Ashworth garden, the two hundred guests watched the live feed and cheered. They received gold ingots — solid, heavy, stamped with the Blackwell crest — and boxes of sweets that were individually wrapped and probably cost more than they should have. The opulence was staggering, and it was intentional: not vulgar, not excessive, but precise. The Blackwell family spending at this scale was a message, and the message was aimed not at the guests but at the two men in the fourth row who were watching the screen with the expressions of men witnessing something that could not be stopped.
On the screen, Edmund dismounted. Walked to the sedan.
Drew back the curtain.
And lifted Lara — in red, in gold, in the traditional dress that transformed her from a Halcombe designer into something older and more permanent — into his arms. He carried her across the threshold of Kingsgate Hall. The doors closed behind them. The suona reached its peak. The drums thundered.
Callum bit his lip. He bit it until he tasted copper — the salt-metal taste of blood, the taste of a man consuming himself. His eyes, fixed on the screen, were red and wet and burning, and his hands, resting on his knees, were shaking with the particular tremor of a body trying to contain a reaction that was too large for the container.
Declan didn’t bite anything.
Declan hit.
His fist slammed into the table in front of him — a white-draped, flower-decorated ceremony table that cracked under the impact and sent a silk centerpiece tumbling to the grass. The sound was loud enough to turn heads. He didn’t notice. He was already standing, already grabbing his jacket, already moving toward the exit with the blind, urgent velocity of a man who had decided that the distance between this garden and Kingsgate Hall was a distance he could close if he drove fast enough.
He didn’t look at Callum.
Didn’t speak.
Didn’t formulate a strategy or calculate odds or consider consequences.
Declan Thorne, who had spent his life converting physical impulse into forward motion, was converting again — converting rage and loss and the sight of Lara in another man’s arms into the only response his body knew: go.
Go now.
Go fast.
Get there.
He reached his car.
A sports car — low, fast, absurdly overpowered for city streets, the kind of machine that had been his identity for fifteen years and was now, in this moment, simply a tool. He started the engine. The sound was a roar — mechanical, animal, the sound of something that wanted to move and was about to.
He no longer cared about the plan. The plan was ashes. The video was useless. The infiltration was pointless. The holographic ceremony had turned their strategy into a joke — an elaborate, expensive, technologically humiliating joke — and the real wedding was happening right now, at this moment, in a hall across the city, and the only thing Declan wanted was to see Lara.
Not to stop her. The stopping was over.
Even Declan — impulsive, passionate, constitutionally unable to accept defeat — understood that the marriage certificate had been signed ten days ago and that what was happening at Kingsgate Hall was ritual, not legality. You couldn’t un-sign a certificate by crashing a ceremony. The law didn’t work that way.
But he needed to see her. Needed to be in the room. Needed to look at her face and know, with the certainty that only physical presence could provide, that she was happy — or unhappy, or uncertain, or anything at all that he could interpret as evidence that the twenty years still mattered.
He pulled out of the Ashworth estate and onto the road and pressed the accelerator to the floor.