After Rebirth, I Became My Ex's Aunt-in-Law-Chapter 168: Considering Putting My Husband on a Leash

"So," Kai drawled, breaking the heavy silence that had settled over the ICU room. He leaned back in the plastic visitor’s chair, crossing his arms over his chest. "If the French woman isn’t a Viper, and she stole the ledger to stop you from digging... what is the play, Sister-in-law? Do we go hunting in Paris?"

Aria leaned back against her hospital pillows, her emerald eyes calculating.

"We play dead," Aria said simply.

"Excuse me?" Damien asked, his voice low and laced with pure displeasure.

"Strategic gaslighting," Aria explained, holding her hands up. "The French woman told me to stop looking into my mother’s death. She warned me that if I kept pushing the Vipers, she couldn’t protect me anymore. So, we make her believe she won. We make it look like her little bridge-toss scared me off the scent entirely."

Julian adjusted his glasses, nodding slowly. "A tactical retreat. It makes sense. It’s suicide to rush blindly into a cartel war when we don’t even know the players on the board. The only tangible connection we still have to the Vipers is Lydia."

"Exactly," Aria agreed, pointing at the lawyer. "We focus on Lydia. We squeeze her until she cracks and gives us the network. We do it slowly and quietly. I am not putting any of you at risk by kicking a hornet’s nest we can’t see."

"No."

The single word cracked through the room like a whip.

Damien was basically vibrating with pent-up rage. The veins in his forearms strained against his rolled-up sleeves.

"I am not dropping this," Damien snarled. "They touched you. They put you in a van, they bound your wrists, and they threw you into a freezing river. They almost took you from me. I don’t give a damn if they are the ghost of Napoleon himself. I am going to find them, and I am going to eradicate them."

Aria looked at her husband. She watched his jaw clench, watched the lethal, dark promise of violence swirling in his golden eyes.

’Okay, he is kind of terrifying right now,’ Aria thought, biting the inside of her cheek. ’But so incredibly hot!’

She cleared her throat.

"Damien, I’m not letting it go either," Aria reassured him, forcing her voice to remain steady. "I want revenge just as badly as you do. But we can’t be reckless. We’ve done so much already. We wait. We gather intel."

Kai sighed, waving a hand dismissively in the air. "Slow and steady wins the race, I guess. Though, it’s significantly less fun."

He looked at Damien.

"Why don’t you go blow off some steam?" Kai suggested playfully. "Go find that idiot bouncer at Elysium. The one who let them drag her out the front door. Punch him in the face a few times. That should take the edge off."

Julian closed his eyes. He let out a deep, soul-weary sigh, bringing a hand up to rub his temples in profound exasperation.

"He already did," Julian muttered into the quiet room.

Kai blinked. "Oh, cool. Gave him a black eye?"

"He broke his legs," Julian responded, his voice dropping into bleak despair.

Kai choked on his own spit, hacking violently into his fist. "Wait. Both of them?!"

"He’s lucky I didn’t rip his spine out," Damien stated coldly, entirely unapologetic.

"The family is suing," Julian continued with another heavy sigh. "The man has a titanium rod in his thigh now. The court date is in a month."

Kai stared at Damien in pure, unadulterated awe. He slowly turned his head to look at Aria.

"Sister-in-law," Kai whispered loudly. "You might need to put your husband on a leash."

Aria laughed but the amusement didn’t reach her eyes. Her mind wandered elsewhere.

The words ’court date’ echoed in her mind.

She had never actually witnessed Damien’s violence firsthand. She knew the rumors. She knew he had serious anger issues. But hearing it stated so casually that he had snapped a man’s legs dragged a memory from her past life violently to the surface.

In 2026, Damien Sinclair’s name had been plastered across every global headline. Not for business. For murder.

He had been on trial for intentionally running over three climate protestors who had blocked the road while he was desperately rushing his pregnant sister to the emergency room. He hadn’t stopped. He hadn’t slowed down. He had plowed his vehicle right through them with no remorse, no regret. He even refused to apologize to the victims’ families.

Aria stared at Damien’s clenched fists.

’How much of the past is going to repeat itself?’ she wondered, a knot of anxiety twisting in her stomach. The timeline was changing, but Damien’s lethal, uncontrollable temper remained an absolute constant.

He was a force of nature, and forces of nature eventually destroyed things.

She wasn’t afraid of him; she was afraid of losing him to the consequences of his actions.

"Okay, enough plotting," Aria announced abruptly, throwing the heavy hospital blankets off her lap. "I am going stir-crazy in this bed."

She swung her legs over the edge of the mattress and slid off.

The moment her bare feet hit the cold floor, her muscles, atrophied from nine days of a medically induced coma, completely gave out.

Her knees buckled instantly.

Aria pitched forward, a startled gasp escaping her lips.

She didn’t even drop six inches.

Damien moved. He closed the distance in a fraction of a second, his large, warm hands shooting out to catch her perfectly by the waist. With a single, fluid motion, he hauled her upward, pulling her flush against his solid, unyielding frame.

Aria gasped, her hands flying up to grip his broad shoulders for balance.

She looked up.

Damien was staring down at her.

Kai let out a low, highly amused whistle. He slapped his hands on his knees and stood up from the visitor’s chair.

"Alright," Kai announced, throwing an arm casually over Julian’s shoulder. "That is officially our cue to exit. We are now third-wheeling a romance novel, and I don’t want to be here for the explicit Chapters."

"Agreed," Julian muttered, not resisting as Kai marched him toward the door.

"See you tomorrow, kids!" Kai called out, flashing a blinding grin over his shoulder. "Try not to break the hospital bed!"

The glass door clicked shut, the sound echoing loudly.

Silence engulfed the ICU room, leaving Aria and Damien entirely, utterly alone.