Divorce me I'm done serving you (Ayla) novel Chapter 696

None of them had ever lost someone they truly loved. They didn't know what that kind of pain felt like.

One had shot the other. The other had stabbed back.

Ayla didn't even want to waste words on them.

Troy hadn't expected her silence. His composure, always a point of pride, began coming apart at the seams. "Ayla, after everything, you'd still want someone like him? If you can forgive Draven for all of this, why couldn't you ever forgive me? Why?"

Ayla looked at his unraveling face and asked, simply, "Why were you having me watched?"

The question stopped him cold.

The honest answer was that he wanted her contained, wanted her inside the boundaries of his reach, permanently.

He'd told himself for a long time that a cleaner, harder approach would have prevented all of this. He wouldn't be standing here bleeding if he'd just acted sooner. He'd lost every advantage, one piece at a time.

"You can't answer that," Ayla said. "Then don't."

She turned to Draven.

It had only been three weeks since the full moon celebration. Three weeks since she'd last seen him, and even then he'd felt slightly unfamiliar. Twenty-some days, and now she was looking at a stranger.

"Draven." Her voice was flat and cold. "I'm taking back what I said about you. After what you did with my children, you don't deserve to be called that anymore."

Troy blinked. He had assumed she'd come back to Draven because of the children. The way she was speaking, it sounded more like severance.

He turned it over in his mind and began to understand how wrong he'd been about almost everything.

He had thought the IVF would bind her to him. He had assumed that with the children as leverage in Draven's hands, Ayla would naturally gravitate back toward Draven. He'd built his entire calculation around her being predictable.

Ayla had never been predictable. She was clear-eyed and steady, and she had been watching both of them the whole time, measuring what they'd each done, deciding what she could live with and what she couldn't.

Troy suddenly understood the full weight of what he'd done.

The IVF. She might never forgive him for that. He had told himself he could manage her. The truth was she had been quietly watching both of them for a long time, doing the math on what was best for her children, and somewhere along the way she had stopped loving him without either of them marking the moment it happened.

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