Sold to Bastard Alpha after My Divorce!-Chapter 195

Kael’s POV

The voicemail hit me like a gunshot.

I’d been in the middle of a drill formation when Damon appeared at the edge of the training field. One look at his face and I knew. Whatever had happened, it wasn’t small.

I was in the car before he finished talking.

The whole drive, I kept replaying her voice in my head. That voicemail. Three sentences. *Kael, call me the second you get this. It’s—just call me. Please.*

She’d stopped mid-sentence.

Aria never stopped mid-sentence.

Damon briefed me from the passenger seat. Serena. The school. The cream-colored car heading south. The girls. I listened to every word and kept my hands steady on the wheel and said nothing because if I opened my mouth right now, something was going to come out that I couldn’t take back.

I found her on a sidewalk, two blocks from the industrial ring road, limping toward the southern boundary like she was going to chase down the car on foot.

I almost didn’t recognize her for a second. Not because of how she looked—that sharp profile, that straight spine—but because of the way she was moving. Like she was held together by sheer stubbornness and nothing else.

She went down on one knee just as I pulled over.

I was out of the car and across the pavement in seconds.

"Hey." I got my hands around her before she hit the ground. "Hey—I’ve got you."

She turned her head. Found my eyes. And for just one second, every wall she’d been holding up all afternoon—the control, the focus, the terrible calm—cracked right down the middle.

"Kael." The way she said my name. Like she’d been holding it in her chest for hours and had finally run out of room.

"I’m here." I looked down at her leg. At the soaked bandaging. At the dark stain spreading through her slacks. My jaw locked. "What happened to your leg?"

"It doesn’t matter right now."

"Aria—"

"The girls," she said. Sharp. Clear. Back in control, just like that. "Serena has them. She’s heading for the border, Kael. She’s going to sell them."

Something in my chest went very, very cold.

"Get in the car," I said.

"I’m coming with you."

"I know." I was already pulling her upright. "That’s why I said get in the car."

---

She told me everything on the drive.

I listened. Eyes on the road. Foot on the accelerator. Every detail landing like a stone in still water.

Serena had planned this. Documentation. A story. Fake consent forms that looked real enough to fool school staff. She’d studied Aria’s schedule. She’d known exactly when to show up, exactly what to say.

She’d been planning this for a while.

And I hadn’t seen it coming.

That was the part I couldn’t stop turning over in my head. I had an entire intelligence network. I had people watching the perimeter. I had files on every potential threat to this territory and to Aria’s family.

And I hadn’t seen this coming.

"How long has your leg been like that?" I asked.

A pause.

"Not so long," she said.

I didn’t argue. There was no argument to make.

Instead I picked up my phone and made three calls. Fast. Precise. The tracking team had already locked Serena’s car—Route Eleven, heading south, less than twelve minutes from the outer boundary crossing. I gave orders. Roadblock at the boundary. Intercept teams from both flanks. Nobody moves until I’m in position.

"You have her?" Aria asked when I hung up.

"We have the car." I looked at her. "We’ll have her in ten minutes."

She turned back to the window.

Her fingers were pressed flat against her thigh—not over the wound, just beside it. Like she was containing herself. Keeping everything inside by sheer force of will.

Ten minutes had never felt so long. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

---

We saw the car from half a kilometer out.

Serena had stopped. Not by choice.

Two black SUVs had boxed her in from either side. A third sat across the road dead ahead, engine running, lights on. She’d driven straight into the trap and probably hadn’t realized it until the last twenty seconds.

The cream-colored sedan sat crooked on the asphalt. She’d braked hard. There were skid marks.

I pulled up behind it and stepped out.

Open road. Low scrubland. The boundary markers visible in the distance—red and silver, Blood Crown territory’s edge. Four minutes. Maybe less.

She’d been four minutes away.

My people stepped back when I walked through. They knew better than to be between me and whatever I was walking toward.

The passenger doors were still shut. Nobody had gotten out from the inside. Good.

Then the driver’s door flew open and Serena practically fell out of it.

She caught herself on the door frame. Hair half out of whatever she’d put it in. Mascara smeared under one eye. Her blouse was wrinkled and there was a coffee stain on the sleeve that hadn’t been there yesterday.

She looked like someone who’d spent the last three hours convincing herself everything was going to be fine.

It wasn’t.

She saw me and went completely still for one second. Then her chin came up.

"Kael." She said my name like she was bored. Like this was an inconvenience rather than the end of everything she’d tried to pull off. "Quite the welcome party."

"Where are the girls."

Not a question.

She laughed. Short and sharp. "Oh relax. They’re in the back. I’m not a monster."

"Step away from the car."

She took two steps back. Her hands came up—and that’s when I saw the phone. Left hand, screen lit, her thumb already moving.

She was making a call.

I raised my gun and pulled the trigger in the same motion.

The shot was clean. Her wrist snapped back. The phone hit the asphalt and skittered under the sedan.

Serena screamed.

Not a dignified sound. Raw and ugly, the kind that comes before thinking, before control. She grabbed her wrist and bent double, and the composure she’d been performing since she stepped out of the car shattered completely.

"You SHOT me—" She looked up. Eyes wet. Face red. "You actually—are you insane? You shot me! Over CHILDREN? They’re just—"

"Careful," I said, "what you say next."

She shut up.

Her wrist was bleeding. Not badly—I’d aimed for the edge, enough to stop her, not enough to do permanent damage. She was clutching it against her chest and shaking, all that manufactured calm gone, and what was left underneath was exactly what I’d expected.

Fear. Fury. The particular combination of both that only shows up in people who thought they were smarter than everyone around them and just found out they weren’t.

Behind me, engines. Voices. My team moving.

Down the road, maybe two hundred meters, a cluster of vehicles had gone very still. Seven of them. Dark windows. Out-of-territory plates. They’d been waiting at the boundary—waiting for Serena to deliver.

The buyers.

"Take them," I said.

My second was already moving before I finished the sentence.

It took less than three minutes. These men weren’t fighters. They were businessmen. Men with clean hands and cold math who dealt in human lives like they were line items on a spreadsheet. They didn’t run. They didn’t even try.

They just went very, very still.

Smart.

Serena watched all of it happen. Her face had gone gray. Whatever she’d been telling herself about how this would play out—that she’d get across the border, that the money would fix everything, that nobody would trace it back to her—it was all dissolving in real time.

I turned back to the sedan.

The back door opened.

---

Lina came out first.

She was pale. Her dark hair was messy and her eyes were too wide, that particular kind of wide that children get when they’ve been afraid for a long time and have been trying very hard not to show it. She stood at the edge of the car door and looked around at everything—the SUVs, my people, the men being held—and her small face crumpled for half a second before she got control of it again.

Four years old and already trying to be brave.

My chest did something painful.

Lilith was right behind her. Quieter. Her eyes tracking everything with that unnerving, too-old steadiness. She’d been through worse than this, I knew. That was both better and worse at the same time.

Both girls looked at Aria’s car.

And then Aria stepped out.

She shouldn’t have. Her leg was bleeding through the bandage and she’d been on it all day and she looked like she was running on nothing but adrenaline and sheer stubbornness. But she was already moving, door swinging open, pulling herself upright, one hand on the car frame.

"Mommy!"

The word came from Lina like a dam breaking.

She ran. The way small children run when they’ve been afraid and the fear is suddenly, finally over—completely, abandoning every pretense of composure. Lilith was right behind her, something fractured in her expression, and she was running too, both of them running across the road, and they were crying, actually crying, not bothering to hold it back.

"Mama—"

"Mommy, Mommy—"

Aria’s face.

God. Her face.

She took two steps toward them. Shaking. Her arms already coming up. Her eyes wet and wide and so achingly full of everything she’d been holding in for the past hours.

Two steps.

And then her legs gave out.

She went down. Not violently—just quietly, suddenly, the way a candle goes out when there’s no air left. One moment she was standing. The next she wasn’t.