Ch. 51 – Damage Control

Rhys already knew what Dione was standing on his porch for. He didn’t even give her a chance to launch into whatever tearful monologue she had undoubtedly rehearsed on the walk across the street. His face was a cold, impenetrable mask as he gripped the edge of the door, his voice flat and unyielding.

“You’re wasting your time, Dione,” Rhys said, cutting straight through the heavy air. “It seems our little game is over.”

Dione flinched as if he’d struck her, her eyes darting nervously toward the quiet neighborhood street before returning to his face with a look of desperate, terrified urgency. “Rhys, please,” she whispered, her hands clasped together near her chest. “Can I... can I please come in? Someone might see us standing out here.”

Rhys was momentarily taken aback by the genuine, trembling panic in her posture. Against his better judgment, he stepped aside, opening the door just wide enough for her to slip through. “Fine. But—”

The moment she crossed the threshold, Dione didn’t stop in the foyer to take off her shoes or smooth her clothes. To Rhys’s absolute shock, she bypassed the living room entirely and marched with singular, frantic focus down the hallway, heading straight toward the back of the house—straight into his and Lira’s master bedroom.

“Dione, what the hell are you doing? Stop!” Rhys called out, his jaw dropping in disbelief as he hurried after her. “Hey! Dione!”

He caught up to her just as she crossed into the quiet sanctuary of the master bedroom. Refusing to let her invade his marriage’s private space any further, Rhys reached out, seizing her firm by the shoulders and pivoting her around to face him.

“Tell me what’s going on, Dione,” Rhys demanded, his tone dropping into a hard, non-negotiable register. “Right now.”

Dione looked up at him, her lips trembling—and then she completely shattered.

A choked gasp escaped her throat, and she burst into heavy, racking sobs, covering her face with her hands as tears spilled over her fingers. Rhys stood appalled, entirely frozen in place. In all the time he had known her—through all their quiet, forbidden rendezvous and casual neighborhood interactions—he had never seen her break down like this. She looked raw, completely unspooled, and utterly terrified.

His instinct as a protector, ingrained deep into his marrow from years of hero work, surged to the surface. The harsh, tactical shell around his chest dissolved. With a heavy, silent curse, Rhys pulled her into his arms, wrapping her in a warm, solid embrace. He gently rubbed her back, feeling her entire frame shudder against his chest as he stood there in the middle of his master bedroom, consoling his neighbor’s wife until her desperate weeping finally subsided into quiet, ragged hitches of breath.

Slowly, Dione pulled back just enough to look up into his eyes, her gaze heavy with an aching, unrestrained affection. “I... I missed you so much, Rhys,” she whispered.

Rhys didn’t respond to that. He kept his face neutral, refusing to feed into the romantic sentiment, because he could feel the underlying tension still radiating off her like a fever. There was something else. Something far worse than simple longing.

“Tell me what’s wrong, Dione,” Rhys said softly, his voice softening into a caring tone that slipped out before he could catch himself.

Dione swallowed hard, looking down at his chest before forcing the terrifying truth past her lips. “There’s... there’s a possibility that Arthur knows about us. About our affair.”

The air was instantly sucked out of the room. Rhys’s entire world felt as though it slammed into a wall, cracking at the seams and threatening to shatter into sharp, irrecoverable shards.

“WHAT?!” Rhys blurted out, recoiling so hard he practically tore his hands off her shoulders, taking two sharp steps back.

Dione broke down again, reaching out with frantic, trembling hands as she pleaded with him. “Rhys, please! Wait! Please just hear me out!”

A deafening, high-pitched ringing roared in Rhys’s ears, drowning out the ambient sounds of the house. His chest tightened to the point of agony, his lungs refusing to expand. This is it, a cold, terrifying voice echoed in his head. This is the end of everything. My marriage, my quiet life, my reputation. It’s all over.

As Dione started frantically explaining, Rhys began to pace the floor of the bedroom like a caged animal, turning from the foot of the bed to the window and back. He could barely process her words over the roaring inside his head—and then, deep within the center of his chest, a dormant, horrifyingly familiar sensation pulled violently at his nerves.

It was his powers. His kinetic cells, dormant and ruined since his sacrifice play, were trying to cough back to life under the immense stress of the moment. Sharp, needle-like spasms of pain shot through his sternum as his broken biology tried to draw on phantom energy.

Fuckin’ great, Rhys thought bitterly, clutching at his chest through his shirt as sweat broke out on his brow. My body is so convinced I’m about to die that it’s desperately trying to fire up a power that will literally tear my organs apart.

He forced his mind to grind through the panic, focusing his hearing on the frantic stream of words spilling from Dione’s mouth.

“...and I didn’t know what to do, Rhys, he was just holding it and asking—”

“Wait, hold on—what the hell did you just say?” Rhys interrupted, spinning around to face her, his eyes wide. “He found what again?”

Dione shrank back slightly, looking up at him sheepishly. “He... he found your shirt, Rhys.”

Rhys stood flabbergasted, his mouth slightly open. That crazy witch, he screamed internally, his mind flashing back to Vespera and the subtle, chaotic web she had spun around him. She intentionally engineered this! The sheer absurdity and danger of it made him stumble over his own tongue as he tried to speak. “My... my shirt? How the hell does Arthur have my shirt, Dione?!”

Dione tried her absolute best to appease his rising rage, wringing her hands nervously. “I... I took it, Rhys! The night we all went out to the club... while you were distracted, I took one of your shirts from your bag. I kept it as a keepsake... to have a piece of you with me.”

Rhys stopped dead in his tracks, taking in the full sight of her. Dione looked smaller than usual, her shoulders hunched, thick tracks of tears painting her flushed cheeks. She looked like someone standing on the edge of a cliff, her eyes pleading with him, begging him not to push her off.

Despite the volcanic anger coursing through his veins, a small, unwanted flicker of pity burst through his rage. He couldn’t help but feel for the woman standing before him—she was clearly lost in her own unrequited feelings, drowning in a mess of her own making. And, deep in the darkest, most troublesome corner of his mind, a quiet voice noted that even in the middle of this catastrophic breakdown, she still looked hauntingly beautiful.

Rhys let out a heavy, bone-weary sigh, rubbing his face with both hands. “I don’t even want to know why you thought that was a good idea, Dione.”

“Because I was falling deeper in love with you, Rhys!” Dione cried out, her voice cracking as she took a step toward him, unable to hold it in any longer. “I wanted to keep a part of you close to me! I felt so lonely, and having something that smelled like you was the only thing that made me feel safe!”

That poor, foolish woman, Rhys thought, the bitterness in his heart softening into a quiet, heavy sorrow for her delusional heartbreak.

He took a deep, stabilizing breath, forcing his former tactical training to sweep over his emotions, cooling the panic in his blood. He squared his shoulders and looked her dead in the eye.

“Alright,” Rhys said, his voice entirely calm now. “Tell me everything. Exactly what happened, word for word. From the beginning.”

Now that they were both grounded, Dione began to detail the events, spinning a short story that felt excruciatingly long to Rhys’s tense nerves.

Her husband, Arthur, was a stout, broad-shouldered man—an old knight from a high-ranking order who was notoriously overconfident, deeply traditional, and aggressively overbearing. Though he was well past his glory days, he still carried the suspicious, stern demeanor of a commander. According to Dione, their dog had somehow gotten into her closet, dragged Rhys’s hidden shirt out into the backyard, and left it in the grass.

Arthur had found the shirt outside, brought it into the house, and set it on the kitchen table. When Dione walked in and saw it sitting there, her heart had practically stopped, and she reacted with visible, extreme panic. Arthur, noticing her strange behavior, had simply picked up the shirt and asked a basic, unassuming question: ‘Is this yours? Where did this come from?’

Instead of offering a simple cover story, Dione—who was a woefully terrible liar under pressure—had immediately panicked, burst into hysterical tears, and fled the house, running directly across the street to Rhys’s front door.

When she finished speaking, a heavy, suffocating silence settled over the master bedroom.

Rhys stared at her, blinking once. Twice.

“That’s it?” Rhys blurted out, the words bursting from his mouth as a sharp, almost loud shout.

The sudden volume startled Dione, who flinched and looked at him like a lost, terrified puppy waiting for punishment.

Rhys’s posture softened instantly. Relief, vast and overwhelming, washed over him, melting the terrifying ice in his chest. Arthur didn’t know about the affair. He hadn’t caught them red-handed. He had simply found a random piece of men’s clothing in his yard and asked an innocent question, only for his wife to completely freak out and run away.

This is fine. This is completely manageable, Rhys reassured himself, his mind already spinning up three different tactical narratives to fix the mess.

He walked over to Dione, standing close and placing a reassuring hand on her arm. “Listen to me,” Rhys said firmly, his eyes locked onto hers. “I’m going to go ahead and handle this. I’ll smooth it over. This won’t be able to end us.”

The moment those words left his mouth, Dione’s entire face transformed. The terror vanished, replaced by a radiant, glowing look of unadulterated adoration. Her eyes shimmered as she looked up at him as if he were her knight in shining armor coming to rescue her from the ashes of her own mistake.

“Oh, Rhys...” Dione breathed softly, her voice dripping with affection. “Will you really fix this... for me and you?”

Me and you.

The phrase pinged around the inside of Rhys’s skull like a stray bullet. There is no ‘me and you,’ Rhys thought instantly, his internal alarms firing off a barrage of warnings. There is me and my wife. Did I misspeak, or did she completely misinterpret what I just said?!

Before he could open his mouth to clarify the boundary, Dione leaned up on her tiptoes, wrapped her arms around his neck, and pulled herself up, pressing her lips to his in a slow, desperate, deeply passionate kiss.

Rhys stood entirely frozen for a second, his mind racing. He wanted nothing more than to break the kiss and step back, but he knew the psychological state of the woman holding onto him. Dione was balancing on a razor-thin emotional precipice; her mind was fragile, hysterical, and ready to snap. If he harshly rejected her right now—while her suspicious, hot-headed husband was sitting right across the street holding physical evidence—Dione might completely break down. She could easily run back home and confess the entire affair out of sheer spite, heartbreak, or unhinged panic.

With a silent, agonizing curse echoing in his head, Rhys begrudgingly gave in to her desperate kisses, holding her waist just enough to keep her stable while enduring the uncomfortable warmth of her mouth as she pushed into a deep, needy French kiss.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, Dione slowly pulled away, her breath coming in soft, heavy hitches, her eyes heavy with affection as she looked up at him.

“What... what do you plan to do, Rhys?” she asked softly, her voice breathless.

Rhys looked down at her, forcing his face back into a calm, unreadable mask. He raised a hand, gently wiping a stray tear from her flushed cheek with his thumb.

“First,” Rhys said quietly, his voice carrying a cool, controlled weight, “you’re going to clean yourself up. Wash your face.” He stepped back, gesturing toward the master bathroom door. “And after that... you and I are going to walk right back across the street, and we’re going to go talk to your husband.”