Chapter 6 Jace
Ihate her.
The ex.
The one at the door.
The one who used to twist my brain inside out and call it connection.
She would kiss me while staring at Kieran, making him feel like he wasn’t good enough… Then whisper to him like I wasn’t even in the fucking room when I was right beside them.
She tried to turn all three of us against each other because the negativity made her feel powerful.
And we let her tear our friendship to strips for a while.
Too fucking long.
Now I sit in the low light of the loft, staring at Silas’s screen while he scrubs through traffic camera footage like he’s assembling a kill list. And I know he won’t let us repeat a past mistake.
Eris is nothing like her.
Daniel, and the major problem that he is, keeps circling Eris like a glitch that never clears.
But every time I try to focus, the beast of a nepo bitch claws her way back into my mind. How she looked at me at the door, like I owed her a conversation… As if she hadn’t gutted our group and smiled while doing it.
“Just say it,” Silas mutters, eyes never leaving his monitor. “You’re vibrating.”
“I hate her.” Those three words rumble from my chest, stuck between my ribs for months.
Across the room, Kieran looks up and makes eye contact with me. There’s no shock on his face at my admission, just understanding.
Silas switches to a new angle, the computer chair wheels the only sound in the loft before his fingers are moving fast over his keyboard. “You’re over her. You have been for a while now.”
It’s not a question.
But I answer anyway.
“I am.”
Kieran nods once. “We know.”
There’s no teasing or reminders of old wounds. We’re all passed that. They’ve seen me since being in Eris’s presence. And they can’t fight the magnetic pull they feel to her either.
It started the night she typed her name into the app like she was handing over a secret she never meant to share. And it became so much stronger the night she walked into that bar in black boots and a stare sharp enough to cut bone.
Eris made the universe irrelevant.
“I can’t stop thinking about this morning,” I admit. “Not just Daniel. The ex. What are the odds of her showing up now?”
“Not a coincidence,” Silas says flatly. “She heard about the app and the money it’s generating. And when she got here to sniff around, she saw Eris.”
Kieran leans back, thoughtful. “Do you think she knows?”
We look at each other.
“Yeah, I think she knows,” I say with a snort. “And I think it’s killing her that she can’t play us like she used to.”
“She’s obsessive.” Silas never sugar-coats anything, especially not when it comes to the she-beast. “She’s petty and hates feeling like she’s being replaced.”
“And she was replaced,” I mutter. “Instantly. Well before we met Eris… Separation was the best replacement we could have had.”
Kieran sighs as he drops onto the couch. “Do you think she’s going to cause a problem?”
“Of course she’s a fucking problem.” Silas grimaces, disgust written all over his face. “Always has been. But she’s not Daniel.”
The air changes, the conversation shifting like gravity tilting beneath our feet.
“He’s getting too close,” I say, far more calmly than I should feel, but he gets brought up so often, I’m becoming desensitized to his name.
“He’s smart in the wrong ways,” Silas answers. “Rotates burner phones. Swaps between three cars that I’ve been able to track so far. Loops around her building before stopping to park and watch. But he avoids the smaller, easier to identify patterns.”
“Daniel is testing the perimeter,” Kieran murmurs.
“He’s testing us,” I point out, not that they need me to.
Silas zooms in on a grainy traffic clip of a black sedan. “He’s escalating without touching her. That tells me he wants the first touch to be significant.”
I grit my teeth. “Significant how?”
“He doesn’t see her as a person.” Silas looks at me as he answers, quirking a brow at my expression. “Possessive. He sees her as an extension of his identity.”
“And if she rejects that?” Kieran asks.
“He’ll take her,” Silas says. “Call it rescuing or saving her. Narcissists always wrap their violence in synonyms for love.”
“Not happening.” My stomach turns sour at the thought. “Not even close.”
Kieran stands and starts pacing. “We need to take the offensive.”
“Agreed,” Silas says. “I’m close to getting a plate number from the car he drove yesterday. Once I do? I’m done waiting. We fix this. Permanently.”
“And if he gets close again? Before we can fix it?” I counter, mostly because I need to know the worst-case scenario.
Kieran stops dead in tracks, glancing between me and Silas.
“Then we turn you two loose.” His voice drops, low and lethal. “And we help Si bury this piece of shit.”
No one disagrees.
Not even a little.