_Rowena’s POV_

I genuinely thought it was over after a while because Grandma Alice had settled.

The tea had been brought.

The room had found its balance again, and I was sitting across from her thinking that I had perhaps another twenty minutes before I could reasonably excuse myself and go call Celeste to explain why the house preparations needed to be less visible for the next eight days.

Then Alice suddenly set down her cup.

"There is one thing," she said.

I waited.

She folded her hands in her lap with the precise energy of someone who had been holding a thought back and had decided the moment was right. "You and Kaelen." She looked at me directly. "You haven’t consummated the marriage."

The room went very still.

I kept my face neutral. "Grandma Alice...."

"Don’t." She shook her head. "I’m old, not blind. Three years and the bond is still incomplete. Everyone in this family knows it." She looked around the room briefly, at Maelis in her chair, at Hannah near the door, as if gathering an audience. "That is the root of this problem. That is why that other woman has been able to walk in here and put down roots." She turned back to me. "If you had completed the marriage properly, none of this would be happening."

"Rowena, damn it." Kyra said.

"Not now."

Maelis made a sound. Not quite agreement, not quite endorsement, something in between. The sound of a woman who had a different reason for finding the suggestion useful but was willing to let someone else make it first.

"Alice is not wrong," Maelis said, in the careful tone she used when she was about to say something shameless and wanted it to land as wisdom. "The bond matters. In pack law, in practice, in everything. A consummated marriage is considerably harder to dissolve." She paused. "For everyone’s protection."

I looked at her.

For everyone’s protection. Meaning for Moonreign’s protection. Meaning if the marriage was consummated, the dissolution became legally and emotionally messier, and the Ashthorne accounts might stay within reach a little longer.

I understood exactly what this was.

"Kaelen." Alice turned to the doorway.

I hadn’t heard him come in. He was standing just inside the room, still and unreadable, with the particular expression of a man who had walked into something he hadn’t anticipated and was deciding whether to retreat.

He didn’t retreat. He came in and sat down, which was worse.

Alice looked between us with the expectant energy of someone who had just set something in motion and was waiting to watch it go.

"You are husband and wife," she said. "In name only, currently. That needs to change." She said it the way someone announced a household decision, plainly, without drama, as if the feelings of the people involved were a secondary consideration. "Tonight would not be too soon."

The silence that followed was the most particular kind I had experienced in this house.

I looked at Kaelen.

He was looking at the floor.

Not at Virella, who I could hear moving in the corridor outside, the soft, deliberate footsteps of someone who had slowed down near the doorway. Not at Maelis, who had arranged herself in her chair with the satisfied composure of someone who had gotten what they came for without having to ask for it directly.

On the floor.

And his expression,I read it in three seconds flat.

He was troubled. Genuinely. Not because the suggestion disgusted him. Not because he was thinking about Virella.

He was troubled because some part of him was considering it, and he knew that I knew, and the combination of those two things was sitting very uncomfortably on his face.

Something settled in me. Cold and clear and completely final.

"There it is," Kyra said quietly.

There it was.

Three years of waiting. Of managing and hoping and telling myself that people could be better than their worst moments. Of giving the benefit of the doubt to a man who had spent three years not deserving it.

And now here we were. His grandmother and mine, sitting across from each other suggesting my body as a solution to a financial problem, and the man I had married was looking at the floor instead of shutting it down.

"I appreciate the concern," I said. My voice came out very steady. "Both of you."

Alice looked at me expectantly.

"But I think we’ve had enough family discussion for one afternoon." I stood up, smoothed my jacket, and set my cup down on the table with a small, clean click. "Grandma Alice, I’ll have Hannah escort you to the door."

"Rowena....."

"It’s been a long day," I said. Gently. The way you close a door you are never going to open again.

I walked out.

In the hallway, I passed Virella without looking at her.

Up the stairs, into my room, door closed.

I stood in the middle of it for a moment with my hands at my sides.

"Seven days," Kyra said. "I’m glad you’re not wavering."

"I’m glad too.", I said.

I picked up my phone and called my attorney.

"Accelerate everything you can," I said, when she answered. "I want to be out of here in five days, not seven."

A pause. "I’ll see what I can do."

"Do more than that," I said.

I hung up.