Chapter Twenty-Eight
XADEN
Hiding isn't in my nature.
I knew she would go after him.
The second she left that rink, I gave her a head start, then followed. Not because I needed the time. Because I wanted her to feel like she had it. I wanted her walking into that building believing she had the upper hand, believing she was one step ahead of me.
She wasn't.
She never has been.
I want to see the betrayal on her face when she comes out.
I need to see it. I have to look into those blue eyes and see that she chose that conniving son of a bitch over me.
That after everything—-the warehouse, the warehouse floor, the scalpel I couldn't drive home—-she still chose the brother who let her rot in Walter House over the man she claimed to love.
I need her to have done that.
I need something to be furious about that doesn't have her name all over it.
Taking out the soft bastards manning the perimeter was almost insulting.
None of them are trained. They carry guns like accessories and throw their weight around because Kellar's name has always done the heavy lifting for them.
Even without weapons my men can hold their own in a fist fight. The whole operation took four minutes.
I'm leaning against their SUV with my arms crossed over my chest. When it's done, Ken, Gauge and Johnson have all of Masen's pathetic men on their knees in the gravel in front of me, hands behind their heads, mouths shut because they are smart enough to understand what happens if they aren't.
This is me flexing.
This is me making a point to every man in a ten mile radius that I don't care how many of them there are or how long they've been loyal to the Kellar name, I am the Don of Stormsend and Somerset and I am not a man you place hurdles in front of.
I will break through every single one until I get what I came for.
And what I came for is Masen Kellar.
I count the seconds.
That's what I do when the thing I'm trying not to feel gets too close to the surface, I count.
I give my mind something mechanical to hold so the dark thing inside me stays on its leash.
I've been counting since we pulled off the road three miles back and cut the lights.
Since I pulled up to the building on my phone and I studied every exit without saying her name once.
I hear her before I see her.
That's how it always is with Toren Kellar.
I can walk into a room of a hundred people and know within seconds exactly where she is.
It isn't something I can explain and I have long since stopped trying.
It's like a frequency she occupies in my chest, a rubber band that pulls taut and leads me directly to her whether I want it to or not.
Whether I'm trying or not. Whether it suits me or destroys everything I'm trying to build.
It's always her.
The doors open.
She steps outside and her eyes move immediately, not scanning the perimeter the way a trained person would, not clocking my men or the kneeling row of Masen's guards first.
She looks for me.
Directly. Deliberately. Like she already knew I'd be here and she's been deciding what her face will do when she finds me.
When her eyes lock onto mine something shifts in them.
I watch it happen. I catalog it the way I catalog everything about her because I am apparently incapable of not doing that, incapable of letting a single detail of Toren Kellar pass through my field of vision without filing it somewhere permanent.
She isn't shocked.
She isn't afraid.
There's no flinch, no sharp intake of breath, no involuntary step backward. She stands in the doorway with her spine straight and her chin lifted and she looks at me the way she has always looked at me, like she's already decided something and is waiting for me to catch up.
Like she knew I was coming and she came out anyway.
Ready.
Like she's walked out of her own nightmare and stepped directly into mine and she isn't going to apologize for either.
And beside her, standing upright, unrestrained, moving under his own power like a man who has made a decision he intends to keep is Masen Kellar.
My jaw locks.
The fury is immediate and total… underneath it, beneath the cold clean rage that I know how to use, there is something else.
Something I won't name. Something that has been growing since the warehouse floor, since a scalpel clattered to concrete and I stood there with empty hands and a chest full of things I don't have words for.
She managed it.
She walked into that building alone, into the place that was supposed to finish her, that her own father built to break her and she came out with the man I have been hunting for two years, walking voluntarily at her side.
I push off the hood of the SUV.
The gravel crunches under my boots as I move toward her and she holds her ground. Of course she holds her ground, she has never once in all the months I have known her taken a single step backward from me when she could have taken twenty.
We stop three feet apart.
The men on both sides of this equation have gone very still. Carnage is at her right, I feel him without looking, that cocksucker's presence is like a weather system. The kneeling men in the gravel. Halo somewhere in the dark behind her. My men fanned out, waiting for an order I haven't given.
Nobody breathes.
I look at her.
She looks at me.
The weight of everything we haven't said sits between us in the dark, like a third person, like it always does, like it has done since the first night I put my hands around her throat and she didn't look away.
“Tink.” Her name comes out of me before I've decided to say it. Rough around the edges. Not the weapon I've trained myself to make it.
Something moves through her expression. A flicker. Fast, involuntary and gone before she can hide it.
“You followed us,” she says. Not an accusation. Just the truth, laid out plainly between us the way she does everything.
“I followed you.” The distinction matters and we both know why.
Her jaw tightens. Barely. “He's with me, Xaden.”
I look at Masen over her shoulder.
He looks back at me.
I have spent two years building toward this moment.
Two years of careful, meticulous, patient construction, one stone at a time, one sleepless night at a time, one piece of intelligence and one calculated move at a time, all of it aimed at the man standing behind her with blood drying on his face and the performance stripped clean away.
He doesn't look like what I expected.
He looks like a man who has put something down.
The rage in my chest is real and righteous and two years old and it hasn't gone anywhere. It won't. It lives in the same place Emery used to live, in the hollow she left behind, and nothing will fill that and nothing should.
But there is something else here tonight and I am running out of room to pretend I can't feel it.
“He was the second,” she says it quietly, watching my face. “He's been running the cartel since he was seventeen. He knows everything… every account, every name, every piece of leverage Steven ever collected.” She doesn't look away from me. “He's going to give us all of it.”
That word.
Us.
She keeps saying it like she's earned the right to it. Like it belongs to her by some logic I've never agreed to and can't seem to argue against. Like it's already true and she's just waiting for me to stop pretending ignorance.
I look at her for a long moment.
The parking lot is quiet. The building looms behind her, all dead stone and iron, the building her own father signed the paperwork to put her in.
She walked back into it tonight.
She walked in and she came out.
Still standing. Still here. Still looking at me like I'm worth the effort of being looked at.
My throat does something I won't acknowledge.
“Forty eight hours,” I say. My voice comes out level, which is a small miracle. “He gives you everything. All of it. Nothing held back.” I hold her gaze. “Then I come for what I'm owed. And you don't stand in the way of that.”
She holds the stare for three, four, five seconds.
Then she nods. Once. Small. Certain. The nod of a woman who has heard every layer of what was just said and is accepting all of it with her eyes fully open.
“Thank you,” she says quietly.
“Release my men,” I force out. “If they’re injured, Johnson will put a bullet in each of those cunts' heads as payback.”
I look at her for one second longer than I should.
Then I turn away.
I walk.
I don't look back.
I don't count this time.
I just walk, the sound of gravel under my boots, the cold air, the distant road and everything that belongs to this night fills the space where the counting usually goes.
And underneath all of it, small, persistent and impossible to bury —
Us.
I sit here in the basement in front of Caspian. He’s leaning against the opposite wall in the exact same position as I am, knee bent with one leg straight out, one arm resting on top and a blank look on his face.
I shouldn’t be here. This motherfucker betrayed me, yet here I fucking sit.
Staring at the bastard who became something to me after I lost everything. Doc patched him up. He has a broken leg, fractured ribs and some other shit but the point is, he’ll fucking live. He knows the punishment he got was just, he should have gotten a lot fucking worse.
“Masen is with her.”
He doesn’t pretend to misunderstand me. “Why?” His voice is gravely and tinged with pain. I should feel some form of guilt, but I don’t.
“She says he was Steven’s second.” I watch him, cataloging every movement for any signs that he knew the truth about Masen, but the shock on his face is real. Either that or he’s an Oscar winning actor and I missed the fucking memo on that.
“How?” he murmurs. His features pull tight as he tries to think over their past. “When? He was with us, we were together every fucking day at his house or Kellan’s, training at the rink—”
“Since he was seventeen.”
Caspian’s face contorts. I see betrayal and anger burning in his eyes. “He knew about all of this,” he mutters quietly. Then his eyes widen and rage snuffs out the betrayal as he locks his eyes onto mine. “He knew Kellan was a mole.”
I nod, I came to that realization as well.
“If he is who the fuck he says he is, then he knows about Fiona and you.”
He inhales a sharp breath. Silence stretches between us for a moment.
“Is he alive?”
My jaw locks. “Do you fucking care?” I hiss.
His eyes narrow and I see him grinding his teeth as he attempts to move but then groans in pain and clutches his side. I don’t look away, I watch his discomfort and revel in it. He chose to turn on me, he deserves worse than what he got.
“No,” he grits out through the pain. “I asked because if it’s fucking true, it means he could have the intel that is needed to take that bitch down.”
“That cunt will say anything to save his ass.”
“Why’d you let him live then?”
I growl in warning. This fucker is no longer my brother. He has no right to question me or my motives.
“You want to give her enough rope so she hangs herself and then you get to save her from her brother?”
I scoff. “I gave the bitch forty-eight hours to get the intel, after that he’s mine.”
“She won’t give him up. She thinks she hates him but he’s still her brother.”
And that right there is the truth I needed to hear out loud. Caspian must read something on my face because his features soften slightly as he looks at me.
“Stop backing her into a corner, Xaden, thinking she will turn her back on you. Toren loves you. All that girl is trying to do is find a way to survive.”
“I haven’t killed her.”
“Not for her life,” he snaps.
“What the fuck else is there to fight for then?” I yell.
“She’s trying to survive you!” he hisses, then flinches. “Living in a world without you at her side is worse than death for her. She allows you to hurt her, torment her and be the crazy son of a bitch you are because it means she still gets you.”
His words land like a sucker punch.
“Taking Fiona down doesn’t end the war, it just stops the battle.
The real war is between you and the girl you swore to break.
The one person who forced you to see past your hate and grief.
She forced you to live again without you even knowing.
The Xaden Devlin I know would never have hesitated, he would have slit her throat and then sliced those lips from her face.
I guess your fairy used her dust on you without you even realizing it. ”