Chapter Thirty-Five #2
She looks at me for a long moment. Something passes between us, all the things we don't have time to say.
One of the biggest questions I want answers to is, who is your devil, Harp?
She nods and follows the others.
I hear the back door open and close.
The house goes quiet.
And then the front door opens.
He doesn't kick it in. That's not his style. It simply opens, because he has always known how to make an entrance that costs nothing and communicates everything.
Xaden fills the doorway.
Six men at his back, fanning out through the house like they've practiced the layout, because they have.
Because Halo's face when he pieced it all together told me they've had weeks to memorize every room and every exit.
They move fast and quiet and I hear furniture hit the wall in the hallway, hear the sounds of the house being cleared.
His eyes find mine before his men have even finished moving.
They always find me. That has always been the problem.
I don't run. Running is for the girl I was before all of this, before Walter House and Kellan and Kenna Dee and Emery.
I hold my ground in the middle of the empty bedroom with my spine straight and my hands loose at my sides.
I look at Xaden Devlin across the wreckage of the room and I feel, under all of the rage and the grief and the hot sick knowledge of everything he's taken, that pull.
That terrible, magnetic, unforgivable pull that I have spent months pretending I could out run.
I hate myself for it.
He steps inside.
“Tink.”
My name that isn't my name. Low and unhurried, like we are the only two people here and the sounds of his men moving through my house are nothing but weather. The sight of Emery’s pendant hanging around his neck sends a stab of pain through me, I miss the feeling of it around my neck.
I miss how it would ground me and offer some semblance of peace.
But, it was never mine to keep. I hate that I had to give it up.
“You bugged my phone.” The words come out flat. Deliberate. A verdict, not an accusation.
He doesn't flinch. “You kept it.”
Three words. True and terrible. I kept it and we both know why and neither of us is going to say it out loud, because saying it out loud would mean admitting that somewhere inside all of this hate and strategy and carefully maintained fury there is something that refuses to let go of him, and I am not ready to die with that truth on my lips.
“The library.” My voice almost holds. “This morning. You heard everything.” I watch his face when I say it. I need to know what's on his face when he confirms it. “You knew about the tape before I did.”
A muscle in his jaw tightens. Something moves through his eyes, brief, involuntary, gone before I can name it and then the wall goes back up.
“Yes.”
“You knew Meekan was using that private moment between us—” My voice cracks on the edge of it and I drag it back and rebuild. “You knew, yet you did nothing and still made me wear your jersey and sit rink-side and perform like a good little puppy.”
He says nothing.
“Why, Xaden?” I ask.
The silence stretches, long enough that I start building walls against whatever he says next.
“Everything you think you know is wrong. Meekan was never going to upload that tape because I already had him and your father.”
I search his face for the lie and find none, he’s speaking the truth.
“You have my father?” I breathe out.
The cruel smirk that spreads across his face is sinister. “Had to catch the senator before you did, Tink.” His tone is filled with sarcasm.
“I hate you,” I seethe.
“I saved you.”
“That’s the biggest lie I have ever heard—”
“Your stupid ass was about to meet Meekan. Your father had planned to have his men intercept you. Use you against the Denver Kings and try to use you against me.” His words hit their mark and knock the air right out of me.
“Oh, Tink,” he purrs as he moves closer and reaches out to brush the back of his knuckles along my cheek.
“I’ve loved listening to you plan my fall and plot your rise but you made one fatal mistake. ”
I step back, forcing him to drop his arm back to his side.
“What’s that?”
“I’ve been planning this for over a year, I was gathering intel.
Moving men into place without my father knowing.
Killing him wasn’t a spur of the moment decision, it was calculated.
It was the perfect time to strike. Steven showed me his cards that night, your brother proved he is nothing without the backing of his daddy.
He’s weak and he’ll be the first I take out tonight. ”
I swallow and stare up at the man I have allowed to consume my every thought, to get under my skin and fester inside me.
“When this is over, I'm still coming for your empire.”
Something crosses his face. Hard and complicated and not quite the cold triumph I expected. “You won't survive this war.”
“You don't know that.”
“Yeah, I do. This war ends tonight, Tink.”
The sounds from the rest of the house have gone quiet. His men finished. The house is his and he knows it and I know it. We are both standing here anyway.
I take one step toward the door.
He doesn't move to stop me.
I take another.
“You know we have Kellan’s phone,” I say it without turning around. I don't know why I say it. Maybe because knowledge is the only currency I have left to spend. I turn. “He's going to crack it open. Whoever was helping Kellan, is going to know what you did. They’ll find out.”
He already knew before the library that I had betrayed him, made a deal with Kellan to help him. He knew Kellan was working for the CIA, he killed him for it. All this time I thought I was learning and making power moves, only for Xaden to pull the rug out from right under my feet.
Something happens to Xaden's expression then.
Something that isn't quite surprise and isn't quite fear and moves so fast I'd have missed it if I hadn't been watching.
He looks at me with those gray eyes that I have never been able to read as well as I need to, and I see it, the calculation, the re-evaluation, the thing that looks almost like he's seeing me clearly for the first time.
Good.
Let him look.
“Time to reunite with your daddy and brother, Tink. Your lips will finally be mine by the end of the night.”
I walk out of the bedroom and down the hall and out the front door with Xaden right behind me.
I don't look back. I don’t need to. I can feel his shadows shrouding me and drawing me into his darkness.
I keep walking until the cold air hits me and the night swallows the sound of the house behind me.
All I have left is my own heartbeat and the phrase I have been repeating since I was a girl with nothing.
To teach is to learn. To learn is to excel. To excel is to thrive. To thrive is to live.
Caspian stands beside one of the Suburbans like a loyal guard.
I shoot my old friend a dirty look as he pulls the back door open.
As I climb inside the car, I pause at the sight of my brother, cuffed and gagged with blood smeared across his face.
His eyes are wild with hatred as he glares at me. I shoot the pathetic asshole a scowl.
“You brought this upon yourself,” I mutter as I move past him and sit in the very back.
I expected Xaden to claim the seat beside me so he could taunt me some more, but it’s Cas who claims the seat beside me.
Another one of Xaden’s men climbs in the back and sits next to my brother, Xaden climbs into the passenger seat as one of the guys I recognize from school climbs behind the wheel.
I stare at the house and feel sadness wash over me. That place was my sanctuary, it was the place where I grew strength and formed bonds with five guys I never expected to grow to care so deeply for. I pray they reached the medics in time and Carn is okay, I can’t face the thought of losing him.
“To the warehouse, boss?” Chance asks. Xaden nods and he drives us away from my home.
“Tink?” I grit my teeth and refuse to look away from the window as I answer.
“What?” I snap.
Xaden chuckles at my angry tone, which just pisses me off.
“I reunited your dear friend Kellan with his father. That fucker tried to put up a fight and I didn’t have time to waste, so Cas took him out.
” I snap my head toward Cas and stare at my old friend like he’s a stranger.
He keeps his gaze ahead while twirling his phone in his hand.
“Turns out, Frank was brought in by your dear brother here, that fucker was trying to undercut Steven and Lorenzo and use Frank’s connections with his shady clients to help him break into the Hollow Hills market and overthrow both our dads.
Such a greedy one, aren’t ya, Masey boy?
” Xaden sounds unhinged, I’ve never heard him like this before and I’ll admit, I’m fucking scared.
Masen struggles in his restraints but it’s useless, the guy beside him pulls a gun and presses it into the side of his temple, rendering my brother still.
“Carlos, I want that cunt alive,” Xaden snaps.
“Yes, boss.”
The car falls silent for a few minutes.
Outside, everything slides past in the dark, familiar streets and closed store fronts, the skeleton of a town I grew up afraid of and came back to tear down. I watch it pass the way you watch things from a moving train. Already past the point where you could stop.
I press my temple to the cold window and close my eyes. I do the arithmetic the way I've learned to do it, fast, without flinching, without the luxury of hoping the numbers come out differently than they do.
Carnage is shot somewhere behind me with a field dressing and a twenty-four-hour window.
My father is in Xaden's hands before I ever got close to him.
The house is gone. The Kings are scattered. Every plan I built over the last two months was heard through a phone I carried like a lifeline, into ears I thought were mine to outwit.
And Xaden is four feet away in the front seat, still breathing, still winning, and I am still, somehow, also breathing. Still thinking. Still here.
To teach is to learn. To learn is to excel.
Cas shifts beside me. I feel it more than I see it, the small adjustment of weight, a hand moving from his knee to the inside of his jacket pocket. The faint vibration of a phone before he silences it.
I don't mean to look.
I'm not looking for anything. His hand rests on his knee again and the screen is facing up and my eyes drop to it the way eyes do, automatically, without asking permission.
One name on the screen.
I read it. I read it again.
The world doesn't stop. I've read enough about shock to know that's not how it works.
What happens is quieter and worse. Everything continues exactly as it was.
The engine hums. Masen's restrained breathing comes from the seat ahead.
Xaden says something low to Chance in the front. All of it carries on.
And inside me, something slots into place with the sick, clean precision of a key turning in a lock.
Caspian.
Kellan had one person in this town he trusted without question.
One person who had been at the center of everything in both Stormsend and Somerset for months without ever being looked at twice because he was always just Xaden's Cas.
Reliable, constant, invisible in the way that only the most useful people learn to be.
The one person Kellan would have chosen because he'd known him since they were boys.
The one person who understood both sides of the board because he'd been playing on both sides of it the entire time.
I understand why Kellan died.
Not because Xaden discovered a CIA asset. Because someone who couldn't afford to be uncovered made sure the right person was in the room at the right moment. Made sure there was a gun. Made sure I was watching.
Don't look, Tor. I don't want this to be how you remember me.
He knew. He knew at the end, and he told me to close my eyes, and I didn't, and now I know too.
I will figure out what you are. I will figure out which side of the line you're standing on and whether Kellan died because of you or in spite of you. I will untangle every thread of it.
Cas's phone vibrates again, the name blaring like a neon sign.
K. Kyle.
“It's you,” I breathe out, barely above a whisper.
He holds my gaze and says nothing.
And that, more than any answer he could give me, is everything.