Chapter 17
The Devil's Game
~KAI~
She falls asleep mid-sentence.
One moment she's speaking—voice fading, words slurring, eyes drifting closed with the inevitability of someone whose body has decided it's done waiting for permission—and the next, she's simply... gone.
Unconscious.
Vulnerable.
Curled into that armchair like a child seeking protection from monsters under the bed, except her monsters are real and one of them is standing three feet away, watching her breathe.
Me.
I'm the monster.
Aren't I?
The question surfaces unbidden, uncomfortable, the kind of introspection I've spent years training myself to avoid. Self-reflection is weakness. Doubt is death. You don't survive in my family's world by second-guessing the path that's been laid out for you.
But that path just tried to kill me.
So maybe it's time to start questioning.
I don't move for a long moment.
Just stand there, arms still crossed over my chest, watching the slow rise and fall of her breathing.
The pink pajamas make her look softer than she is—almost innocent, if you ignore the calluses on her hands, the faded scars visible at her wrists where the sleeves have ridden up, the tension that lingers in her shoulders even in sleep.
This is who my father is afraid of?
The thought circles back, persistent and confusing.
Why?
She's small.
Tiny, really—five-foot-three at most, built like a dancer, all lean muscle and delicate bones. She looks like a strong wind could knock her over. Like a single well-placed blow could shatter her completely.
But I've seen her fight.
I've seen what she can do with those dual blades she carries, the way she moves through violence like it's choreography. Six men in under a minute, and she wasn't even breathing hard when she finished.
Ballet, Sage said.
She's a dancer.
It makes sense now—the grace, the precision, the way every movement seems deliberate even when it shouldn't be. She's trained her body to be an instrument, and she plays it with the skill of a master musician.
But that still doesn't explain why my father would see her as a threat.
She's one Omega.
Packless.
Alone.
What could she possibly do to the Lawson empire that would warrant assassination orders?
Unless...
The Eastman legacy.
The name echoes in my skull, dragging memories with it.
I was seventeen when my father ordered the hit on the Eastman family. Old enough to understand what was happening, young enough to believe the justification he gave—that they were enemies, threats, obstacles to be eliminated for the good of the empire.
I didn't question it.
Didn't ask why.
Just accepted that this was how our world worked, and if people had to die to keep us safe, then that was the price of power.
But now...
Now I'm standing in a borrowed mansion, watching the sole surviving daughter of that massacre sleep in my armchair, and I'm starting to wonder what I was never told.
What secrets my father buried along with those bodies.
What sins are attached to the Lawson name that made him willing to kill his own heir rather than risk exposure.
I uncross my arms.
Take a step forward.
Then another.
My feet are silent on the hardwood—years of training, of learning to move without sound, of becoming the weapon my father wanted me to be. The irony isn't lost on me that I'm using those skills now to approach an enemy he also tried to destroy.
She doesn't stir as I crouch beside the chair.
Her face is peaceful in sleep—softer than I've seen it, the sharp edges and manic energy temporarily smoothed away.
Her pink hair falls across her cheek in damp strands, still slightly wet from the shower.
The dark circles under her eyes are prominent, testament to whatever hell she's been living through.
Lonely, she said.
I just don't want to be lonely anymore.
The admission shouldn't affect me.
Shouldn't mean anything.
I've heard plenty of people beg, plead, confess their deepest fears in the moments before I ended them. Vulnerability is a weapon, and I learned long ago not to be moved by it.
But something about the way she said it—so simple, so tired, like she'd given up pretending to be anything other than what she was—
It stuck.
My hand reaches out before I can stop it.
Fingers finding her chin.
Lifting, gently.
Her head tilts with the motion, following the pressure, but her eyes don't open. Her breathing doesn't change. She's truly, deeply asleep—exhausted beyond the ability to maintain any kind of vigilance.
Trusting.
Stupid.
I could kill her right now.
The thought surfaces with cold precision—the tactical assessment I've been trained to make in every situation. She's unconscious, weaponless, completely at my mercy. One hand around her throat, pressure in the right places, and the Eastman bloodline would finally be extinct.
My father would be pleased.
The mission would be complete.
Everything could go back to the way it was supposed to be.
Except my father ordered my death too.
And Sage bonded us all to her.
And she just offered to help me destroy the man who raised me, who trained me, who apparently decided I was more useful dead than alive.
Alliance, she said.
Short term.
Then we're enemies again.
The terms are... acceptable.
More than acceptable, actually. She's not asking for anything permanent.
Not demanding my loyalty or my protection or any of the things Omegas typically want from Alphas.
She's just offering a temporary truce—a partnership of convenience, where we both get what we need and then go back to trying to kill each other.
It's transactional.
I understand transactional.
I release her chin, letting her head settle back against the chair.
She's still asleep.
Still vulnerable.
Still trusting me not to hurt her, even though we both know I probably should.
Stupid, I think again.
But there's less conviction in it this time.
I straighten, taking a step back to survey the situation.
She can't stay in the chair all night. As comfortable as it looks, she's still recovering from poison, still healing, still in desperate need of actual rest. And leaving her here while I figure out what to do next seems... wrong somehow.
Since when do you care about wrong?
The question doesn't have an answer.
Or maybe the answer is: since my father proved that all the rules I built my life around were lies.
I move her hair first.
Brushing the pink strands away from her face with more gentleness than I knew I possessed. The texture is soft—finer than it looks, like silk threads dyed the color of cotton candy.
Cotton candy.
Her scent is fading now, muted by sleep and the clean smell of soap from her shower. But I caught it earlier, when she was playing pool and stealing my whiskey and smirking at me like she knew exactly how much her presence was affecting me.
Frosted sugar.
Cherry blossom.
The sweetest goddamn thing I've ever smelled, and it makes me want to bury my face in her neck and never come up for air.
I huff at my own weakness.
Then I bend down and scoop her up.
She weighs nothing.
Nothing.
Like picking up a child, or a doll, or some fragile creature that shouldn't exist in a world as brutal as ours. Her head lolls against my shoulder, pink hair spilling across my chest. Her hands are limp at her sides, fingers twitching occasionally in whatever dreams have claimed her.
Even unconscious, she counts.
I can see it in the subtle movements—four twitches, pause, four twitches, pause. The obsessive rhythm that she probably doesn't even realize she's maintaining.
OCD, Sage mentioned.
ADHD. PTSD.
A brain that doesn't work the way it's supposed to.
And yet she's survived this long.
Thrived, even.
Carved out a place for herself in the most brutal sector of the academy system, earned a townhome through violence and cunning, built a body count that most Alphas would envy.
She's not weak.
She's not broken.
She's just... different.
Dangerous in ways that don't fit the standard categories.
Maybe that's why my father is afraid of her.
The thought follows me down the hallway, through the maze of expensive rooms, back to the bedroom where she woke up earlier. The bed is still unmade—covers thrown back, pillows askew—evidence of her hasty departure.
I lay her down on the mattress.
Carefully.
Gently.
Arrange the covers around her, tucking them in with a precision that would probably embarrass me if anyone was watching. She makes a small sound as I pull the blankets up to her chin—not quite a word, not quite a protest, just a soft exhale that might be contentment.
Or might be another dream.
I step back.
Survey my work.
She looks... peaceful.
Small and pink and peaceful, like a sleeping princess from one of those fairytales she mentioned—the kind that never have happy endings, not really, not for people like us.
Movement catches my attention.
The robot.
Aphrodite, she called it. Ro.
The small sphere is hovering near the pillow, sensors blinking in that steady rhythm that probably means it's monitoring her vital signs.
It's a strange contraption—clearly custom-built, the kind of thing you'd only create if you were desperate for companionship and skilled enough to engineer your own.
No friends, she said in her letter.
Just me... and Aphrodite... my robot companion.
The loneliness in those words was palpable.
I reach out and pluck the robot from the air.
It's lighter than I expected—compact, well-designed, with none of the rough edges or exposed wiring you'd expect from amateur construction. She built this herself, apparently, and she built it well.
"So you heard those bastards' plan," I mutter, turning the sphere over in my hands. "Didn't make shit up."
The sensors blink.
"Unable to go against the commands of my owner," Ro responds, and there's something almost defensive in the synthesized voice. "Recording was authentic. No modifications or falsifications detected."
"Is she telling the truth?"
A pause.