Chapter 31 Kaian #2
“Will you look at him? If I put someone like him on my stage, I’d have a line out the door and a fight in the parking lot.”
Quinn pushes off the doorframe with a low growl. “Don’t look at him. He’s not here for that.”
Jewel lifts one brow and looks straight through Quinn to Kaian. “You let him speak for you?” Her gaze slides over him again. “Such a shame. I could make you a lot of money.”
“He doesn’t need your fucking money.”
“Everyone needs money.”
Quinn steps closer to the desk. “Cut the bullshit. I danced the first three nights of my schedule. You owe me.”
Jewel studies him for a moment, the smile thinning. Then she rolls her chair back with a squeak and bends to open a drawer in the desk.
“God, Quinn, always so serious.” Papers shuffle. A cash box scrapes across the wood. “You used to be more fun.”
“I used to work here.”
“That’s what I meant.”
She flips open the box and thumbs through a stack of bills, counting slowly, like she enjoys making him wait. When she finally looks up again, her attention slides to Kaian once more. She fans a stack of wrinkled, stained bills. “Want to change your mind?”
Quinn doesn’t even glance back. “No.”
Jewel’s smile widens. “I’m enjoying this new side to you, Lomax.” She slides in front of the monitor, pulls out a pad of forms, and peels one off the top. “Sign here. Can’t have you telling the state I fucked you over.”
When her chair rolls aside, the monitor shows a maroon sedan parked beside the Mustang. The camera switches to the grainy club feed, and two men walk through the club floor, cutting between the empty tables like they already know where they’re going.
“Quinn—”
Quinn half-turns toward him.
Jewel’s eyes are glued to Quinn’s face, and the smile that spreads across her face makes something cold settle in Kaian’s chest.
“Well,” she says lightly. “Looks like your friends found the place.”
Quinn looks at the monitor. For a second, Kaian sees it land—recognition and the flash of fury that follows. “Why?”
Jewel doesn’t bother pretending she doesn’t know what he means. She leans back in her chair, folding her arms like she’s settling in for a show. “Everyone needs money. You should’ve stayed gone, Quinn.”
Kaian reaches for The Plain on instinct, searching for that split-second opening where time loosens.
But panic makes him clumsy, and fear is slower than he needs it to be.
By the time magic surges hot and desperate against his barriers, someone big has Quinn by the back of the shirt.
The office fills with the flat, unforgiving click of a gun being cocked.
Jewel leans back in her chair like she’s been handed exactly the morning she wanted. “There we go. Took you long enough.”
Quinn goes still in the way a wild thing does when it knows one wrong move will get it killed.
His eyes cut to Kaian for the briefest second, and there’s so much in that look Kaian could drown in it—anger, warning, calculation, and beneath all of it the thing Kaian least wants to see right now: Quinn trying to protect him.
Kaian needs that attention on him before his mate does something romantic and stupid.
The second man comes through the door, and it’s then that Kaian remembers these are two of the men from Quinn’s apartment. Only the brown-suited one is missing.
Kaian drags a breath into lungs that feel too tight and says, as evenly as he can, “You’re missing one.”
The Gun-Guy frowns. “What?”
“Where’s your buddy?”
The smaller guy, who had been more afraid of Soren than the magic-wielding threat in the room, sticks a pointy finger in Kaian’s direction, but he gives him a wide berth. “You put Vinnie in the hospital. Two cracked vertebrae.”
“Wish I could say I was sorry about that. Too bad I didn’t make that a hat trick.”
“Why you little—” The weasel takes a step toward him.
Kaian raises his hands like he’s going to do something magical. “Boo.”
Weasel-Face stumbles backward into the door frame with a startled “Eek!”
Quinn grins with big, white teeth flashing, and it warms Kaian to his very soul. They may be in a pile of trouble, but his mate is still proud, and they’re not beaten yet.
“Jimmy. Enough,” Gun-Guy says. “He’s not going to be our problem.”
Something inside Kaian drops into place, cold and final. These guys aren’t the endgame, and Quinn was never the prize. He was just the pressure point to get Kaian to stop fighting before the fight had even started.
Quinn’s face freezes, the realization hitting that Vincenzo’s goons aren’t here just for a retrieval mission—they’ve called in the first string.
As if the words themselves had summoned them, a big black SUV pulls into the lot.
Three car doors open, but on the monitor, Kaian only catches two magical signatures and one big guy in tactical gear.
“Kai,” Quinn says. Just his name—like a warning.
Kaian barely hears him. The Plain boils under his skin, rising in response to his fear.
It comes up through him the way heat rises through stone after a lightning strike—sudden, violent, impossible to ignore.
He can’t stop it as time loosens at the edges of the room.
The milliseconds stretch thin, threads waiting for his fingers.
He knows how to do this. He’s done it before.
All he would have to do is reach for the right seam at the moment and pull.
Every heartbeat in the room would hang suspended like dust caught in sunlight.
He could slip past them, down the hall, and out into the morning, gone before the retrieval team even reached the swinging door behind the bar.
Instead, it tastes like ash. Even with the gun pressed against his temple, even with a stranger’s hand twisted in the back of his shirt, Quinn’s attention is still on him. Their eyes meet, and for a moment, the room disappears.
Quinn’s mouth shapes one word. Go.
That word breaks his heart. The Plain surges in response, eager, answering him like a warhorse that has been given its head.
Power floods Kaian’s nerves until his skin prickles and the air around him shivers.
Across the room, Jimmy’s hair lifts straight off his scalp.
The change is subtle, but every Were in the room feels it.
Gun-Guy notices the shift, and he presses the barrel of the gun harder into Quinn’s temple. “I will blow his head clean off if you so much as twitch,” he says, voice gone flat and serious. “Vincenzo might want him alive, but I’m not taking chances. This time I won’t miss.”
Jewel straightens in her chair. For the first time since they walked in, her smug certainty fractures.
“What the fuck is going on?” she snaps, looking from the men to Kaian like the room has slipped out from under her control.
“This is my office. You didn’t say anything about killing him here. O’Daire will have my guts for garters.”
Quinn doesn’t even look at her. His gaze is locked on Kaian’s like he’s trying to push the words into him through sheer will. This time, he says it out loud. “Go, bébé.”
Kaian whimpers as the endearment cuts through him like a blade. Because Quinn isn’t just telling him to run—he’s telling him to live.
The Plain roars through Kaian like a tidal wave breaking against the fragile walls he’d built, ready to tear time itself apart if he lets it.
Kaian shakes his head, just once. No.
He made a promise to himself a long time ago, back when the Academy’s shadow first fell over his life.
Once he’d learned that they were looking for someone special, and he’d come into his power, he promised himself that no matter what they did to him, no matter what they threatened, he would never lay another life on that altar. Only his own.
That rule had kept him running for years. Kept him alone. Kept everyone else safe from the disaster of loving him.
Quinn had said he didn’t like to get attached, but that wasn’t true for Kaian. Kaian loved people and loved learning what made them happy and sad—what made their lives worth living. Somewhere between that moment in the fighting arena under All’s End and the safe house, something had changed.
It had been absurdly easy to love them. Connall, with his iron control and the quiet grief buried under it.
Elias, with his steady hands and soft voice.
Isaac’s wild laughter and confidence that whatever came their way, it would work out.
The way Soren watched Quinn was like he was the only beautiful thing left in the world.
And Quinn—who cares, even though he doesn’t want to, and whose beautiful eyes are currently wide with horror.
The realization lands like a stone dropping through water. This is why the coin wouldn’t let him leave. Why every path he’d tried to take had curved back toward this city like gravity. Nashville had never been an accident. It had always been the destination. This had always been Fate’s plan.
Kaian meets Quinn’s eyes and tries to put everything he can’t say into the look he gives him.
The love. The gratitude. The terrible certainty.
Vincenzo might think he’s getting leverage today.
But Connall O’Daire will burn the world to the ground before he lets anyone keep it.
All Kaian has to do is make sure Quinn lives long enough to see it happen.
He finally lets it go, pushing it back behind his walls until the next—or the last—time.
Quinn’s jaw tightens. “Goddammit, Kai,” he breathes.
Heavy footsteps echo down the hallway. The three newcomers come through the door, confidence rolling off them in waves.
Whatever Gun-Guy and Jimmy had done the last time to mess things up clearly hadn’t shaken their faith in the outcome.
This time, their prize was standing exactly where he was supposed to be.
The first man through the door takes in the scene with a satisfied glance, especially the gun under Quinn’s jaw. “Well,” he says smoothly. “Looks like you boys finally managed to get something right.”