Page 137 of Alpha-Ex Wedding Ruse
I turned to look at her. “You knew, didn’t you?” My voice was sharper than I intended, but I didn’t care.
For a moment, her brows knit in confusion, then the look shifted. Not confusion. Recognition. And beneath it…guilt.
I gave a humorless scoff. “Of course you knew.”
“I couldn’t tell you, Luca,” she said softly, remorse dripping from every word. “She swore me to secrecy.”
I shook my head, jaw tight. I couldn’t deal with this. Everyone in my life had lied to me—my mother, my father, fucking Victor…and now Mrs. Chen.
Without another word, I turned and walked up the stairs, my footsteps echoing like a countdown. When I reached my father’s study, I shoved the door open hard enough to rattle it on its hinges.
He jerked upright behind his desk, anger flashing across his face. “Have you lost your damn mind, boy?”
“We need to talk.” My voice was cold, deliberate.
“That gives you no reason to barge into my office like a psychopath,” he snapped. “I’ll take your disrespect anywhere else, but not here. Not in my own house.”
“Oh, spare me your self-righteous bullshit,” I shot back. “Cat’s out of the bag, Father. You can drop the holier-than-thou act.”
He eyed me warily before leaning back in his chair and sliding the glasses off the bridge of his nose.
“This is about your mother’s dramatic reappearance, isn’t it?” he asked. “She’s come back to feed you all sorts of nonsense, and now you’ve forgotten who it was that raised you all these years after she abandoned you and your brother.”
“She didn’t abandon us—you drove her away!” I stepped forward, so sick of his constant lies. He’d take me for a fool all these years, lying over and over again. And here he was, doing the exact same thing again.
I wasn’t the type to channel my anger through physical outbursts. I preferred strategy, precision. But finding out you’ve been lied to your entire life? That cracks something in you. That shatters control. That demands an eruption.
Shock flickered across his face. No—anguish. But only for a heartbeat. Then it twisted into something uglier: the mask of a guilty man with zero remorse. No denial. Just the cold calculation of someone deciding how much damage control he needed.
“So, she told you,” he drawled lazily. “I wondered how long it would take her to poison you against me.”
My hands curled into fists. “Poison me? You’re the real poison here. You murdered an innocent man—her Mate—in cold blood. And you threatened to frame her for it if she didn’t leave the pack.”
“I protected this family,” his voice sharpened, cutting through the air like steel. “She was going to destroy everything I built with her infidelity. What do you think other pack Alphas would see me as if they found out my Luna had been unfaithful? They’d think I was weak. That I wasn’t man enough to keep her. That I didn’t have the balls—the cock—to satisfy my woman.”
“That’s what you were worried about? Your fucking cock?”
His eyes flared. “As insignificant as that sounds to you, it’s everything in my world. No Alpha, no businessman, will associate with a man they perceive as weak. And weakness,” he clicked his tongue, “there’s no room for that word in my vocabulary.”
I shook my head in utter disbelief. Between my father and Victor, I didn’t know who was sicker. My father’s sense of what strength meant was definitely sick. Sicker than Victor obsessing over my Mate? That, too, was something sick.
“I eliminated a threat,” he continued, like he was trying to make me see his reason, to reason with him. “Something you clearly don’t understand, given the mess you’ve created lately.”
I stepped forward until I was standing right in front of me, staring him down so he could see the disgust in my eyes, the shame I felt for having to call someone like him my father. “You spent my entire life calling me incompetent, demanding perfection, holding me to standards so fucking high I thought you were a god. I always knew you were a devil. It didn’t surprise me to learn you forced yourself on my mother. Or that you killed her Mate. But it is shocking how well you played the script of the abandoned husband for twenty-one fucking years.” I clicked my tongue. “I think you might even trump the devil at this point.”
“Watch your tone, boy.” His voice was low, lethal.
“No.” The word came out like a growl. “I’m done pretending you’resome pillar of strength when you’re the most broken, twisted man I know. You destroyed my mother’s life. You made me hate her for abandoning me—when you’re the one who forced her out of our lives. You made damn sure I grew up believing she didn’t love us enough to stay. Have you ever stopped to think that the reason she cheated was because you’re not half the man her Mate was? That she knew she deserved better—and went for it?”
His gaze darkened, and he stood slowly, his towering figure a clear threat. But I didn’t flinch.
“There’s no better man than me. Certainly not that rogue she claims was her Fated Mate. That’s the thing with you and your mother. You believe in all that Fated Mate nonsense, when all it really has ever been is a mask for weakness.”
“You’re wrong,” I said firmly. “And you’d never know what it feels like to have a Fated Mate because the Moon Goddess could never pair you with anyone because you’re the most unworthy person I know.”
He laughed. There was no remorse in his eyes. He had ripped his own family apart, poisoned everyone he touched beyond repair—and all I saw in his expression was irritation. Like this was just another problem he needed to manage.
“While you’re standing here spewing some delusional shit about Fated Mates and throwing a tantrum over ancient history,” he said, “you should be thinking about salvaging the mess you’ve actually made. The wedding you destroyed. The illegal dealings plastered across every news outlet—”
