Chapter 325 I wanted you to get close to Julian Cross

Chapter 325: Chapter 325 I wanted you to get close to Julian Cross

Aria’s POV

I read the folder twice, sitting alone in that cold French estate with the fire dying low and Sylvia’s poison still ringing in my ears.

Questions about a death. Motive. Opportunity. The Blackwoods.

And yet, the more I stared at those neatly typed pages, the more something in me refused to bend. I’d learned the hard way what a forged document looked like. I’d built my entire escape on the ruins of one. A folder and a few whispered accusations weren’t going to undo the man who sat with me in a bridal atelier and dismissed forty gowns just to see the right one. The man who counted thirty-one years for me.

No. If there were questions, then I would ask Damian himself. I would put every page of this in front of him and watch his face, because I knew his face now, and I trusted it more than I trusted the woman who’d tried to make me sign away my inheritance the week my father died.

I picked up my phone and headed for the door.

The handle wouldn’t turn.

I knocked. "Grandfather? Kiel?"

No answer.

Through the window, I caught sight of two guards stationed outside the entrance.

My stomach sank.

They weren’t asking me to stay.

They were keeping me here.

---

Ethan’s POV

My grandmother’s funeral had barely settled into the ground before I was standing in the marble lobby of the V&A Group, demanding answers.

Two years. Two years I’d propped that woman up as my Luna, funneled every ounce of her strange, inconvenient talent into keeping Silver Creek afloat, and the moment my grandmother passed, Aria Smith couldn’t even show me the decency of a face-to-face conversation.

"Where is she," I said to the receptionist. My voice came out flat and cold, and I saw the girl flinch.

"Mr. Holt, I’m sorry, but Miss Smith is traveling on business. She’s out of the country." She wouldn’t meet my eyes. "I don’t have a return date."

Out of the country. Business.

Heat crawled up the back of my neck. I gripped the edge of the reception desk hard enough to feel the wood bite into my palm, forcing myself to breathe before I did something that ended up in a lawsuit.

"Trouble in paradise?"

I turned. Nathan Smith was leaning against a pillar near the elevators, hands in his pockets, that cool, unbothered smirk of his already in place. Sylvia’s stepson. The one man in this family who had every reason to hate Aria as much as I did.

"This doesn’t concern you," I said.

"Doesn’t it?" He pushed off the pillar and strolled closer, lowering his voice to something almost friendly. "She took what was mine too, Ethan. The inheritance. The controlling stake. Half of what my father built, handed to a bastard daughter nobody wanted."

He let that sit. "You and I want the same thing. If you ever decide you’re done playing the wounded ex, and you actually want to move against her, I have resources you don’t. Say the word."

I studied his face for a long moment. I didn’t trust him. I wasn’t sure I trusted anyone anymore.

But I filed it away. Every card counts when you’ve got none left.

"I’ll think about it," I said, and I left before he could see how much I meant it.

The drive back to Silver Creek did nothing to cool me down.

I smelled her before I reached the front door. Warm and familiar and impossible, and my whole body went rigid on the threshold.

Clara was standing in my living room like she’d never left. Marcus was asleep on the couch behind her, our son, curled up under a blanket that used to be hers. She turned when I walked in, and she had the audacity to smile at me.

"Ethan. You look exhausted, love. Let me—"

"What are you doing here." Not a question. My voice had gone to ice. "You made your choice, Clara. You don’t get to walk back in here whenever it’s convenient."

Her smile faltered. "Don’t be like that. I came for the funeral. Rose was practically a grandmother to me."

"Get out."

"Ethan Holt." My own mother’s voice cracked across the room like a whip. My mother, Margaret, sweeping in from the hall with her jaw set. "That is no way to speak to Clara. After everything she’s given up for this family."

"Given up," I repeated. I could have laughed.

"You will not throw this away out of pride." My mother crossed to Clara’s side, took her hand, and looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read. "Welcome home, Clara."

Then her voice came through my mindlink, meant for me alone.

"Do you have any idea where she’s been these past months? Do you know who she’s connected to now?"

"Clara is with Sentinel Energy, Ethan. Julian Cross brought her in personally. Sentinel is Crown-backed. Every major pack in North America runs through them."

Her voice softened, deliberate and coaxing.

"Whatever happened between you two, you would be a fool to let that door close. Fix this. For the pack."

For the pack. Everything, always, for the pack.

"You’re right," I said quietly. "I overreacted."

Clara’s face lit up with relief, and my mother squeezed her hand, satisfied. I let them believe it. I smiled, I apologized, I played the humbled man coming back to his senses.

But inside, something had gone very cold and very still.

Because I knew the truth of it now. Not Aria—no. Aria was a wound, but Clara was the knife. Clara was the reason I’d rejected my own True Mate at nineteen. Clara was the reason I’d built two years of lies around a woman who’d walked away without a backward glance. Every catastrophe in my life traced back to the woman standing in my living room smiling like she’d won.

I hated Aria for leaving.

I hated Clara more, for being the reason I’d ever had to.

So when Nathan told me three days later that Alpha Cross had taken a very particular interest in Clara—that Julian Cross had been watching her a little too long at every function—I didn’t feel jealous.

I felt like a man who’d finally been handed a lever.

I found her that evening, alone.

"Julian Cross," I said. "He likes you."

She blinked. "Ethan, what are you—"

"I want you to get close to him." I watched the confusion bleed across her face and felt nothing. "Shadowveil handles every foreign relation in the Kingdom. If Silver Creek had their backing, no one could touch us. Not the Smiths. Not anyone."

I stepped closer, my voice soft as a blade. "You owe me this, Clara. You owe me all of it. So you’re going to smile at Julian Cross, and you’re going to make him want you, and you’re going to bring his pack to my door."

For once, she had nothing to say.

Good.