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Chapter 532
Chapter 532:
The door of the lead vehicle flew open.
Cole jumped out without waiting for an umbrella. His face was livid, his jaw clenched so tight his teeth ached.
Thirty minutes earlier, his security team had reported that Alycia had slipped her detail. Her phone’s GPS had pinged just outside the family graveyard before going dark. A dark, violent fear had taken hold of his chest — a dread that this reckless woman was going to desecrate the graves.
He sprinted into the graveyard. His bodyguards ran after him, struggling to hold umbrellas over his head, but he shoved them aside without breaking stride.
He ran straight for Caleb’s plot and stopped dead.
His pupils contracted to pinpricks.
Alycia was on her knees in the thick mud directly in front of Caleb’s headstone, drenched to the bone, mud streaked across her pale face. She had both arms wrapped tightly around the freezing granite stone, clutching it as though it were the only thing keeping her tethered to the earth.
She wasn’t screaming. She was making a low, broken sound — a desperate, pathetic whimper that cut straight through the noise of the thunder.
“I’m sorry, Caleb… I’m so sorry,” she sobbed, pressing her forehead hard against the stone, her voice cracked and hoarse. “I couldn’t keep our promise. I’m so tired. Just take me with you p>
The words hit Cole like precision-guided missiles, burying themselves in the softest, most guilt-ridden corner of his heart.
𝘉𝖾 t𝗵e f𝗶rѕ𝗍 𝘵𝘰 𝘳𝖾а𝖽 𝘰𝗇
He looked at the smiling photograph of his brother on the stone. Then he looked at the woman kneeling in the mud below it, trembling and half-destroyed.
A memory struck him like a physical blow. Caleb in a hospital bed, coughing blood, grabbing his hand. Take care of her, Cole. She’s my only light.
A crushing, suffocating weight of guilt descended on Cole’s shoulders, pressing the air from his lungs. He had told himself his coldness toward Alycia was logical, justified. Now, standing in the downpour with his brother’s face watching from the stone, he felt like a faithless animal. He was failing Caleb.
He closed the distance in three long strides, reached down, and pulled Alycia up from the mud by her arms. She was limp and freezing, like a broken ragdoll.
She opened her eyes slowly and looked up at him. In an instant, she assembled an expression of raw, primal terror on her face and began pushing weakly against his chest.
“Don’t touch me!” she cried, her voice fracturing on the words. “You disgust me! You destroyed my family for that woman, and now you want to kill me too p>
It was a masterclass in manipulation — retreating just enough to strike directly at his guilt, exploiting the precise psychological wound she had spent years learning to find.
Cole wrapped his arms around her and held her firmly against his chest, giving her nowhere to go. His jaw was tight. His eyes were filled with a deep, torn agony.