<h4>Chapter 454: Chapter 454 THE MOTIVE</h4>


    SERAPHINA’S POV


    Even with all of us closing in and Kieran’s presence looming like a thundercloud, Thomas barely nced at us.


    He focused on Brett, who stood between him and the exit, shoulders squared, jaw tight, his expression carved out of something heavier than anger.


    Brett’s eyes searched Thomas’s face as if he was still looking for some crack in the truth, some fragment of misunderstanding he could seize and turn into an exnation that would hurt less than what he had just heard.


    “Tell me it isn’t true,” Brett said. His voice was low, but it carried through the room with devastating rity.


    Thomas’s throat bobbed. Hisposure slipped—just enough for me to see panic sh beneath his restraint, raw and desperate, before he buried it under that mask.


    “Brett,” he said carefully, “you don’t understand what this is.”


    Brett’s mouth tightened. “Then exin it.”


    Thomas gave a humorless, thinugh that sounded wrong.


    “Exin what? That Seraphina Lockwood can dress herself in someone else’s face and put words in my mouth? That she set a trap and lured me here because she’s as much a vindictive bitch as her sister?”


    Kieran took one step forward, and the temperature of the room seemed to drop. “Careful.”


    Thomas nced at him, but only briefly, as though Kieran’s warning mattered less than Brett’s usation.


    “That isn’t an answer,” Brett said.


    Thomas’s jaw clenched. “It’s the only answer that makes sense. You know me, Brett.”


    Brett’s face twisted, grief and fury warring so violently in his expression that it made something in my chest tighten.


    He hade here ready to confront Thomas, but expectation and reality were never the same thing.


    “I thought I did.”


    Thomas flinched.


    “I knew you didn’t like Celeste,” Brett continued, his voice roughening. “I knew you thought she was cruel. I knew you hated what she did to me, and you never forgave her for it, even when I tried to move on. But this?”


    He shook his head, disbelief breaking through the anger. “A kidnapping, Thomas? Drugging her? Handing her over to people who would have destroyed her?”


    Thomas’s features tightened at every usation.


    “Brett—”


    “Don’t,” Brett snapped, and Thomas fell silent. “Don’t say anything that isn’t the fucking truth!”


    The room held its breath.


    I watched Thomas’ face, watched hisposure begin to crack under the weight of Brett’s disgust.


    It was almost unbearable to watch—not from pity, but because the fracture revealed something uglier than denial.


    Something needy. Something possessive. Something that had been festering beneath years of loyalty and resentment.


    “He used you,” I said, my voice steady despite the rage still burning in my veins.


    I hadn’t even realized that I had tapped into Thomas’ mind. His emotions were so potent, it didn’t take much pressing to feel them.


    “He took your pain and turned it into permission. He convinced himself your hurt belonged to him, that your forgiveness was weakness, that he had the right to punish Celeste because you wouldn’t.”


    Thomas’s eyes cut to me. “Shut up.”


    He turned to Brett. “I didn’t do anything to her, I swear. You can’t really think that—”


    “I don’t know what to think of you,” Brett hissed.


    Thomas’s face changed again.


    Somehow, Brett’s uncertainty hurt him more than anger would have.


    Thomas let out a soft, brokenugh. “After all these years, after everything I’ve done for you, you don’t know?”


    Brett’s brow furrowed. “What—”


    Thomas’sposure shattered so abruptly that I flinched.


    “You still don’t see it!” he snapped, voice rising. “You never did. You let that bitch humiliate you, poison you, twist you around her finger, and even after everything, even after she nearly ruined you, you look at me like I’m the betrayal.”


    Brett went still.


    Thomas took a step toward him, and Brett did not move, though everyone else in the room tensed.


    “I was there,” Thomas said, each word scraped raw from somewhere deep inside him. “I was the one who stayed. I was the one who watched you drink yourself sick because of her. I was the one who heard every bitter word you swallowed because you were too decent to let anyone see how badly she had cut you. I was the only one who cared about you enough to want to make it stop. You imed to be over her, but as soon as she was in trouble, you went running. I couldn’t let you fall under her spell again.”


    Brett’s face had gone pale.


    “That didn’t give you the right to hurt her."


    Thomas’s expression twisted. “For you? I would burn the world.”


    The words struck the room with chilling force.


    Brett stared at him as though Thomas had suddenly begun speaking in a foreignnguage.


    Thomas seemed to realize there was no going back, or perhaps some part of him had been waiting for the truth to tear loose all along.


    His eyes zed, burning with fury and anguish, his breath ragged as years of restraint crumbled into something wild and exposed.


    “It was never about her,” he said, quieter now, but no less intense. “It was about you. It has always been about you.”


    The devastation on Brett’s face was terrible.


    “You...” Brett’s voice failed him once before he forced it steady. “You did this because you wanted me?”


    Thomas’s gaze burned. “I did it because she didn’t deserve to still exist in the parts of you I couldn’t reach.”


    A cold, nauseated silence gripped the room.


    There it was—the motive.


    Jealousy masked as concern, obsession as loyalty, Celeste’s suffering as the price of unrequited love.


    Brett recoiled as if Thomas had struck him.


    “You’re insane,” he whispered.


    Thomas’s face crumpled for half a heartbeat.


    Then it hardened.


    I sensed the shift in him instantly.


    Brett had wounded him in a ce only he could reach, and the pain made Thomas dangerous.


    “Brett,” I warned.


    But Thomas had already lunged.


    He mmed his shoulder into Brett with enough force to drive him backward into the wall behind him.


    Brett grunted, caught off guard more by shock than weakness, and Thomas used that opening ruthlessly.


    He drove an elbow into Brett’s ribs, twisted out of reach as Kieran lunged at him, then snatched up his ss and hurled it at Kieran’s head.


    “Kieran!”


    That momentary distraction on my part caused the wards to flicker.


    Not enough to copse entirely, but enough to create a sharp, brief disruption that tore through the air like static. The lights stuttered, the music cut out, and Thomas bolted for the side exit.


    Kieran dodged the ss effortlessly, his gaze fixed on Thomas’ retreating form.


    “Stop him!” he roared.


    Brett recovered first, snarling as he pushed off the wall, but Thomas had already reached the door.


    Corin moved to intercept, his hand snapping out, but Thomas ducked and kicked a chair into Corin’s path, slipped through the side door, and disappeared into the alley beyond.


    I ran.


    There was no thought between the decision and movement, only the violent certainty that Thomas Bane was not escaping, not after the look on Brett’s face, not after the vile pleasure with which he had spoken of my sister’s terror.


    The night air struck cold against my skin as we poured out behind him.


    Lunar Noire backed onto a narrow service alley that opened toward the tree line beyond the private estate road.


    Thomas was fast, faster than I expected for someone whose danger had always seemed to live behind words and strategy.


    He vaulted a barrier, crossed the empty road, and plunged into the woods without looking back.


    Kieran reached my side in seconds. I knew he was faster than me by a long shot, but he matched my pace.


    Ethan and Maya followed close behind, Corin slightly ahead to the left, Brett pushing himself harder than any of us, his pain turning into a reckless kind of speed.


    Branches wed at us as we entered the woods, the city lights falling away behind us until the moon and our heightened senses guided the chase.


    The forest swallowed sound strangely.


    Thomas’ footsteps cracked through leaves ahead of us, then vanished, then returned farther off as he cut sharply between the trees.


    He knew the terrain, or at least he had studied it well enough to make us work for every inch.


    My breath came steady, but my mind raced faster than my feet.


    He hade prepared for the possibility that the meeting was not what it seemed. That meant he was either paranoid or someone had warned him to be cautious.


    The thought had barely formed when I felt it.


    A strange pressure beneath the soil.


    I called out in warning, “Brett—”


    The ground ahead erupted.


    A ring of light red between the trees, etched into the earth in jagged, interlocking symbols that snapped awake the instant Brett crossed the boundary.


    The air thickened violently, turning heavy as wet sand. Brett staggered, caught mid-stride, and Maya nearly collided with him before Ethan grabbed her arm and pulled her back.


    Kieran seized my waist and yanked me against him just before I crossed into it.


    The force of the trap mmed into us anyway.


    For one awful second, my senses blurred. My knees weakened, my vision swimming as the light pulsed through the trees.


    It did not burn like wolfsbane, nor did it carry the lethal bite of a killing ward, but it pressed against every instinct in my body, dragging at muscle and bone, slowing movement, muddling direction.


    A dy trap.


    “Damn it!” Ethan snarled, trying to force his way forward and immediately stumbling as the light surged brighter.


    “Don’t!” I snapped. “It’s feeding on resistance.”


    Kieran’s arm remained locked around me, his body tense with the effort of holding himself still when every part of him wanted to tear through the barrier.


    His eyes glowed as Ashar pushed close to the surface, rage turning the gold in them almost molten.


    Brett strained against the edge of the ward, his face twisted with fury and hurt. “Thomas!”


    Ahead of us, through the trees and the shifting haze, Thomas looked back.


    He was beyond the trap’s reach, breathing hard, one hand braced against a tree. The distance between them was not great, but the trap made it feel uncrossable.


    His gaze found Brett first, and something passed over his face.


    Regret, perhaps.


    Or the grief of a man who hated being seen clearly.


    Then a second figure stepped out from the shadows behind him.


    My entire body went cold.


    At first, my mind rejected what my eyes understood.


    The forest was dark, the light from the trap unsteady, the shadows shifting with every pulse beneath the ground. It could have been anyone.


    A trick of distance. A distortion created by the ward.


    But then he turned slightly, and the moonlight caught the familiar line of his profile.


    The dark hair in a low bun.


    Theposed posture.


    The face that had once looked at me with secrets hidden behind gentleness and pain.


    Lucian.