novelraw Chapter 224- He is mine
Chapter 224- He is mine
Ten days.
That was all it took.
Ten days of waking up too early, of staring at the ceiling until the pale morning light bled through the curtains and burned her eyes. Ten days of swallowing black coffee without tasting it, of letting the scalding heat slide down her throat as if pain in one place could numb the ache in another.
Ten days of Seleyena’s voice playing on repeat inside her skull.
’He is... mine.’
Thalia’s jaw tightened.
She stood in the corridor now — long, marble-floored, lined with enormous potted palms that cast spindly shadows across the polished ground. The air smelled of fresh-cut flowers and old money, of wood polish and ambition. Climate-controlled and silent except for the distant murmur of voices on the other side of the towering door at the corridor’s end.
Two guards flanked it.
They saw her approach.
Without a word, both men dipped their heads in a slow, deliberate bow.
Thalia didn’t pause. She let her heels carry her forward — one measured step, then another — the sound of them clicking against marble the only thing grounding her to the present moment.
’Click. Click. Click.’
She didn’t look at the guards. She didn’t need to. She could feel their eyes tracking her, watchful and careful, the way men in positions like theirs always watched someone they understood to be significant. Someone dangerous in a quiet way.
But her mind — her mind was still back in that room.
Still in the dim hush of Cruxius’s space, where Seleyena had stood with her arm wrapped around her own waist like she was holding herself together. Where she had looked at Thalia with those steady, liquid eyes and said the words with a kind of exhausted finality that somehow made them worse.
’I want to make sure you don’t come back.’
Thalia’s fingers curled at her side.
She wasn’t angry at Cruxius.
That — strangely, bitterly — had never been the wound. Cruxius sleeping with a woman was Cruxius’s own affair. Cruxius’s own choices. Thalia had no claim there, no right to storm and scream about bodies pressed together in the dark.
No. It wasn’t that.
It was Seleyena.
It was the way Seleyena had looked at her — not with malice, not with venom, but with something far more infuriating. With ’pity’. With the kind of calm certainty that belonged to someone who already knew how the story ended. Who had already read the last page and simply waited for Thalia to catch up.
’Do you know how easily he could’ve made you his sex slave, Thalia?’
Her teeth pressed together.
’He respected you — when he didn’t have to.’
"Seleyena," she whispered under her breath, the name escaping her like steam from a cracked lid. Low. Quiet. But the frustration beneath it was enormous and coiled, a living thing she had been carrying in her chest for ten days without relief.
She couldn’t even say it aloud. Not properly. Not the way she wanted to — which was loudly, messily, with her hands shaking and her voice stripped raw. She wanted to scream it into the open air and let the sound carry. She wanted to demand to know who exactly had given Seleyena permission to stand there, composed and trembling all at once, and claim him like a planted flag.
But she couldn’t.
Because screaming meant crumbling. And crumbling meant showing exactly what she refused to show — that somewhere beneath the tight-lipped silence and the ten sleepless days, she felt it. The loss. The sharp, unwelcome sensation of something slipping from her grip.
’Her’ man.
The thought settled in her chest like a stone dropped into still water.
’How dare she.’
The words rolled through her head again, slow and deliberate, gathering weight with every pass.
’How dare she.’
Not because Seleyena was wrong — Thalia was too honest with herself to pretend that. But because hearing it said out loud, hearing it wrapped in soft, careful words delivered by a woman with genuine feeling in her eyes, made it real in a way Thalia had not been prepared for.
It made her realize she had been operating under an assumption. A comfortable, unexamined assumption that he was simply... there. That he would remain in her orbit the way he always had, difficult and electric and impossible to ignore. She had taken that constancy for granted without ever naming it, the way people take warmth for granted until they step into the cold and finally understand what it was.
And now Seleyena stood in the middle of that warmth like she ’belonged’ there.
The guards pulled the door open.
A wall of sound hit her instantly — overlapping voices, the mechanical percussion of cameras firing in rapid succession, the shuffle of bodies pressing forward. The conference room was enormous. Long glass windows let in pale, professional light. A vast table ran the length of the room, surrounded by men and women in dark suits, their faces already turning.
But it was the press section that erupted.
’Flash. Flash. Flash.’
The bursts of white light caught her mid-step, and Thalia absorbed them without flinching. She had been in rooms like this before. She knew how to let the noise wash over her without drowning in it.
"Miss Thalia — Miss Thalia, is it confirmed that you will be named the official heir?"
"Can you speak to your relationship with the Black family patriarch?"
"Are you taking sole ownership of the corporation — is this a hostile acquisition or a sanctioned transfer?"
The questions came in jagged overlapping layers, microphones tilting toward her like sunflowers turning toward light.
She paused at the edge of the room.
Her chin lifted, just slightly. Her shoulders settled back. The posture cost her nothing — it was bred into her, bone-deep and automatic — but it transformed her completely. The woman who had been standing alone in a corridor pressing her fingernails into her palm simply vanished.
"The details of any structural decisions within the Black family corporation will be communicated through the appropriate channels at the appropriate time," she said.