Chapter 277: Chapter 277 – Those lies you’re telling are digging a hole

Voren had stayed away on purpose. After that morning in the outlands, the way she had put her sunglasses back on and thanked him like he was a business associate who had held a door open for her, Voren had made a decision. Give her space. Let her breathe. Don’t be the thing that makes her uncomfortable.

And he had kept to it for days.

But he missed her, told himself that was the only reason he was here was because of the proposal. Five hundred billion deal was a good enough reason to be let into her office.

When her secretary informed him that Seraphine was in her office with Corvine, something dropped in his chest that he didn’t have a clean name for. Heavy and uninvited and completely unreasonable. He stood outside the door for maybe three seconds, then pushed it open without knocking.

He already knew what he was going to find and there it was. Seraphine’s arms around Corvine’s shoulders, her head slightly down, and Corvine’s arm around her like it had been there a thousand times before and expected to be there a thousand more.

Voren stood in the doorway and felt something move through him that had no business being there. This wasn’t the first time. It wasn’t even the second. And she wasn’t his.

Voren had no claim, no standing, no rational reason for the way looking at them together felt like something pressing directly on a bruise.

He set the proposal on the edge of her desk. Didn’t look at her face. His voice came out flat and clipped.

"Let’s talk." His eyes moved to Corvine. "Your office."

Seraphine pulled back from Corvine and turned away, reaching up to clear her face. Voren kept his eyes off her deliberately.

"You can look through that while I’m gone." He nodded once toward the document. "I’ll be back."

He walked out first, his whole presence carrying that particular cold energy that lowered the temperature of whatever room he was in.

Corvine glanced at Seraphine once, a look that said several things without saying any of them out loud and followed, the door clicked shut behind them.

Corvine’s office was tidy in the specific way of someone who preferred order but wasn’t rigid about it, everything in its place but lived in. Voren didn’t sit. He turned around the moment he heard the latch catch and looked at Corvine straight on.

"I’ve asked you this before." His voice was controlled, even, and underneath the evenness was something that wasn’t quiet. "But I’m asking again. What exactly is going on between you and Seraphine? Because the closeness... it’s too much."

Corvine looked at him for a long moment.

Then he laughed. The short, quiet one that carried genuine disbelief in it, the kind that came out when something was so ironic it bypassed irritation entirely.

"Seriously." His chin lifted slightly. "You’re actually standing in my office asking me that." It wasn’t a question. "Aren’t you the same person who told me... and I remember this clearly, that even if Seraphine were the moon goddess herself, you wouldn’t be interested?"

Voren’s jaw tightened.

He looked for the words to dismantle that, to reframe it, to find some angle that made it mean something different than what it obviously meant but nothing came. Because the problem was that when he had said it, he had meant it completely.

He had looked at the woman Ravyn had pushed out and feeling she deserved every bit of it for choosing Ravyn over Voren.

But then, every bit of time he spent with her at the pack and the outlands, told a different story, though he was still pained by how she keeps her feelings wrapped up like it wasn’t there at all.

"That was then." Voren kept his voice level. "Things are different now. And it’s not even about attraction. Yes, I like her a bit, and my wolf responds to hers. That’s a separate thing."

Corvine’s expression didn’t change even slightly. He looked at Voren the way someone looks at a story they have already heard the ending of.

"Just like her," he pondered aloud, "you are also a liar."

Voren’s eyes narrowed but Corvine did not flinch.

"And just like I told her—" Corvine suddenly remembered the sketch he still had in his hand, straightened, and lifted it towards Voren.

"Those lies you’re telling are digging a hole. And you keep going deeper every time you open your mouth and say something you don’t mean." He pressed the paper against Voren’s chest. "And when it finally swallows you up, nobody’s going to be able to pull you out."

The anger that moved through Voren was fast and hot and he let none of it show on his face. But underneath the anger was something else, the quiet, uncomfortable recognition that Corvine was not wrong.

The sketch was correct, and Voren hated that it was Corvine saying it. With Damon he could push back.

Damon operated on loyalty and history and Voren knew exactly how to hold his ground in that dynamic. Corvine was different. Corvine had no investment in protecting Voren’s ego and nothing to gain from softening things, and that made him genuinely difficult to argue with.

"There are reasons," Voren said, his voice dropping lower. "It’s complicated, and I don’t expect you to understand because I don’t understand it myself but what is clear is this. Seraphine and I don’t make sense. Everything ended when she chose Ravyn, and a lot has happened then."

How could he tell Corvine that Seraphine would not even give him the chance to show her who he became because of her? He paused, choosing to redirect the conversation. "And why haven’t you told her how you feel? She trusts you more than she trusts most people."

He watched Corvine’s face carefully, wanting him to back down but Corvine looked back at him for a moment that stretched longer than expected, something moving behind his eyes that Voren couldn’t fully read.

Then the corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, more like the expression of a man who had just been handed exactly the question he had been waiting to answer.