His Wicked Game (Sins of Stonewood #1)

Chapter 1 – Ben

Chapter

One

BEN

The bell over the door jingled as I stepped inside Stonewood Hardware, dragging a gust of Gulf Coast winter wind in with me.

That wet cold clung to everything — my clothes, my skin, the scar tissue puckered along my ribs — and made even the inside of the hardware store feel colder than outside.

It was the kind of cold that didn’t just touch you; it sank in, humid and heavy, crawling under your skin like it had a personal vendetta against your bones.

The side of my face — the one that had caught the worst of the windshield glass and that damned fourteen-point buck’s antlers — ached the second the winter air hit it.

It wasn’t a surface sting, but a deep, bone-level throb that felt like every nerve was remembering the night my accident happened.

The skin there never sweat right anymore, never adjusted well to temperature changes.

It just went straight from numb to burning.

The wind still carried the faint tang of brackish water from where the river met the bay, and somehow that made it worse, like the air itself wanted to pick at my old wounds.

Under the hoodie, the scars across my chest pulled tight as I moved, the damaged nerves flickering with cold-bitten static.

My left knee ached like it always did when the pressure dropped, the steel pins inside it humming dull and mean.

My hands hurt worse. I should’ve worn gloves.

Henry had reminded me, but I’d waved him off.

Idiot.

The floorboards creaked under my boots as I kept my head low, hood up, hands shoved deep in my hoodie pocket.

The list in my pocket crumpled against my fingers as I pulled it out and studied it, Henry’s tight handwriting spelling out wood glue, epoxy, screws, hinges, sandpaper, and a damn space heater.

We had central heat at my family’s old hunting lodge, sure, but the east wing was drafty, and Henry had a thing about redundancies.

It was an old habit from his special-forces days.

The man had backup plans for his backup plans.

I moved through the aisles, methodically running through the items on the list, ignoring the sideways glances from the two girls behind the counter.

The older one — barely out of junior college, maybe — kept sneaking peeks in my direction.

The other one had her phone out, scrolling through social media, gum popping between her teeth.

They didn’t bother to whisper as they gossiped with each other.

The older girl leaned toward the younger one.

“…he’d be, like, twenty-five now, right? But I haven’t seen the guy since I was a kid.”

The younger one blew a big bubble with her gum and snapped it with an obnoxious pop.

Please tell me they’re not talking about me, for fuck’s sake.

The younger one actually paused her scrolling and looked up from her phone.

“My cousin swears she saw him through the gate of the hunting lodge last year, but it was probably just Henry. Or maybe a ghost. You know what they say about that hunting lodge.”

Pop.

The older one crossed her arms and shook her head.

“It’s not the hunting lodge that’s haunted, stupid.

It’s Ashgrove House, the old Stonewood family mansion, where Jacob Stonewood died.

Ben Stonewood’s stepmom totally killed his dad.

Everybody knows it. But nobody could prove it, and then she skipped the country while Ben was in a coma? Like, hello?”

Pop.

If the younger girl kept popping her gum like that, I was going to have a really hard time not slapping it out of her mouth for the sake of my sanity. The younger girl glanced around, but didn’t lower her voice before speaking again.

“I heard he’s deformed. Like… Phantom of the Opera kind of deformed. That’s why he never leaves the hunting lodge since his accident.”

I wished like hell that I hadn’t listened to Henry. I’d love to be back at the lodge right now, rather than hearing those two airheads gossip about me and my family.

I reached for a box of epoxy and missed as the younger girl popped her gum again, pulling my attention away from what I was doing as I glared at her over my shoulder. My hand slid sideways and white-hot pain lanced through my palm, dragging my attention back to what I was doing.

There was a sharp edge on the bracket underneath the shelf, and I’d just cut my hand on the jagged metal someone hadn’t bothered to file down. It had sliced clean across my palm before I could pull back.

I gritted my teeth as my hand pulsed with throbbing pain and warm blood dripped from my palm onto the metal shelf and the concrete floor.

I sucked in a breath through clenched teeth, but I didn’t curse. I didn’t flinch, either.

Of course this would happen. Of course, this was the day Henry finally convinced me to leave the damn hunting lodge.

I spent three goddamn years in a coma, then four years awake and hiding away at the hunting lodge, and this was how my reintroduction to the world started?

Bleeding on the concrete floor in Stonewood’s one hardware store while girls who didn’t even know me on sight gossiped about my life like it was a Netflix docuseries.

I stepped up to the counter, blood trailing down my fingers. My hood still shaded most of my face, but my voice came out gravel-rough. Years of disuse did that.

“Can I get a first aid kit, please?”

The older girl turned toward me and froze.

I watched her eyes widen. Her gaze snagged on my jaw, where the scarring was worst, visible even in the shadow my hood provided.

Her lips parted, but no sound came out. She just gave me a dead-eyed stare, the kind people usually reserved for roadkill they couldn’t quite identify.

“I just need a bandage,” I said, slow and clear enough for even an imbecile to comprehend what I was saying.

Still nothing. She just kept staring at me.

The bell above the door jingled again. Another gust of damp, cold wind barreled through, hard enough to blow my hood off my head.

Shit.

The air hit my face like a slap.

I didn’t need a mirror to know what they were seeing. Scar tissue dragged from my temple to my jaw, across my cheekbone and down my throat. It was twisted, raised, and ugly as fuck.

Once upon a time, I was handsome. Too handsome, if I’m being honest. Before the accident, I had a sharp jaw, good bone structure, and piercing blue eyes, paired with dark hair that always looked artfully messy, even when I didn’t try.

I used to have a face that made people smile at me before I even said a word.

Now?

Now they stared at me for entirely different reasons.

The scars stole everything soft and handsome from my features.

The ones on my throat tugged my expression just enough to make my resting face look cruel.

The ones on my cheekbone caught the light in a way that made people flinch.

And the ones beneath my hoodie, the ones that ran down my chest, over my ribs, across what used to be a body worth showing off?

Well, those were just for me. And Henry, I supposed.

And the surgeons who’d pieced me back together after I hit a fucking fourteen point buck in a two-door sports car and it came through my windshield, of course.

The older girl behind the counter recoiled, and the younger one hid behind her. The gum popper’s hand fluttered near the register on instinct, like I might rob the place next.

“Are you fucking serious right now?”

The voice came from behind me. It was sharp as a blade, feminine, and righteously pissed off.

I turned toward the sound and froze.

A young woman stood in the doorway, her dark brown hair windblown from the walk across the lot, a space heater box clutched tight in both arms. Her beanie was red, her cheeks pink from the cold, and her coat looked like it had been patched once or twice over the years.

It was clean, but worn at the cuffs, like everything she owned had to stretch a little farther than it should need to.

She had big brown eyes, freckles dusted across her nose, and her brown hair was in a messy braid, frizz curling at the edges from the humidity. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-one or twenty-two, but she moved like someone who didn’t have the time or the patience to be fragile.

She zeroed in on my bloody hand, then on the girls standing behind the counter, staring at me like I was the fucking boogeyman.

“You see this man standing here bleeding, and y’all are just… what? Practicing to be extras in a horror movie? Quit gawking and hand me the damn first aid kit.”

The cashier flinched like she’d been slapped. She shook off her stupor, fumbled under the counter, came up with a dusty ass first aid kit, and slid it toward the woman who’d walked in, like I might bite her if she handed it to me, instead.

The girl with the beanie slammed the heater box in her arms down on the counter and grabbed the first aid kit, dusting it off.

“That piece of shit space heater you sold me doesn’t even turn on.

I bought it with my own money to keep my grandmother warm in the nursing home, and you better believe I’ll be getting a working one before I leave this store.

But first?” She popped open the lid on the first aid kit and grabbed gauze and alcohol wipes.

“You’re gonna let me help this man, and y’all are gonna sit your asses down and shut up while I do it. ”

The brunette turned back to me, her dark eyes scanning the cut on my palm with practiced ease.

“Sit,” she said, nodding to the stool near the window.

“I’m fine.”

The words came out as a growl.

She arched a brow at me, completely unfazed by my brusque response.

“And I’m a fuckin’ unicorn. Sit down… please.”

I sat.

As she prepared to clean the wound on my hand, she didn’t flinch. More than that, she didn’t stare at my face. My scars didn’t seem to give her pause, not even for a second. She didn’t even acknowledge them.

She didn’t recognize me… her accent was local, but she had no earthly idea who I was.

That realization hit me harder than I expected it to.

She’d gone to public school, I deduced, Stonewood High, probably, which meant she was from the part of town I rarely had a reason to visit, if ever. My family all went to Stonewood Preparatory Academy, the private school on the rich side of town.

My side of town was all gated driveways, country club banquets, and legacy wealth. This girl and I might’ve lived five miles apart, but we’d grown up in two entirely different worlds.

And yet here she was — hands warm, movements sure — patching up a stranger like taking care of others was second nature to her.

She dropped to one knee and set the open kit on the floor beside her like she’d done this a hundred times. She pulled out the pair of latex gloves and put them on.

I hissed through my teeth as she cleaned my cut with the antiseptic wipes she pulled out of the kit.

“Sorry,” she grimaced, but didn’t let it slow down the work she was doing on my cut.

“It’s fine,” I grunted. “Thank you.”

She moved quickly but carefully, not even blinking at the blood as she pressed gauze against my cut and wrapped my hand with that tape they use to hold gauze in place when you give blood.

“You’re lucky. The cut is shallow.”

“Yeah.”

Way to sound like a monosyllabic idiot, fucknut.

“Boy, you’re a real chatterbox, aren’t you?” She glanced up at me with a wry grin. “What’d you cut your hand on?”

“A metal bracket. I got distracted by that one girl chewing and popping her gum loud enough they could probably hear her all the way across the bay in Mobile, and when I turned to look at where all the noise was coming from, my hand slipped and I cut it.”

Red beanie girl chuckled and shook her head.

“You gotta keep your eyes up in this store, buddy. Everything’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.”

She wasn’t looking at my face. Or, if she was, she didn’t show it. No staring. No flinching. Just hands on my skin like it was normal… like I was just another guy.

“Thanks,” I said quietly.

She shrugged.

“No problem. Sorry about the airhead twins over there. Most people in this town were raised better than to act like that.”

I huffed out a husky laugh. I couldn’t help it. She didn’t even know who I was.

“What’s your name, stranger?” she asked.

I paused. Just long enough to make it weird.

“…Jacob.”

Why the fuck did I give her my middle name? Smooth move, asshole.

She smiled up at me, soft and crooked.

“Nice to meet you, Jacob. I’m Chrissy… Chrissy Jones.”

I stared down at her for a beat too long.

Because Chrissy didn’t look at me like I was broken. She didn’t look at me like I was cursed or tragic or some local legend or a scarred boogeyman.

She looked at me like I was just a man with a cut on his hand, who needed help, and she was happy to give it.

Not a monster. Not a myth. Just a man.

And maybe — for the first time in years — that’s exactly who I wanted to be.

But I knew better.

That version of me was long dead and buried in the wreckage with the deer, the glass, and the boy who used to smile without thinking twice about it.

Still… Chrissy Jones. That name stuck under my skin like a splinter.

I didn’t know her, but I didn’t need to. I didn't need to deserve her, either, but I knew in that moment, I was going to find out everything I possibly could about her. I needed to know where she worked, where she lived, who she trusted, and who she smiled at when I wasn’t around to see it.

Even if I couldn’t step back into Stonewood society the way Henry had hoped I would… I could still watch her. I could still want her, and I could bide my time until I found a way to have Chrissy Jones all to myself.