Angels Are Falling (Twisted Ever After #1)

Prologue

KAI

Karens ignore trigger warnings, only to later complain about said warnings.

Don’t be a Karen. This book contains dubious sexual scenes, drug usage, a child’s accidental exposure to drugs, among other dark content matters.

Please review all the triggers listed in the Author’s Note.

This book is intended for readers wishing to explore their fantasies safely through fiction while exercising sound judgment in real-life situations.

Please do not read if the listed triggers disturb you.

There were hundreds of people on the boat, but I’d come for only one. A married woman who didn’t know I existed, yet she had belonged to me for years.

She wore a mermaid dress tonight, the color of deep water. I knew because I’d memorized every color in her closet, and this dress was the only formal thing she owned that hadn’t been mended.

I’d crossed an ocean of people to stand at the edge of the black-tie gala I had no interest in attending, on a luxury cruise I’d boarded for one reason, and the reason stood near the bar, laughing at something a stranger said.

I hated the stranger with everything I had.

She’d taken this two-week gig because the alternative was watching the bills stack up in a house with her husband and his three grieving siblings.

I’d built my entire plan around it, hoping she’d be desperate enough to finally look at me.

She wasn’t. Instead, she was working on a luxury yacht as a nurse and smiling as if the world had never taken a thing from her, and the reason for that stood twelve feet to my left with his hand at the small of another woman’s back, speaking to the boat’s captain.

I crossed to him and clapped a hand on his shoulder, harder than necessary to get his attention, hard enough to make the girl beside him flinch.

He didn’t turn fast. Men like us never turn fast. “Cavendish.”

“Great to see you, Maxwell. I was starting to think you wouldn’t come out of your room this entire cruise.

” My empty smile was directed at Caden Maxwell.

I once considered him a friendly acquaintance from boarding school, but now, he was a nuisance for giving Amelie a nursing gig on this luxury yacht.

I planned to make him pay for it, and the easiest way to take revenge was through the woman standing beside him.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your beautiful date?

” I intentionally looked her over from head to toe.

His jaw set. Good. Now he felt a fraction of my anger over his interference. Maxwell couldn’t react too strongly in front of his woman. He had to be on his best behavior and hold his crazy cards close to his heart if he didn’t want to drive her away. “This is Rose,” he said begrudgingly.

“Nice to meet you, Rose. I’m Kai Cavendish.” I put out my hand, slow, deliberate, the way you offer a thing you know will be refused. Caden’s fingers closed over hers before she could lift them, and I smiled, because that small flare of possession was the whole point.

She noticed the thick tension between us. “How do you know each other?”

“Boarding school.” Maxwell’s curt answer was meant to end the conversation preemptively. During our time at boarding school, my reputation with women had preceded me, and he didn’t want me anywhere near his girl.

Fuck him for thinking he could get rid of me.

I didn’t want his girl. I’d wanted exactly one person in my adult life, and she was standing by the bar.

This one was simply the softest place on Caden Maxwell that I could press my thumb into.

He had pushed my plans back to make his girl smile. So I’d make her the cost.

“In case you’re wondering, he was just as much a grouch back then,” I told Rose with the most charming smile I could muster.

“Which brings me to ask, how did such a pretty girl end up with a man like him? There are other options, you know?” Maxwell’s steely glare landed on me, which I ignored for my finishing touch. “Are you free tomorrow?”

Caden practically growled, “Do you want to spend the rest of your vacation in the brig, Cavendish?”

I kept my gaze on Rose. “Just blink twice if that’s a yes.”

The boat’s captain, Marcus, who had been quiet thus far, sensed the escalating tension and stepped in. “Gentlemen, we have all night to catch up with old friends. For now, we should start the gala.”

Rose looked around, stating the obvious—the gala had already started. But Marcus insisted his parties always started with a first dance.

Obviously, I extended my hand toward Rose. “May I have this dance?” I asked for no reason other than to watch Maxwell’s hands shake with anger.

Rose knew better than to take my hand and quickly retreated, looking scared.

Maxwell’s reaction didn’t disappoint. He grabbed the lapel of my tux just subtly enough not to cause a scene. “Want to keep that hand, Cavendish?”

“Worth a shot.” I jerked out of his hold and smoothed the jacket he’d wrinkled.

Across the room, Amelie tipped her head back and laughed, and the sound went through me like a blade I’d pay to be stabbed with twice.

No matter how much I tried to be present, it was impossible when she was in the room.

Nonetheless, I exchanged more cutting words with Maxwell.

The captain tried to defuse the situation again.

This time, instead of speaking to only our bickering group, he grabbed the microphone and addressed the rest of the guests at the gala.

He spoke about the history of this boat and introduced the crew.

I paid attention to none of it. Instead, I kept an eye on Maxwell and his girl, listening in on their conversation in case he planned to send Amelie more money.

“What’s going on between you and that guy, Kai?” Rose asked.

“A difference of opinion,” Maxwell replied callously.

“Over?”

“I provided financial assistance to someone who had done me a favor. Cavendish wasn’t thrilled about it.”

“Why would he care if you gave someone money?”

“He was hoping to bankrupt this person and had specifically asked me not to get involved.”

Fucking asshole. Every dollar Maxwell had given Amelie closed the wound I’d been trying to open. My timeline had slipped by months as a result, which meant more months of watching her from across the room.

It was getting more difficult to survive the time.

I aggressively grabbed a champagne flute from one of the servers and took a deliberate sip, my attention drifting back to the girl in blue.

She was fucking gorgeous. I watched her over the rim of the glass and cataloged her—the gold of her skin, the little crease she got between her brows when she was trying to explain something.

Her lips… I had never touched that mouth, yet I knew it better than my own.

Marcus finally announced the tradition of a first dance, and Maxwell pulled his girl to the dance floor.

Like everyone else in the room, Amelie turned from the bar to watch them.

She watched them while I watched her. I wasn’t the only one looking at her.

Other men looked at her and saw a beautiful woman.

I looked at her and saw the only thing I’d never been able to buy.

When the song ended, Marcus rushed back to the dance floor. “Give it up one more time for tonight’s hosts, Dr. Caden Maxwell and his lovely fiancée, Rose.”

I rolled my eyes as the crowd cheered. The noise of well-wishers had barely subsided when Rose peeled off toward the bar, toward Amelie, until the two women spoke with their heads bent together while I stood alone with my drink. Watching her.

Which was when Caden found his way back to me.

“Stay away from Rose.” His voice was silk laid over a blade. He wasn’t looking at me; he was looking at Rose, the way I’d been looking at Amelie all night, and for one ugly second, I understood the man completely. “Whatever you’re trying to do, find another lever.”

“I had a perfectly good plan,” I said pleasantly. “Before a former friend of mine got sentimental and started writing checks.” I turned my glass in the light.

“I helped a family in need.”

“You don’t give a shit about that. You wanted to impress your woman by helping her best friend.”

“The girl you want is married. What do you not understand about the situation?” he spoke through gritted teeth. “She’s happy with someone else.”

I didn’t care if she was happy, only that she was mine. The two had stopped being the same thing a long time ago.

“Move on, Cavendish,” he added. “There are plenty of fish in the sea.”

I tilted my head at Rose. “Is that what you would have done if she were married?”

He said nothing.

“You fucked up my plans.” I let the pleasantness fall away, just enough.

“So here’s how it goes now. Every time you interfere with my life, I’ll reach into yours.

I’ll circle your girl. I’ll charm her. I’m sure you remember from our boarding school days that women tend to lose their minds around me.

I’ll make your girl wonder why. And women who start wondering about me don’t tend to stop. ”

Maxwell ground his jaw.

I smiled. “If you want my hands kept off your girl, don’t put your filthy money near mine. Don’t fund Amelie again. Not one more dollar. Forget she exists.”

He was quiet for a long moment. He sounded subdued when he spoke again. “The girl loves her husband. Leave it alone, Cavendish. If you pursue her, you’ll regret breaking up her family.”

It was my turn to clench my jaw. “I regret a great many things,” I said. “She won’t make the list.”

He looked at me with a touch of pity, which I pointedly ignored. Then he was swarmed by guests congratulating him on his engagement, and I went back to the only thing I had ever wanted.

Amelie was speaking to Rose. She’d worked one heel half out of her shoe beneath the hem of the dress, a small private thing, and I saw it, because I see all of her, always, and it undid me in a way the grand gestures never could.

Look up, I thought. Just once. Just at me.

She didn’t. She never did. Years ago, I’d stood at the back of a hall while she ignored my whole existence to text an insignificant boy, and all this time later, she was still looking everywhere in the world but at the man who’d have burned it down for her. My princess, who didn’t know my name.

I was tired of the glass between us. So I took some away.

I set my flute on the rail, closed my hand around it, and squeezed until it gave.

It was the only way to make her talk to me, to make her see me.

The pain came a half second behind the sound, bright, clean, honest, the first true thing I’d felt all night.

Blood welled dark into the linen that a horrified server ran over to press to my palm.

I barely noticed it. Someone said the word nurse. Someone went to fetch her. I wrapped my ruined right hand in the linen and waited, my pulse loud and even, and watched her cross the room toward me at last—summoned, finally, by the call she couldn’t ignore.

There she is.

Her hands were about to be on me. It had cost a fistful of glass, and I’d have paid it a hundred times over.

She led me away from the ballroom and to the medical room.

She knelt in front of me and took my ruined hand in both of hers, gentle, professional, a stranger doing her job.

She didn’t know she’d just walked into the rest of her life.

I let her work, and I memorized the top of her bent head, and I thought: soon.