Chapter 43
WES
Istayed outside on the front steps for another half hour after I watched Nova leave. It was funny to me that they’d let Marty come all the way up the driveway this time, as if they couldn’t keep track of their own arbitrary rules.
I’d fucked everything up, just like I feared I would from the very beginning. Why the fuck hadn’t I just told Nova the truth from the start?
My initial reasoning—that because my family was dead to me, it didn’t matter—sounded stupid now. It was stupid. Of course, it mattered, if only because Nova mattered, and Nova had deserved to hear the truth from me instead of in the worst way imaginable.
Roman had touched her. He’d had his psychopathic hands all over her.
Something was terribly wrong with him—I’d known it for a long time. It was why I’d cut him out the same as my father. Because Roman wasn’t like me. He was a Graves, through and through.
He didn’t feel empathy. He delighted in others’ suffering. He felt no remorse, and the only language he spoke was that of power.
He hated me because he thought we were in competition, but my spot as my father’s first born and golden boy had only ever been a ruse. I’d only pretended to want to take my father’s place one day to gain enough access to destroy his legacy altogether.
Before I got sober, I blew up my own revenge plot and ceded my place to the son who actually wanted it, who might’ve even killed me for it.
I thought it would end our one-sided war, but it seemed Roman had never stopped seeing me as the enemy, no matter how much time had passed.
Perhaps he saw my involvement with data privacy startups as an act of aggression.
It was a cause I strongly believed in after spending a decade cozying up to the profit-hungry evil masterminds who controlled our digital worlds.
Or maybe he had inherited the same obsessive streak I had, and I was caught in the crossfires of his relentless climb to the top.
Before my new car arrived, I finally stood and re-entered Roman’s web of sex, power, and secrecy.
A grand dining room was being set by quiet, dutiful workers dressed in all black. Dahlias and white pillar candles lined the center. A woman was already tied to one of the chairs.
I found Roman in one of the main drawing rooms, watching two older men torture a woman with increasingly harsh implements. She wore a purple bracelet, her mouth was duct taped, and her arms were restrained by zip ties. They held her on the floor, caning her already bruised and red thighs.
“Do something else. I’m bored. She’s not screaming anymore.” Roman’s voice was flat.
I quickly searched the woman’s eyes, every part of my body tense and on high alert.
I hated this place and what it did to me.
I didn’t trust people like Roman to engage with kink safely, to take care of the people they toyed with.
In every woman here, I saw Kallie, no matter how hard I tried not to.
The thought reminded me Nova and I had done our first impact scene, which meant she was now dealing with subdrop—the physiological and psychological comedown that followed an intense scene—completely alone.
The urge to text her to remind her to stay hydrated, to eat well, to get rest was so strong, but she’d told me she never wanted to hear from me again.
Addicts are fucking liars. Liars who destroy anyone who dares to get close to them.
The words played in my mind in a constant loop, confirming I’d been right all along. I was unworthy of redemption. I’d never deserved Nova. Not after what I let happen to Kallie.
“Roman,” I said.
I had to let Nova go. It was what was best for her. Roman had targeted her because of me. And I couldn’t let that happen ever again.
When Roman finally turned to me, his features revealed only the slightest tinge of wrath beneath his impenetrable mask of boredom.
“I thought you’d leave with her,” he said. “Or could she still not stand to look at you?”
“We’re done,” I said. “I want nothing to do with her after you touched her.”
Roman’s brow lifted. “Is that so?”
I wanted to punch the smirk right off of his face. His eyes were still frighteningly opaque. Roman was a hunter, and his hunting was not a game to him.
I’d caught glimpses of his true nature after I moved in with my father and my new stepmom when Roman was nine years old.
Even as a child, Roman had an eerie, quiet rage inside him.
Family pets wound up dead, each time blamed on some freak accident.
Other children would go home crying, wounded by Roman’s cutting words or rough play.
By the time he was an adult, and I was nearing the end of my drinking career, Roman made it clear he would be the sole heir by any means necessary.
His undermining and sabotage were covert and meticulous.
If I hadn’t blown up my own plan by self-destructing, I wasn’t sure what Roman would’ve done to take me out himself.
“Do you want a drink?” Roman asked, contorting his features into false empathy. He snapped at a nearby attendant, ordering me a whiskey, my old drink of choice.
I kept my tone level. “I am not your competition, Roman. Keep all of this,” I waved a hand around.
“Inherit the keys to the kingdom. If my absence hadn’t been clear enough to you, let me say it plainly: I have no interest in Wave Platforms Incorporated, except to avoid every drop of its corrosive poison. ”
Roman laughed. “Read up on Marx during your time in Brooklyn, did you? Viva la revolución.”
The attendant returned with whiskey. When I didn’t take it, Roman did. His outstretched hand hovered in the space between us. I didn’t even look at the amber liquid. I fought the urge to slap the glass right out of his grasp and watch it shatter on the floor.
Somehow, Roman had discovered all those years ago my plans to buy the deconsecrated church that had been put on the market—the church The Circle now owned—and transform it into a kinky club.
The only explanation I could think of was that he’d broken into my Chelsea apartment back when we were vying for our father’s favor.
I’d drafted the plans with Kallie. It wasn’t supposed to be an exclusive space for the wealthy—it was going to be an educational and community center for regular people, the kind of people who had graciously taught me about BDSM and allowed me into their kinky world.
It never would’ve happened, not with my drinking and our relationship issues, but it was something we created together, one of the bright spots in our tumultuous dynamic.
And clearly, in my drunken stupor, I hadn’t noticed Roman breaking into my apartment and stealing my notebooks and who knew what else.
I’d known they’d gone missing at some point, but my memory had been so damaged by alcohol and drug abuse, it had been impossible to find anyone to blame but myself.
Until I learned from an old acquaintance from the scene that the exact concept I’d come up with years ago with my now-deceased ex-girlfriend had been brought to fruition and botched by wealthy assholes.
I knew Roman had to have been involved in some capacity, even if he remained in the shadows, pulling the strings of his puppets—Jayne and Archer.
He’d uncovered my interest in kink from his snooping and eavesdropping back when I still lived with my father during college breaks.
He’d been quietly, frighteningly obsessed with me since I first arrived on their doorstep, mourning my mother.
He’d hated that he now had to share our father’s attention.
I thought the obsession had been broken the day I scrubbed myself from the Internet, cut all ties with my family, and started my life over from scratch. Clearly, I’d been wrong.
Roman lured me back into the two worlds I’d left, and I wasn’t going to stick around any longer to find out why. I’d only stayed this long because of her.
And that was over too.
“I’m leaving now,” I said. “And I will not be returning. Leave me the fuck alone.”
I almost said to leave Nova alone too, but such threats would only encourage him. I needed to make her look as uninteresting as possible to both of us. If I stayed away, so would he.
Roman sipped the whiskey I’d refused to take. “She really is almost perfect, isn’t she?” he taunted, halting me before I could turn away. “The mouthiness can be trained out of her. It will just take a strong, capable hand.”
I forced my face not to react the way it wanted.
He wanted a reaction, and I couldn’t give it to him, not if I wanted to keep Nova safe.
“Goodbye, Roman.”
I turned, taking three strides away from Roman and the writhing, shrieking woman with duct tape over her mouth behind him.
“Goodbye, Wesley. Don’t worry about Nova. I take very good care of my property. Once I break her in, I’ll be sure to give her—”
He didn’t even finish the sentence before my fist collided with his mouth, and Roman stumbled backward. The whiskey glass shattered on the floor.
The woman stopped shrieking into her gag, and the men angrily shouted.
“Wes,” Jayne said, exasperated as she burst into the room. She looked from Roman back to me. “It brings me no pleasure to say this, but you have earned a lifetime ban from The Circle.”
“Pity,” I drawled sarcastically.
Roman smiled, spitting up blood on the floor next to him. “You’re going to fucking regret that.”
The sickest part was—Roman didn’t even look angry. He looked utterly delighted. My guts turned to lead as I walked out of the house of my own accord, security flanking me.
Roman’s bloody grin and excited, soulless eyes haunted me all the way home, serving as the backdrop for Nova’s words as I continued to rewind them over and over again.
She was right. I was exactly what she’d said about me. So I would heed her demands and never contact her again.
Because I couldn’t bear to destroy what I loved.