Sold to Bastard Alpha after My Divorce!-Chapter 207

Kael’s POV

I turned the badge over in my palm one more time.

Small. Dark metal. Roughly cast, like someone had done it fast, under pressure, not caring whether it was pretty. Just caring that it lasted long enough to be found.

**DEFECTORS.**

I’d seen that word before.

Not just the concept—the word itself. The specific font of it, the angle of the letters, the depth of the cuts. The way the *D* curved slightly inward at the bottom, like whoever had made the mold had slipped on that first stroke and kept going anyway.

I’d seen this badge before.

Or something close enough to it that the difference didn’t matter.

Where.

I turned it over again. Ran my thumb across the surface. The metal was cold under my fingers. Tarnished at the edges, dark in the grooves.

*Where have I seen this.*

"Kael."

Damon’s voice. Quiet. Waiting.

I closed my fingers around the badge and looked up.

The east bay was still. The floodlights still hummed outside. Bryce was two rooms down, stable, probably dreaming something dark. Vane and Cho were laid out with their hands folded and their gear straightened because that was the best anyone could do for them right now.

"Have the bodies transported to the proper facility by morning," I said. "Get someone to the families tonight. Not tomorrow. Tonight."

Damon nodded.

"Personal visits," I added. "Not a phone call. Not a message through the pack network. Someone goes in person, looks them in the eye, tells them what happened and what we’re doing about it."

"I’ll go myself."

I looked at him.

"You don’t have to—"

"Danil’s wife," he said. His voice was flat, but there was something underneath it. "She deserves to hear it from someone who knew him."

I held his gaze for a second.

Then I nodded. "Okay."

He started to turn away.

"Damon."

He stopped.

"Get some sleep after." I said it quietly. Not an order. Just—something. "You’re no good to me running on fumes."

He gave me a look that was about three seconds away from being an argument. Then he seemed to think better of it.

"You too," he said. Which was as close to *yes, sir* as Damon ever got when he didn’t want to agree with something.

He left.

I stood there alone in the east bay for a moment.

The badge was still in my fist.

*Where have I seen this.*

---

The drive back took longer than the drive out.

I wasn’t rushing. My foot was on the accelerator, the city building up around me again as the territory’s eastern ring fell away behind us, but my brain had already detached from speed and destination and was turning that badge over and over in the dark.

Insider knowledge. Fourteen people with access to the east rotation schedule.

Not sophisticated. Not trained. But *patient*.

Someone had been watching our patterns. Mapping our windows. Waiting for the right moment. That kind of surveillance didn’t happen in a day. It didn’t happen in a week.

Whoever was behind this had been watching us for a long time.

*From inside,* Bryce had said.

The word *defectors* sat in my chest like a stone.

I pulled up to the house at half past five in the morning.

The lights were off. All of them, except the faint glow from the lower hallway—the one my mother always left on because she said the dark felt too heavy otherwise. Something she’d done since Lucian and I were small. Old habit. The kind that outlasted everything.

I sat in the car for a moment.

The house was quiet.

That was the first thing I noticed. Genuinely, properly quiet. Not the brittle kind of quiet that preceded an explosion—not the held-breath silence that had lived in these walls for the past several months while Lucian fell apart and my mother tried to hold the pieces together.

Just quiet.

I got out.

Walked to the door. Put my key in the lock.

The house didn’t brace itself when I stepped inside.

That was new.

I stood in the entrance hall and just breathed for a second. Taking stock. The way I always did—automatic, territorial, reading the air. Looking for the static that had been a constant feature of this house for so long I’d started to think it was just architecture.

Nothing.

The entrance hall smelled like my mother’s tea. Like something cooking somewhere, earlier in the evening, now just a ghost of warmth. Like the pale flowers she kept in the vase by the stairs, the ones she replaced every week without fail no matter what else was happening.

I closed the door behind me.

---

She was in the sitting room.

I almost walked past it—the light was off in there too, except for the lamp in the far corner, turned down low. But the outline of her was there when I glanced through the doorway. Sitting on the couch. Back straight. A book open in her lap that she wasn’t reading.

My mother had never quite learned how to sleep when her children were out.

"You’re back." Her voice was soft. No reproach in it. Just a fact, stated quietly, the relief underneath it so normal by now that she didn’t bother to hide it.

I stepped into the room. "I didn’t mean to wake you."

"You didn’t." She closed the book. Set it aside. "I wasn’t sleeping."

I should have known.

I crossed the room and dropped into the chair across from her. The one I’d been sitting in since I was small enough to disappear into it entirely.

For a moment, neither of us said anything.

The lamp made everything amber. Warm. The kind of light that made it easier to say things.

"Lucian?" I asked.

Her face changed.

It was a small change. A softening around the eyes, the particular kind that came from relief—not the relief of a crisis averted but the relief of something you’d been afraid might never come back actually returning.

"He’s sleeping," she said. "He’s been—" She stopped. Started again. "He’s been calm, Kael. Since Aria came." She folded her hands in her lap. "He woke up for a little while in the evening. He was lucid. He knew where he was. He knew who I was." Her voice went carefully steady. "He asked for water. Then he went back to sleep."

"He’s going to be okay," I said. And for the first time in a long time, I actually believed it.

She nodded. Quick. Once. Like if she let herself dwell on it, the relief would knock her over.

"Your Aria," she said.

The words landed oddly. Warmly. I didn’t correct them.

"She walked into this house not knowing what she was walking into," my mother continued. "She was frightened. I could see it. But she didn’t run." She looked at me steadily. "And what she did with Lucian—whatever she did, however she did it—" She shook her head. "She is something extraordinary, Kael. That girl is something extraordinary."

I smiled.

I couldn’t help it. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

It wasn’t the kind of smile I let out much. The unguarded one, the one that just happened before I could do anything about it.

My mother saw it.

Something in her expression went soft in a way it almost never did.

"It’s good to see that," she said quietly.

"See what?"

"That look." She nodded at my face. "I haven’t seen it in a long time. Not on you."

I didn’t have anything to say to that. So I didn’t say anything.

For a moment, the lamp hummed and the house stayed quiet and my mother looked at me the way she used to when I was young enough to let her.

Then I reached into my jacket pocket.

Felt the cool edge of the badge against my fingers.

Pulled it out.

"I need to ask you something," I said.

Her eyes dropped to my hand. To what I was holding.

"I found this at the eastern checkpoint," I said. "Left at the scene of the attack." I held it out toward her. "It was planted deliberately. Meant to be found." I turned it over. Let her see both sides. "I don’t know who left it yet. But when I looked at it—" I stopped.

She hadn’t moved.

Her eyes were fixed on the badge. Something had happened to her expression that I couldn’t quite name. A stillness. The particular kind that came just before something landed.

"Have you seen this before?" I asked. "Anything like it. Anything with this mark, this shape—"

"Kael."

Her voice was different.

I looked up.

She was staring at the badge. Both hands pressed flat against her thighs. Her jaw had gone tight.

She was on her feet.

She crossed to me. Held out her hand.

I gave her the badge.

She held it under the lamp. Turned it over the same way I had. Ran her thumb across the engraving. Her face had gone through something I couldn’t quite follow—surprise, and something older than surprise, and something that looked almost like fear but wasn’t.

Then she looked at me.

"Of course I’ve seen this," she said.

Her voice had gone very quiet.

Very careful.

"This is your father’s."