Chapter 388 That’s what led to her death

“Nick wouldn’t have done such a thing, could he?” She whispered, more tears streaming down her face, the imagination of it alone feeling like staring into something too horrible to look at directly. It couldn’t have been him. He couldn’t have done something like that to her, but yet he was the last man she remembered seeing.

“As much as I want to comfort you, sunshine, Nick is the son of a greedy woman like Camila, and the brother of a traitor like Javier. Apples don’t fall far from their trees. And if he is responsible…” Sebastian gritted out, his arms tightening around her, “I will kill him in the worst way possible.” He opened his mind link quietly and ordered Matt to send men to apprehend Nick immediately.

Though Sebastian wanted to believe there had been no sexual intercourse involved in the assault, he couldn’t confirm it, whoever was responsible had concealed their scent and left nothing behind he could use as identification. But sexual intercourse or not, Sebastian was not going to allow his bond with her to wane. Not if he had to fight it every single day until the day he would mark her finally.

Viola cried into his chest, and when her tears finally dried and nothing more came, the detachment settled back in more solidly than before. She pulled back from him slightly. “I should talk to him. I can always tell when he isn’t being truthful with me, I know him well enough to—”

“You are not seeing him alone. I have already sent men to take him into custody. Once he is there, we will see him together.”

Before all of this, Viola might have pushed back and pleaded for more time before his arrest. But she couldn’t bring herself to do that now. She felt nothing, nothing at all, and that was its own kind of answer to the relationship they had once had.

“Don’t leave my side tonight. Stay with me.”

She gently pulled his hand, guiding him back down onto the bed before settling her head against his chest and laying down half on him. Beneath the blanket, she draped one leg possessively over his, slipping it between his warm, muscular thighs, wanting to remain there for as long as she possibly could.

She had a new fear now, one she had never imagined she would carry. She wanted to hold on to every moment of the affection he still had for her before the inevitable happened, before the unmarked mate bond took over and began pulling him away from her, the way it was said to do when it perceived something like this as a betrayal of the relationship.

She put her arm around his waist and said quietly, “For now let’s pretend none of this happened. Tell me about Natalie like you promised you would tonight. Why did you kill her?” She asked, remembering the topic she had been carrying all day and not wanting it to get buried under everything that had happened, under her… assault. She felt the constricting feeling rise in her chest at the thought of Nick being responsible and pushed it firmly back down.

“Are you sure you want to talk about it tonight?”

He pressed a gentle kiss to her hair, feeling the storm of doubt and emotion swirling inside her. He wanted to reassure her further about his love, but he knew it would be better to prove his words through his actions rather than simply saying them.

She was emotionally fragile right now. More than anything, she needed to feel safe and secure in his arms and his world.

Guilt gnawed relentlessly at him. None of this would have happened if he had simply turned them around instead of attending the ceremony that morning. Better yet, if they had never come to the Grim Pack at all and he had chosen to deal with the other packs through war instead, she would still have been safe beside him and this life changing event wouldn’t have occurred.

He had promised to protect her.

Tonight, he felt as though he had failed at another promise yet…

Viola nodded against his chest.

“Yes. Tell me everything. From how you met her… to how you killed her.”

Sebastian had always known this day would come, the day he would finally tell her the whole truth. Because if he was going to spend forever with her, there could be no more lies, no more secrets left standing between them.

But after everything that had happened only hours ago, the confession somehow felt both less important and far more urgent.

He couldn’t afford to let Alex reach her first and tell her his version of the story, the one he had believed for years, the one that had made him hate Sebastian with every fiber of his being.

The last thing Sebastian wanted was for Viola to look at him the way his brother did.

If anything, his wife deserved to hear it from him. So his eyes drifted idly to the wall clock, 2:29 am, and he parted his lips and began to talk.

“I wasn’t the one who married Natalie. I wasn’t the man who had that so called perfect relationship with her.” He said, and Viola’s head lifted from his chest immediately, her eyes finding his with a small frown.

“How is that possible? I followed your relationship for years through social media and—”

“It wasn’t me, love. I never did any of that with her. It was my brother.” He confessed, watching her eyes move through confusion and then slowly into realization before she asked, “You mean… Alex isn’t dead?”

Sebastian nodded. “I never killed him. What the pack witnessed was someone else’s blood on those sheets. I may not care about many things, amor, but family has always meant the most to me and I cherish every one of them. Killing Alex was never an option. Everything you saw with Natalie, that was Alex.”

Viola absorbed his words carefully, and it suddenly occurred to her that the photo album she had looked through that day, the one that had given her a strange, nagging feeling she couldn’t name, hadn’t been her imagination after all.

The man who appeared in every photograph with Natalie always wore turtlenecks and long-sleeved shirts, and something about him had never quite looked like the man she had married and come to know so intimately enough. At the time she hadn’t known Sebastian intimately enough to pinpoint what was off. Now she understood exactly what it had been.

“So where is he now?” she asked, resting her head back against his chest as he slid a hand behind her head, gently guiding her to lie comfortably against him.

“My brother is in hiding. In the past we used to switch places every month, but after he started seeing Natalie, he negotiated for six months each. Most of the time I gave him even more than that, only going out for a month at a time and leaving him longer stretches, because I was awkward around his woman and never knew what excuse to give whenever she looked at me wanting intimacy. I had given my word never to lay a hand on Alex’s woman, so rather than go against it, I gave him more days.”

Viola listened carefully, her own situation fading to the background for a moment as she was pulled into his. She couldn’t help the surprise at the revelation that Alex wasn’t dead and they had managed to pull of a twin switch on the pack members with no one suspecting at all.

“Did Natalie never notice the difference between the two of you?” She asked, genuinely curious, because she had felt something was off from a photograph album alone, let alone in person. If she knew the man she married so well, she would have picked up the differences.

Sebastian’s lips curved into a bitter smile.

“That’s what led to her death. Her love for him was never the sunshine-and-rainbows kind you imagine. There was a deep crack in their relationship long before everything fell apart.”

“Did you kill her because she found out about the two of you?” Viola asked quietly, hoping with all her heart that wasn’t the reason.

It felt far too small a reason to take the life of the woman his brother had loved enough to risk everything for, the woman he had taken across the world, professing his love for her in every country they visited, even in the human world.

“I wish it were that simple. I wouldn’t have killed her for that.” He said, his voice going cold and distant as his eyes moved to some point on the wall. He had never told anyone this. But his wife needed to hear it from him.

When the silence stretched, Viola asked softly, “What did she do?”