Sold to Bastard Alpha after My Divorce!-Chapter 208

Kael’s POV

I stared at my mother.

"What did you say?"

She wasn’t looking at me anymore. She was looking at the badge. At the dark metal in her palm. Her thumb moved across the engraving one more time, slow and deliberate, like she was reading something in braille.

"Your father’s," she said again. Same quiet voice. Same careful certainty. "Or something very close to it."

The room felt smaller suddenly.

I stood up.

"What does that mean," I said. "It’s his badge, it’s his *symbol* — what exactly are we talking about here?"

She exhaled. A slow, controlled breath, the kind she did when she was deciding how much to say and in what order. I recognized it. She’d been doing that my whole life. Measuring. Choosing.

She handed the badge back to me.

"Come with me," she said.

---

She led me out of the sitting room and down the back hallway.

Past the kitchen. Past the small pantry that always smelled like dried herbs and old wood. To the door at the very end of the hall — the storage room. The one that was always locked. The one I’d been told as a child held nothing interesting. Old furniture. Winter clothes. Broken things nobody had gotten around to throwing away.

She had the key already.

The lock turned. The door swung inward.

It smelled like dust and time. Like a room that had been sealed off from the present.

My mother walked in without hesitating. She knew exactly where she was going.

I followed.

The room was exactly what she’d always said it was — storage. Shelves along both walls, boxes stacked in careful rows, the kinds of things that accumulate in any household over decades. Old linens. A broken floor lamp. Crates I didn’t recognize.

She went straight to the back wall.

Third shelf from the bottom. She crouched down, pushed aside a wooden crate, and behind it — a flat wooden box. Dark finish, brass hinges, the kind of thing that held documents or keepsakes. It was covered in a thin layer of dust that said it hadn’t been touched in a very long time.

She lifted it out.

Stood. Set it on the shelf beside her.

"When your father was young," she started, her eyes still on the box, "he wasn’t the Alpha. He was just one of many. A strong one, yes. Ambitious, absolutely. But not the heir. Not yet."

I didn’t say anything. I was watching her hands.

"He gathered people around him. Boys, mostly. Young men with power and nowhere to put it. With anger and no name for it." She touched the lid of the box. "He gave them a structure. A purpose. Called it something — a brotherhood, he said. A way of rising together."

"A gang," I said flatly.

She didn’t argue the word. "By the time he became Alpha, it was large enough to be useful and dangerous enough to be a liability. So he dissolved it." She turned the box slightly. "Officially."

The word landed.

*Officially.*

"And unofficially?" I asked.

"He sent most of them away. Scattered them. Some he rewarded. Some he threatened." She pressed her lips together. "And some — the ones who had become too much of a problem — you exiled them yourself. Years later. You didn’t know they were his."

Something cold moved through my chest.

I’d exiled six men in the past three years. Different offenses. Different circumstances. I’d gone through each case myself. I’d been thorough.

I hadn’t known what I was looking at.

"He met with them," I said. Not a question.

"I think so." Her voice was careful. "I don’t know when. I don’t know where. But your father has always been careful about keeping things in reserve. About having people who owed him things, who he could call on." She looked at me. "He doesn’t give up power. Not any of it. Not even when he’s—"

She stopped.

I finished it in my head. *Not even when he’s been stripped of his title. Locked down. Officially removed from everything.*

My father had been neutralized. Contained. I’d made sure of it myself — or I’d thought I had.

Apparently he’d been busy.

My hand closed around the badge.

"This badge," I said. "The organization. What was it called?"

She opened the box.

Inside — papers, mostly. Folded. Old. A photograph face-down that I didn’t look at. And underneath all of it, at the very bottom of the box, wrapped in a cloth that had once been black and was now just grey with age—

She unwrapped it.

A badge.

Same shape as the one in my hand. Same rough casting. Same dark metal. But older — the edges worn smooth, the tarnish deeper, the engraving rubbed down at the corners from handling. Someone had held this thing many times. Carried it. Pressed their thumb across it exactly the way I’d been pressing my thumb across the new one.

She held it out.

I took it.

I brushed the dust off with my thumb.

The letters came clear.

**DEFECTORS.**

I curled my fist around both badges.

The metal bit into my palm.

*Father.*

*Is this what you’ve been building? All this time? While I was trying to hold this territory together, while I was trying to fix what you broke — you were out there, gathering your dogs, planning this?*

I stood there in the dusty storage room in the dark, with my mother watching me and the lamp from the hallway throwing a thin line of amber across the floor, and I made myself breathe.

In. Out.

My jaw tightened until I felt it in my back teeth.

Father.

Are you really coming to take revenge on me?

Then come.