Pucking With the Enemy (Devlin Mafia Duet #2)

Prologue

KELLAN

Some secrets are buried to protect the living. Others are buried because the truth would destroy everything still standing.

I used to tell myself mine was the first kind.

I'm not so sure anymore.

The most dangerous thing a man can do is love someone he was never supposed to protect.

The second most dangerous thing is knowing exactly what's coming and walking toward it anyway.

I've done both.

They say dead men tell no tales.

They're wrong.

Dead men tell the best ones. The difference is no one is listening until it's too late.

By the time you read this, you'll already know how my story ends.

You'll have watched it happen and maybe you'll have grieved it or maybe you won't—maybe you'll have decided I deserved it.

I've made peace with both outcomes. What I haven't made peace with is the things I never got to say, the truths I swallowed to keep other people breathing, and the one girl I failed so spectacularly that the memory of it follows me into every room I walk into like a second shadow.

This is my confession.

Not to God. Not to a priest behind a screen.

To her.

These meetings are getting reckless and I know it.

I feel it in the way my hands stay too still when Masen talks to me now, the practiced calm of a man who has learned that the wrong micro-expression can cost him everything.

I used to be good at reading people. Now I spend most of my energy making sure they can't read me.

Masen is circling.

He asks where I go at night with that studied casualness that fools everyone except the people who grew up watching him perform it.

He's been doing it for weeks. Watching. Cataloguing.

Building a picture from the fragments I've been careless enough to leave behind.

I know better than this. But there is something about carrying this much alone that makes a man sloppy at the edges, and my edges have been fraying for months.

We were close once. Him, me and Caspian.

The kind of close that felt impenetrable, forged in locker rooms and late nights and the specific loyalty that grows between young men who believe they are invincible.

I believed it too, once. Before I found the files in my father’s office.

Before I understood what Masen was. Before I realized the people I trusted most had been building something in the dark that none of us were ever supposed to survive long enough to talk about.

Some bonds don't break cleanly.

They rot from the inside, slow and silent, and by the time you notice that what you're standing on has turned to nothing, you're already falling.

I found out how deep Masen was in all of this a few weeks before the crash.

The same night I kissed Toren for the first time.

I've never said that out loud to anyone.

I don't know why I'm saying it now except that the weight of keeping it in has become heavier than the weight of saying it, and I am so goddamn tired of carrying things alone.

That kiss lives in me like a bruise that never quite healed, not painful exactly, just present.

Always present. A constant reminder of the exact moment everything I had been trying to hold together began to come apart.

She is unlike anything I have ever known.

Fierce and soft in equal measure, loyal to her bones, and utterly devastating in a way she has never once been aware of.

The kind of girl who walks into a room and recalibrates everything without meaning to.

I thought distance would protect her. I thought cold shoulders and sharp words would make her stop looking at me like she could see through every wall I'd ever built.

I thought if I made myself impossible to love she would stop trying.

I should have known better.

Toren Kellar has never in her life walked away from something she didn't understand and I was arrogant enough to believe I'd be the exception.

She wasn't the exception. She never was.

I loved being near her in a way I've never been able to explain to anyone, including myself.

The feeling of her eyes finding me across a room was better than sunlight.

Her attention, even briefly, even stolen in the spaces between everything else, was always the best part of my worst days.

There are nights I replay it all and try to find the moment I could have chosen differently.

The moment I could have taken her hand and told her the truth and chosen her over the deal and the silence and the slow suffocation of knowing too much.

I can never find it.

Because the truth is there was never a version of this where Toren Kellar was safe and I was honest.

I chose her safety.

I will stand by that choice until whatever comes for me finally arrives.

I got into that car the night of the crash because I didn't trust Masen to be alone with her.

That is the truth I have never said out loud to a single living person.

Not to Caspian. Not to Fiona. Not in any of the debrief sessions where I sat across from people with government badges and dead eyes, recounting a version of that night so carefully edited it was almost fiction.

I told myself it was my duty. Loyalty. The right thing.

But underneath all of that, stripped of every justification I have ever dressed it in, the real reason was simpler and far more inconvenient.

I just wanted more time with her.

And that decision, that one small, selfish, human decision, is the thing I will carry to my grave.

It cost four people everything.

After Kenna. After Emery. After Neave and Miles.

I watched Xaden Devlin absorb his grief and turn it into something cold, deliberate and aimed.

I watched the boy I once played against become the kind of man who weaponizes his own darkness.

That particular devastation doesn't weep.

It calculates. It waits. It sharpens itself in the quiet and when it finally moves, it moves with the kind of precision that leaves nothing standing.

He would never stop. I knew it the moment I looked into his eyes and saw not grief but purpose. He would pull at every thread until the whole thing unravelled and took everyone near down with it.

Including her.

I couldn't let that happen.

So I made a deal with a woman I should never have trusted with my name.

Deputy Director Fiona Williams doesn't negotiate.

She doesn't compromise. She identifies what you love most and she places it on the table between you and she waits for you to fold.

I knew exactly what she was doing when I sat across from her.

I did it anyway because the alternative was watching Toren walk into a war with nothing but the truth, a target on her back and absolutely no idea how deep the water was beneath her feet.

I got her immunity.

I got his.

I told myself it was enough.

I have been lying to myself for a very long time.

The burner phone vibrates in my pocket. Not my daily, the one only two people in the world have the number for, and one of them is currently making my life significantly more complicated than it needs to be.

Him.

I answer on the second ring.

“Yeah.”

“Can't make the meet.” His voice is tight. Fraying. The sound of a man being pulled in directions he didn't agree to when he signed up for this.

I press down the cold spike of irritation. “She needed us both. She wants this wrapped up before—”

“Before what?” he cuts across me. “Before it all blows up in our faces? Little late for that.” A pause, heavy and loaded.

“Want to trade places? Want to spend every day knowing one wrong word and everything comes down?

I'm bleeding for this too, Kellan. Don't you dare stand there and act like you're the only one with skin in the game.”

“Then stop withholding intel—”

“Fuck. You.”

The line goes dead.

I stand in the dark for a long moment with the phone in my hand and the silence pressing in around me and I think about the first time I realized this was bigger than both of us.

The first time I understood that the deal I made wasn't a lifeline, it was a leash.

And the person holding the other end of it has never once had any intention of letting go.

Headlights slice through the trees.

She doesn't bother to cut the engine. She never does, like she is always one decision away from leaving and wants the option ready.

Fiona Williams steps out of the car and walks toward me with the particular posture of a woman who has never once in her life been afraid of the dark.

I have always found that either admirable or deeply sinister depending on the night.

Tonight it's sinister.

“Kellan.” Clipped. Impatient. “Tell me you have something I can use.”

“I have Toren.”

Something moves behind her eyes. Hunger, maybe. Or the closest thing to it that a woman like her allows herself to feel. “Where is she?”

I almost smile. “You may have me by the balls but I am not handing her location to anyone. Not even you. Especially not you.”

She studies me for a long moment in a way that always makes me feel like she is reading something written on the inside of my skull. Then she produces a folder and holds it out between us like a peace offering that is anything but.

“The names in those files are still being watched,” she says quietly.

Quiet is always worse with Fiona. Quiet means she has already decided.

“Closely. If anyone moves against the terms of the deal struck with the former leader of the Saints, they go down. All of them. No exceptions. No second chances.” Her eyes don't waver. “Are we clear?”

I take the folder.

I don't answer.

I drive home in the dark with it sitting on the passenger, not opening it because I already know what's inside.

I requested every page of it. I've known what it contains for weeks and I've been waiting for the right moment, the right hand-off, the right way to make sure it reaches the only person I trust to know what to do with it.

These files aren't for me.

They were never for me.

I have that feeling again, the one that lives low in the chest and refuses to be reasoned with, the quiet and persistent certainty of a man who has learned to listen to his instincts because they have kept him alive in situations that should have ended him.

The feeling that tells me I am running out of time.

That the threads are pulling tighter. That something is circling.

That the ending I've been outrunning is nearly here.

I think about her.

I think about the way she looked at me before I made myself impossible to look at.

The way she saw through me anyway, every single time, without even trying.

She knows me too well. She always has. That was the problem and the gift, the one thing I couldn't afford to let her do because, if she had seen through me clearly enough, she would have understood what I was carrying and she would have tried to carry it with me.

I couldn't let that happen.

So I was cruel. Specifically and deliberately cruel, in the way you can only be cruel to someone you're terrified of losing.

I pushed her into his arms without meaning to.

I kept her at arm's length and let her believe it was indifference and I have replayed every moment of it since and I would do it again.

I would choose her safety over her opinion of me every single time without hesitation.

That's the part I never got to tell her.

Toren.

If you're reading this then I didn't make it and I need you to know that every cold word, every turned back, every moment you thought I didn't care, it was all a lie.

The realest thing I have ever done in my life was to love you quietly from a distance because it was the only way I knew how to keep you breathing.

Trust no one who hasn't already bled for you.

And Toren, watch your back. The person you least expect is standing closest.

I'm sorry I couldn't be the one standing beside you.

I'm sorry I didn't stop the car.

I'm sorry for all of it.

There are things in this world worth dying for.

You were always at the top of that list.

I just wish I'd told you while I still had the chance.