Page 131 of It Must Be Fate

Everywhere I turn, I have flashes of memories of my time here.

The good, the bad, the earth-shattering, like the closet we just walked past on our way out, the very same one where I touched Thayer for the same time. I’d looked down at my wife and the pretty pink flush of her cheeks had told me she’d been thinking the very same dirty thoughts that I was.

We’d definitely have to make time for a little pit stop back into the closet before we left.

Thankfully, neither one of our daughters is here, otherwise they’d be mortified. Hayes, like Cato and Kiza, has already been an RCA student for two years so we didn’t bring her along.

And Ivy…

Enrolling her at RCA was out of the question. Like the Royals, we’d move away from London after her kidnapping to give her a much-needed fresh start. I’d signed a contract with Real Madrid and we’d relocated to Spain.

Progressively, Ivy had been coaxed out of the dark hole in which she’d buried herself after that ordeal. She was better now, but not completely. There was still something not quite right, something her mum and I couldn’t quite put our finger on, almost like a tiny sliver of her was still missing.

She was prone to bouts of intense quietude that were unlike her, times where her gaze strayed off and she became unreachable.

I’d have given my entire fortune to know what she thought about in those moments, if she was mentally torturing herself like I imagined she might be.

As her dad, I wanted to take all of her pain away, and the obvious place to start seemed to be getting rid of Rhodes.

If I ever got him alone, I couldn’t guarantee that I wouldn’t kill him, his father be damned.

In the meantime, we’d decided to enroll Ivy in a local secondary school in Madrid to keep them apart, so she wasn’t here either.

“Can you guys believe Thornton’s still here?” Phoenix drawls.

Tristan grumbles. “Fuck no. Every time he sees Nera and I together, he looks on the verge of having an aneurysm though, so might not be too much longer,” he adds with a hopeful note in his voice.

“Not in front of the children,” Nera chides under her breath, tipping her head at Juno and Hana who are hanging out just off to the side of us.

“That’s it for the orientations, right?” Six asks. “What should we do now?”

Rogue turns towards his wife with a shamelessly racy smile on his face. “Bell and I are going to go check out the library.”

She flushes and Riot looks at him with a disgusted expression on his face. “Dad, please never look at Mum the way you just did in front of us again. I know we’re rich, but there’s no amount of money in the world that’ll cover my therapy bill.”

“Or mine,” River adds crisply.

“What’s in the library, Daddy?” Rowan asks.

“Your mum and I used to spenda lotof time there,” he grins down at Bellamy who swats playfully at him. She still bears a faint scar on her forehead from the blows she suffered at Gingrich’s hand. “I want to see if there’s still the fist-shaped dent in one of the back shelves.”

River scrunches his brow. “Why would there be?”

“I punched a hole in it after your mother threatened to move on with another man.”

“Mum!”

“Hey, context! I was entitled to. Your father had pretended to cheat on me at the time.”

Rowan turns on her father, aghast. “Dad!”

Rogue’s face darkens. “I was an idiot,” he mutters, wrapping an arm around Bellamy’s shoulder and pulling her close. “I learned the consequences of my actions that day. Let’s go, sweetheart,” he adds, moving back towards the main building.

“Hey, what about us?” Riot asks.

“Entertain yourselves for a bit, darling,” Bellamy answers. “We’ll be back in ten–”

“Twenty,” Rogue interjects.

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