All Chapters of Dear Ex Mate, You're Mine to Ruin: Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

Lillian’s POVI sat with my grandmother’s sanctum for a while after Aiden gave me the space to do so, walking the familiar boundary slowly, touching the old stones with my fingertips and letting the quiet of the place do what it had always done, which was remind me that I came from something that had lasted longer than any single threat against it.I was gathering myself to leave, already running through what the rest of the day needed from me, when I heard footsteps on the path behind me. I turned to see a man standing at the edge of the sanctum path, he looks familiar but I can’t pin point on where have seen him or known him before. I stared, trying to figure it out then it hit me hard. But he’s taller than I remembered, older around the eyes, but unmistakably the same person.Shawn? I stood very still for a moment. “How did you know I was here?”“Word travels,” he said, which was not really an answer. He stopped a respectful distance away, reading my expression with enough accur

Dorian’s POVI had checked my phone more times than I was willing to count. Every hour that passed without word from Lillian or Aiden added another layer to the restlessness that had been sitting in my chest since she walked out the door that morning, and by the time I wrapped up the elder meeting and made it to the company, I was present in body only. My mind was somewhere on the road between here and where Lilian went following a woman who had gone to face something alone that she should not have had to face alone.The work on my desk went largely untouched.I gave up on the pretense of productivity earlier than I normally would have and drove home, telling myself it was practical rather than admitting it was because staying at the company while waiting for news I had no way of accelerating was making me worse rather than better.I saw them as I was pulling through the gate.Lillian and Aiden walking toward the entrance together, and something about the way they were moving made me

Lillian’s POVAlanna was waiting for me in her clinic when I finally made it to her, sitting with her hands folded on the table in front of her in the particular way she sat when she had something important to say and was carefully organizing how to say it. She had been waiting long enough that the cup of tea beside her had gone cold, which told me she had not wanted to start without me despite the wait.I closed the door behind me and crossed to the chair across from her, reading her expression as I sat down. Whatever she had found, it had unsettled her in a way that she was managing professionally but could not entirely conceal from someone who knew her face as well as I knew mine.“You said it was urgent this morning,” I said. “I am sorry it took me this long to get here. Talk to me.”She reached into the cabinet beside her without speaking and produced the small glass bottle I had taken from Miranda’s box, setting it carefully on the table between us. The pale yellowish sediment w

Lillian’s POVThe figure moved through the doorway slowly, clearly believing I was still asleep. I stayed completely still against the headboard with my phone gripped in my hand under the covers, my eyes adjusted enough to the dark to make out the shape of him as he cleared the door and took his first careful step into the room.Then he passed through the thin strip of light coming from the hallway before the door swung almost shut behind him, and I saw his hand.The scratch. Still visible even in the low light, a thin raised line across the back of his right hand exactly where my nails had caught him through Miranda’s window that night.The guard?I kept my breathing even and my body still for two more seconds, watching him move further into the room with the careful steps. Then I shifted and reached for the lamp on the nightstand and switched it on.He froze immediately. We looked at each other across the lit room and there was nowhere for either of us to go with the pretense that

Dorian’s POVConsciousness came back slowly, pulling me up through layers of heaviness that did not want to release me easily, each layer thinner than the one before it until I finally broke through into the dim awareness of a room and a ceiling and the particular stillness of very early morning when the sky outside had not yet decided between dark and light.I lay still for a moment, taking inventory of my own body the way I had learned to do after situations that left me uncertain of its condition. My limbs responded. My head was clear, slower than usual but clear. The migraine that had flattened me the night before was gone, leaving behind only a faint residual ache that sat at the base of my skull like the memory of something rather than the thing itself.Alanna was across the room, her back partially to me, closing the clasps on her medical bag with the quiet efficient movements of someone who had been there a long time and was finally allowing herself to wind down. She reached o