Chapter 370 Why did you kill her?

“I have no words for how you look, mi amor. Zoe did well with the design, but you brought it to life.” He told her, and watched the surprise cross her face.

The omegas quickly left the room with a look from the Alpha to give them privacy.

“Zoe made this?” She asked, and he nodded. “I had to bribe her into doing it on short notice. That’s actually why she didn’t fly with us.”

Viola liked the dress even more knowing it had been made by Zoe, and she was running her hand over the fabric admiringly when Sebastian stepped closer to kiss her and she turned her cheek at the last moment.

“No kissing on the lips, I have lipstick on and you will ruin everything.” She said, and heard him groan as he pressed his lips to her neck instead and put his hands on her hips, pulling her flushed against him.

“You look so beautiful I don’t want any other man looking at you out there. I want to keep you right here in this room, just for me.”

Viola reached up and fixed his tie properly for him, feeling him nibble at her neck, licking and grazing the skin with his teeth, and she pressed gently at his chest. “Sebastian, you are going to leave hickeys on my neck.”

“That’s exactly the plan, to leave my mark on that lovely neck of yours.” He smiled with deliberate mischief and then added, “You can leave one on me too.”

She thought he was joking until he suddenly pulled his collar aside, revealing the thick, vein-corded expanse of his neck, tilting his head to one side and waiting.

When she didn’t move to bite him, Sebastian looked at her and saw that she was staring at him strangely, without a smile and with slightly unfocused eyes. His smile fell. “Is something wrong?”

“I just remembered something that I need to show you.” Saying that, she reached for her phone on the bed and tapped through to the message, only to find that it was gone, the private contact nowhere in her inbox. She frowned.

“What is it?” Sebastian asked, stepping closer and peering at her phone.

“I got a message from a private contact just a little while ago, but now it’s gone. I could have sworn it was there…”

“Let me see.”

Sebastian reached out and took the phone from her hand, all the playfulness disappearing from his face at the thought that someone had messaged his wife through a private contact. He carefully went through her messages.

She didn’t have many messages apart from spam, the countless texts they had exchanged since they had gotten together, and a few from Nick, which he was momentarily tempted to open. But he resisted the urge, unwilling to invade her privacy, and focused instead on searching for the message she had mentioned.

There was nothing from any private contact.

A scowl settled over his features at the thought that someone had dared to send his wife a disappearing message.

“What did the message say?” he asked, lifting his gaze from the screen to the beautiful, breathtaking face in front of him.

Viola told him word for word, without leaving anything out. She had no intentions of keeping it from him and letting it grow silently into a misunderstanding in the future again. She watched his scowl deepen and his lips press into a thin line.

“Didn’t Natalie die from the curse?” She found herself asking, and his eyes, which had turned as cold and hard as granite, capable of freezing the hottest summer solid, cut to her. For a moment Viola felt a shiver run down her spine. That look was so unlike the warm, loving way he usually looked at her, and because she hadn’t seen this look in his eyes for a while, she had forgotten how terrifying Sebastian was when he wasn’t smiling.

She almost regretted blurting the question out, but then she realized she had always held herself back from asking him anything connected to his late wife, afraid of being told something that would make her jealous or hurt. She didn’t take the words back. She waited for the answers to them.

“What do you think?” he asked calmly, watching her.

Viola pursed her lips. “I don’t know what to think. But whatever you tell me is what I will believe, because I know you wouldn’t lie to me. I trust you as much as I love you. And whatever was in that message… it doesn’t change that.”

She watched his expression soften, more than just a fraction, and he took her hand before gently pulling her into his arms.

He had never imagined she would trust him to the point of believing whatever he told her, something no one seemed capable of doing anymore. Not even his sister trusted his words, and neither did his brother. Sebastian had long come to believe that no one would ever truly trust him again after all the promises he had broken, and never had he imagined that those simple words from her would make his heart feel so full, so painfully in love. The feeling caught him completely by surprise, and he instinctively tightened his hold around her.

Because of what she had just said, Sebastian suddenly felt the overwhelming need to never hide anything from her again, to make sure that trust she had placed in him would never be broken. So he parted his lips and quietly confessed,

“I’ve wanted to tell you this for a while now, but I never found the right moment,” he said softly against her hair. “The message is right. Natalie didn’t die because of the curse or because I marked her. I killed her myself… and then I bit her neck afterward to leave the mark.”

He felt her body go rigid in his embrace, but she didn’t pull away. She didn’t scream or look at him with terror. She stayed, and he found himself exhaling slowly. He had carried this alone for a long time, and he hated that some bastard had chosen to send it to her in a message first. He had his suspicions about who that bastard was, Alex, but for now he needed to put Alex aside.

“Why did you kill her?” She asked quietly, unable to fully reconcile the image she had built in her mind of his relationship with Natalie, the one she had quietly envied for so long in Moonwillow, the love she had once wished for herself and now had, with this.