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Chapter 77: "Caelum?"
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2024-10-29 19:42:56Related chapters
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His voice floats into my head and I have to mask my reaction as he begins,~I’m almost tempted to accompany you two. It doesn’t take much for an argument to start especially when you’re left alone~I chortle because it really doesn’t, but he didn’t have to remind me of that. There’s a devious gleam in Sebastien’s eyes that tells me he liked letting me know how often Caleum and I argue, and this time when I get up, I take a look behind me and see the younger faces camped around the bed. This time, Alora doesn’t seem to be shivering at the sight of Kellen, or feel timid considering her proximity to him.If anything, I feel she wants him to notice her, and I gauge the tension between them. The tension they seem to have always been between them.“They’re siblings aren’t they?”Sebastien chuckles at my question and his response is loud enough that they can both hear, “It’s a bit more complicated than that.”I nod because I'd always suspected it.I take one look at Dimitri and Ophelia and
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Caelum is in the living room when I go to him and this time I know something has changed.He’s hunched over his computer, the look on his face grim and the line of his lips tight. I can tell something’s wrong, it’s obvious, yet when he looks at me his eyes soften. He sits up straight and I unconsciously notice how much space he takes up on the couch.The couch is large enough though. It’s almost perfect for someone of his size.I take the leap of faith and I go to sit beside him. Directly beside him. I feel Caelum stiffen as I settle in and that makes me chuckle, because this shows he’s just as nervous as I am and that settles me.“Is anything the problem?”I can almost already tell there is, yet this isn’t one of those moments where the knowledge of an imminent problem would bring cold to my fingers or a scared rumbling to my belly. The laptop is shining in front of us. When I direct my eyes to it I almost half expect him to close the open window, but he doesn’t.Instead he seems t
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The more I read the more I feel like hitting my head on something, or slamming a knife against my chest and letting the sharp end go in so fast it just stops everything.“This is going to put a lot of people in trouble.”Caelum chuckles beside me and when he speaks, his voice tickles something at the back of my brain though his statement is solemn, “I don’t believe they’re thinking about any of that.”I agree with him because they’re not. It’s obvious they’re not.Volta Shipping isn’t just any shipping company, they have ties everywhere, and even if they seem small, I don’t think they are. They’re one of those organizations I never got to wrap my head around, to be honest. Nothing seemed clear cut when it came to them, but they served my purpose so their origins at the time wasn’t that big of a stumbling block“A scandal of this size could sink Volta.”They don’t have the necessary footholds to survive something of this magnitude, not to talk of the fact that Ulric doesn’t know what t
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“Alora!”I can barely keep the shrill scream from my voice.“Aloraa!!!”There’s something almost perfect about the air today and though I'm screaming my lungs out, I realize all this, just a few happy moments with these people, washes away the years of pain and trauma I've always been trying to keep under the surface. I scream again,“Aloraa!!!”This time she sticks her head out from one of the rooms with a disgruntled look on her face, like an annoyed cat. Her words are calm and slow as she responds, “Is there any reason why you want to shake the pillars of this manor with the sound of my name?”I scoff and chuckle at the same time because if I could do that, I would have done it a long time ago, just not to these pillars and not to this house.I go through the door and into the room she’s in and when she’s seated on the bed again, looking up at me confused and with a slight frown on her face, probably because I’m grinning so much, I say the first thing that comes to mind,“You start
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Alora’s response does not surprise me, but the efficiency of the task does. I realize that I can see what Caleum meant when he told me to go ask Alora. He didn’t just want me to congratulate Alora on her return to reporting. He wanted to save me the stress of having to find things out myself. Things like who to truly side with within this Volta vs Highrise dilemma, and while siding with Volta would have been the easiest and best choice, now I know it’s the right choice too.I know I wasn't wrong with my judgment, and Alora has done the fact-finding to prove it.“Did you get what you needed from her?”Caelum is still seated on the couch when I return, and this time I don't even think twice about it. I throw myself onto the couch with a slump, sitting as close to him as I can and feeling the warmth of his skin on mine through his shirt as I respond.“Ulric is the one setting the company up. I was right.”Caelum chuckles in a way that makes me feel he’s saying there was never a doubt ab
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Caelum nods when I say that and it takes some time, it takes me some time for me to fully process it all, but I find myself chuckling, and when I look up at Caelum again, I find I can't say anything else than what I've said twice now.“You knew.”Caelum nods again and I feel something shift in my mind as I stare at the ceiling once more. The height of it makes the house feel all the more real to me to an extent and I don't know why but I let it ground me.I let the slight look of uncertainty I had seen in Caelum’s eyes bring my mind back to the right track, and with all this knowledge, I look at the situation with new eyes, and I repeat it over and over in my mind again, that he knew.I had always wondered at why Volta was so loose.Why they were so freehanded. Why they would literally not report us to the authorities whenever Ulric tried to sneak contraband into our products and get them shipped overseas?It’s because he knew.Caelum owns Volta. He’s known from the start that Ulri
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Caelum doesn’t let us speak about Volta, and in the spirit of that, I let myself relax in his arms for the rest of the day. I realize it’s nice to sit in Caelum’s highrises’s arms. He doesn’t like it when I call him Highrise, and I realize I don't like it too much.Mostly because the name Highrise reminds me too much of the family connected to it, yet at the end of the day, my daughter bears that name. I bear that name.I want to stop bearing it because of the man who’s made the name a noose around my neck. Ulroic made the highrise name a rope by which he could tug me this way and that, and I let him. I let him do that out of the obligation I felt to be responsible for that name.Ulric made me hate the Highrise name, but Ravenna and Caelum make me feel like some good can come out of it.Like there’s hope, for me and for all of us who bear the name Highrise by association, and not by inheritance.“What are you thinking about?”I hear Caelum’s words strike chords in my heart and another
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Sophia’s pov.I wake up in Caelum’s bed, and I wake up to the feeling of him around me. His skin - so close to mine and his hands around my waist again, holding onto me, like I'm running somewhere.I sigh at the warmth that curls in my stomach, and I sigh at the feeling of his presence, of him, mentally breathing on the mate bond, but more than that, I sigh at the fact that he’s here. The fact I'm not alone anymore, and that as weird as all this might be, I am going to figure it out.I turn to look at him, and I see dark hair tumbling over a sharp and ridiculously handsome face. I see that face has eyes tightly closed in sleep, but his expression while in sleep makes me wonder if he’s actually enjoying the sleep or not.There’s a line, a silver line, just on one of his cheekbones. Up close I can see it without having to strain my eyes.Caelum Maxmoff sleeps with the same expression I used to see on his face each time we met in the halls of this house, or the dining room. Caelum slee
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Kellen isn’t in the room anymore when I enter so I go out into the garden to look for him. I can already see the presence of him in my mind, can already feel the residue he left there, and once again I meet him lying on the bench and staring at the clouds overhead. It’s almost noon now so the sky is a patchwork of colors, a gentle artist’s creation as he drags his paintbrush across the canvas. I ask in a deadpan tone, “Am I to assume you left that nagging at the back of my mind so I could find you or were you waiting for someone already?” I ask because, from the look on his face, I get the feeling that he already knew I would be making my way down here. His response is sullen, “Who would the blind grown male possibly be waiting for?” Again, he sounds moody, and this time I do not let it bother me as much as it would have this afternoon because I have something bothering me too. Something he’s caused to bother me, and which he’s now responsible for explaining. “What did you mean b
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Sophia’s pov.For some reason, Caelum is concerned about the smear campaign going on about me online, and it takes me a moment to come to terms with it.Because it isn’t so bad to me. It’s Violet making her first move and that’s okay. She can’t hurt me directly anymore. The only thing she can do is hold onto Ulric and do his bidding, and I am way past the point where I consider that to be something valuable, or where I consider it to be something she’s taken from me.Right now, I feel nothing about it.I want to feel sorry for her, and I do, but not enough to care. She can fund a million more articles calling me every name imaginable, I wouldn't bat an eyelid to any of them.Yet Caelum though….“I’ll get it pulled down first.”His voice sounds calm and resigned as he begins, “Then block every other avenue they will have to put more out there.”That sounds like a simple statement. It sounds like an exceedingly simple statement, except I know how much it would take to get half the new
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Caelum’s pov.I watch the look on Sophia’s face.I watch how it morphs and changes from a look of blank neutrality, to one of light worry, and then back to her blank neutrality.The emotions her’s elicits in me are cool and calm for now, but I can feel the annoyance the worry she feels brings out in me. I can feel myself waiting for her to just show me an inkling of how much this hurts her, and give me the excuse to do what I've wanted to do for a while now.Murder my half-brother with my bare hands.“I can see Violet’s handiwork all over this.”Sophia’s response isn’t the one I’d been hoping for, and I chuckle internally at that while I feel a smile line my lips, because trust her to always surprise me. I ask more silently, like we’re the only people in the room,“Do you want to see what the public response is?”She saddles closer to me and nods, and suddenly I want to do nothing more than have her in my arms, her laps straddling me, my hands on her hips, and my mouth on hers, bringi
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Everyone goes back in when they’re dirty and soiled enough, and soon it’s only me and my garden. I’d always wanted to grow a garden. I just didn’t have the chance to really do that in Ulric’s mansion, but now that I can, I want to do it here.I’m halfway through rearranging and reconstructing the mounds of soil my little gardeners did when I feel a presence at the entrance to the backyard.I dart my eyes over to see who it is, because it’s not Caelum, I'd have felt it if it was him, and I'm right.It isn’t him.It’s Sebastian instead.I really can’t help the memory flash that comes, and I let it because he’s essentially the first person I knew from this world.He was the bartender who saw me at my worst. Who saw me smiling through alcohol and pain, who saw me whistling along to the sound of my favorite band coming from the speakers in the bar, and who I blatantly told I wouldn't stop drinking, not even if he forced me.I haven’t gone near another bottle of alcohol since then, and that
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Alora is snickering by the side of the wall and Ophelia is drawing with a light smile on her face, while I watch Dimitri… wreck the gardening mounds as he heaves and throws and just…“You could always ask him to stop y’know.”Kellen’s voice floats over from the bench he’s lain on, back against the stone, eyes to the skies, and voice oddly unfeeling as he makes that comment,He sounds calm, and he’s right, I could always ask Dimitri to stop, But so far, he’s the only one who’s offered to help me and he doesn’t seem to care that the others are saying he’s terrible at it, he’s doing what he’s doing regardless.I really want to ask him who taught him how to garden, but then I remember where they both were just a few days ago, and I keep my mouth shut.If Dimitri wants to ruin my garden to process his emotions, then he can. I’ll do my best to salvage what I can later.He seems really interested in actually doing the gardening, he’s doggedly adamant about planting the seeds, and playing wit
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Caelum chuckles, and it’s a laughing kind of chuckle because I enjoy it. I hear his laughter, I hear the sound of it and I enjoy its raspy timbre. I enjoy how he sounds like he just can’t believe his ears. And I enjoy how his eyes seem to gleam a bit, whether with remorse or happiness - I don't know - as he asks, “How is my reason for killing more noble than yours?”Caelum asks a simple question, but it strikes me as hard because I would have to be honest with him on this, and I don't think I have been honest with anyone about this in a long time now.I don’t think anyone really cared to know, so I've never told them. Not Violet, or Ulric, or any of the people I considered family.I feel comfortable when I tell Caelum, “My reason for killing him was anger.”Something primal gleams behind Caelum’s eyes and I suddenly feel so small when he places his gaze on me.Like he could swallow me up with the intensity of that gaze, and I'd let him. Light goosebumps trail up my skin as I clear my
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I do not ask Caelum for permission to go out anymore.My mind has already brought up another way of getting what I need to do, done, and though it wouldn’t be the most conventional way, I still accept it as a way because it is… and asking for permission to go out, would mean I’d have to go out if he agrees, and i don’t want to because that would entail me leaving his side,And I don't want to.I realized it as soon as Caelum started speaking to me and I started seeing him smile from some of the responses I gave him. His voice is filled with light wonder as he peers down at me from where he’s seated and asks,“You’re really the daughter of an Alpha?”I nod, not feeling offended at the fact that he’s making that statement, or that he seems to find the need to ask that question. Not many people know I am the daughter of an Alpha, but it seems like an important thing for my mate to know, and he did say he wanted to understand me.To understand me, he has to understand my background, and h
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“You know half the city is looking for you right now, right?”I only catch a sliver of Sebastien’s statement before I leave the room, yet I can already tell what he’s speaking about, who he’s speaking of, and what the implications of his words are. A short thrill of fear shoots up my spine because though Caelum acts all cool and composed, I can tell what the implications of that video will be now that we’ve decided to keep it up.Caelum showed off weapons with the ability to level the greatest mansion in the history of the past ten years, along with that, he killed the aged leaders of a prestigious pack. No one would believe that would have happened if you told them, yet it did, and all the world will care to know is that those weapons are still in his care and they should not be.They’ll try to attack Caelum from all sides. They’ll try to come at him with lawsuits for lack of a license to handle such weapons, try to label him a national enemy, of course, the real consequences of Ca
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Caelum’s face is scrunched in a light frown when he watches the video, but I notice there’s nothing foul about the frown.He looks conflicted, like he’s trying to decide on something and he can’t, so he’s keeping quiet about it. Mulling over it again and again in his thoughts.I feel a surge of worry and concern go through me and I speak without thinking about it any longer, “If you’re worried about the weapons and your identity, I'm sure we can find a way to get the video pulled down.I can.I can find a way to help with that. This video is only up because you came to save me, and I don't want that to affect you.” I realize how sappy I sound and some rebellious spirit in me lets out a barf sound, nope, it’s Alora. I shoot her a glare, and she looks away as she chuckles, but I feel Caelum’s gaze accurately on me. I feel the intensity of it, the moment it alights on me, and I feel the emotion that courses through it, his gaze bathes me in a subtle heat, like sunlight.And through it,
