Pucked Around and Found Out (Devlin Mafia #3)

Chapter One

XADEN

There is something devastatingly beautiful about looking death in the eyes.

Most men break before I even touch them.

They beg. They weep. They lose control of their bodies just from the weight of my gaze settling on them, because they know.

The moment they see my face, they understand that whatever story they were living has reached its final page, and I am the one holding the pen.

That kind of power doesn't just intoxicate.

It becomes you.

It rewires something fundamental. You stop being a man and become something older, something that has no clean name.

You are the last thing they see. The last voice they hear.

You are the answer to every prayer they ever sent skyward because whatever god they were petitioning turned his back.

You are their judge. Their jury. Their executioner. Their ending.

No drug touches it. Nothing you can inject or inhale or swallow comes close to the clarity of holding someone's fate in your hands and deciding, with absolute calm, what to do with it.

I have waited a long time for this specific clarity.

Months of listening. Of sitting in the dark with her voice in my ear, her schemes, her plans, her carefully calculated moves against me and saying nothing.

Doing nothing. Letting her believe she was building something when she was only ever walking into what I'd already built around her.

When Cas came to me with his plan the day she arrived I wanted to break his jaw for suggesting I needed patience.

I was wrong. He could see the shape of it when all I could see was red.

I'm grateful now.

She wasn't driving that night. She wants that fact to matter. It doesn't. She was in that car. She was there, and that’s all that matters.

Emery. Neave. Miles.

Emery who lit something in me I thought I was born without.

Neave who could talk me back from the edge when I was ready to go over it.

Miles who looked at the Cosa Nostra and saw a cage, who looked at me and saw something worth more than a foot soldier.

He's in the ground now and I'm the Don, and I hope wherever he is he's made his peace with the irony.

Without bugging her phone she would have had everything. The upper hand. The element of surprise. Everything I wasn’t willing to give her.

Frank and Kellan are already gone. That just leaves Steven, Meekan, Masen and her. After tonight the weight that has been sitting on my chest since that accident will finally have somewhere to go. Their ghosts will find their rest.

So will I.

The sound of retching pulls me out of my head.

“Stop the car.” Her voice is a rasp, barely holding itself together.

I don't move. I shake my head at Chance.

“Xaden,” Cas's voice sharpens to something that means business, “stop the fucking car before she decorates my lap.”

I grit my teeth and nod. Chance pulls off the road and Carlos is out before the vehicle stops moving. She stumbles after him and makes it to the bank just in time, and I watch from where I lean against the car as she empties herself into the dark.

I don't move to help her.

I watch because I don't trust her. Because every move she makes, even this one, gets filtered through the question of whether it's calculated. Whether the vulnerability is real or whether she's waiting for the moment my guard drops.

She has faced a gun pressed to her forehead without flinching. But the thought of watching her piece of shit father and brother suffer in front of her? That will break her.

Weak ass bitch.

My mind and body are conducting their usual war.

My mind wants to take her apart slowly, wants it to be surgical, deliberate and final.

My body wants something entirely different, something I have spent considerable energy despising myself for.

I want to consume her. To be so far inside her head and under her skin that she can't locate the boundary between herself and the destruction I intend for her.

I want to be the last thing she thinks of.

The thing she reaches for in the dark before she remembers what I am.

I’m rotten.

I know it.

Everyone who has ever stood close enough to me knows it, they can smell the decay. Everything good in me died with Emery, with Neave, with Miles. Whatever I might have been, whatever version of myself existed before that night is gone, buried under months of grief dressed up as strategy.

My sister was supposed to be here. She had the mind for it. The patience. The ability to see the board and play twenty moves ahead without losing herself. She would have led this family into something worth leading.

All I know how to do is break and kill.

When Toren starts to sway, I push off the car and move toward her.

Not out of concern. I have no concern for the bitch, whatever softness existed between us was a weapon I deployed and I do not regret it.

I move because she is not allowed to fall.

She is not allowed to do anything that isn't on my schedule tonight.

The Kellars end tonight.

All of them. This war they thought they could win comes to a close tonight, and she will be present for every second of it.

I close my hand around her arm. She flinches, a small, involuntary thing and straightens. She looks at me, and there it is. The devastation. Raw and unguarded for just a moment before she tries to bury it.

“I told you, Tink.” The words come out quiet, almost gentle, which is worse and we both know it. “Fairies die when no one believes in them.”

Something sharpens in her eyes. She pulls herself upright, pale, sweating, still half-undone from the side of the road and tries to look like someone I should be afraid of.

“I've learned I don't need anyone to believe in me. I just need to trust myself to survive.”

I look at her for a moment.

“How’s that working out for you?”

She holds my gaze. “It was working well until some bastard bugged my phone, shot my friend, raided my house and knocked me up.”

The last three words land like a lit match.

The anger that moves through me is white and structural, the kind that could bring something down.

I keep my face still because I am very good at keeping my face still.

Chance calls from the car and I drag her back before the anger becomes something I can't account for, shoving her into the car, I ignore her whimper as I reclaim my seat up front.

The drive to Stormsend is silent and charged and I let it be both.

I reach into the glove compartment and retrieve my greatest possession.

My treasure jar.

The sight of all the lips of my victims brings a smile to my face. I bite back a groan of satisfaction. Each one of these fuckers deserved the end they got. These lips are my reward for all the hard work I put in to get them to talk.

The ones I want most are currently attached to the cunt sitting beside my friend.

Hers I will frame. I will hang them above my bed so they are the first thing I see in the morning and the last thing I see at night.

Because she was the key to all of it, the fulcrum the entire Kellar operation balanced on and her own family never recognized it.

They counted her out. Underestimated her. Made her feel like nothing.

I didn't. I saw exactly what she was and I used every inch of it.

One carefully placed obsession. One slow, methodical seduction. One hand on her throat, one around her loyalty and she dismantled her own family from the inside while believing she was fighting for them.

Toren Kellar destroyed the Kellar Cartel.

She just doesn't know it yet.

When the warehouse emerges from the dark ahead the tension drains out of my shoulders like water finding its level. I breathe for what feels like the first time in months.

This is it.

Everything I built since the night of the accident, every calculated step, every night spent in the dark listening to her voice through a stolen signal, every piece of patience I forced myself to hold when all I wanted was to burn it all down immediately, it ends here. It becomes something.

It becomes theirs. Emery. Neave. Miles.

The fairy wanted to believe she could survive me. She wanted to believe she was the kind of story that gets to keep going. Her plotting and scheming was for nothing, I was ten fucking steps ahead of her the whole time.

It’s time for the fairy to watch me work, it’s time for her to see why my last name has the right letters to spell devil.