Chapter 151
Chapter 151:
They crashed into a stack of supply crates, sending plastic containers skittering across the deck. It was not a clean, disciplined fight — it was a messy, furious brawl between two powerful men driven by years of rivalry and something far older than reason.
Hilliard drove his fist into Kegan’s ribs, fueled by a white-hot jealousy that was eating him from the inside out. Kegan was holding her. Kegan was protecting her. Kegan knew her secrets.
Cailin stood back, clutching Elia — whom a medic had brought out wrapped in a thick blanket — against her chest.
“Stop it! Both of you!” she screamed, but her voice dissolved into the wind and the roar of the helicopter overhead.
Kegan drove a sharp knee into Hilliard’s stomach, folding him in half. Hilliard, enraged, grabbed Kegan’s collar and slammed him back against the boat’s railing. Kegan’s mercenaries raised their rifles — and froze at a single sharp, almost imperceptible shake of his head. He wanted to finish this man-to-man.
“She doesn’t love you,” Kegan said, spitting blood onto the deck. “She fears you p>
“She is my wife!” Hilliard roared, and swung again.
“She is the mother of my children!” Kegan’s voice boomed across the water — a verbal grenade, perfectly placed, designed to detonate everything.
Hilliard’s fist stopped in mid-air.
My children. The words wouldn’t process. The DNA test. Kegan. The numbers refused to add up.
Kegan used the half-second of paralysis to sweep Hilliard’s legs. Hilliard hit the deck hard, the impact driving the air from his lungs and sending a white flash of pain through his ribs.
𝖲𝗍о𝗋іеs 𝗒𝘰𝘶 𝘸𝗼n’𝘵 𝗽𝗎𝘵 𝖽o𝘄ո 𝗈n
Kegan stood over him, chest heaving, wiping blood from his nose with the back of a gloved hand.
“Look at her, Holloway,” he said, and pointed.
Hilliard pushed himself up on one elbow, his ribs screaming. He looked.
Cailin was not looking at him. She had buried her face in Elia’s hair and was leaning against one of Kegan’s mercenaries for support, her body curved around the child, her eyes closed. She looked hollowed out — worn down by his accusations, by his blind and relentless defense of Charla, by all of it.
Her posture said defeat. Her choice of where to stand said something far more permanent.
“Take them to the chopper,” Kegan ordered his men.
“Cailin!” Hilliard tried to rise. The pain stopped him.
Cailin paused at the edge of the deck, near the rescue basket waiting to hoist them up. She turned and looked back at him — sprawled on the wet fiberglass, bleeding, surrounded by the wreckage of everything he had chosen.
Her eyes were still. No anger. No love. No hate. Only a vast, quiet distance that no amount of money or power could cross.
“Goodbye, Hilliard p>
She climbed into the basket with Elia and did not look back again.
Hilliard lay on the deck and watched them ascend, the cable retracting steadily into the belly of the black machine until they disappeared. He was left behind with the liar he had chosen over her, the wind, and the sound of the water.
His heart didn’t simply break. It shattered.
The helicopter disappeared into the night sky, its lights fading like dying stars.