CHAPTER TWENTY
The phantom of my wife’s rage hung in the air like cordite after a firefight.
I had witnessed men gutted alive, throats opened ear to ear, skulls crushed beneath boots, and women burned alive, but nothing prepared me for Selene’s hands tangled in Coraline’s hair trying to tear it from her scalp, or the way her knuckles split open when she knocked them against the tumbler now shattered on the floor.
Violence and I were blood brothers. It had raised me in a cradle of broken bones, molded me with bruised flesh through the classes required of heirs, served as my weapon, my armor, and my mother tongue, but watching the woman I cared for deeply shatter because of my betrayal?
That wasn’t just destruction.
That was watching my own carelessness stare me in the face.
Had it been directed at anyone else or reason, I might have found her rage exhilarating. Most women in the Dominion learned early to swallow their anger, to let it die unspoken behind locked doors. My mother and cousin aside, the women I’d known moved through the Dominion like ghosts.
The proof my wife was capable of more than that was still huddled on the floor when Derrick entered the room and surveyed the destruction much like my brother had. "Holy shit what happened here?"
"Selene caught them," Cassian replied, jabbing a finger between Coraline and me.
Derrick let loose a string of curses.
I couldn’t shake the image of her trembling. Selene—who stared down the worst kind of men without blinking, who’d grown up under the boot of a father who collected broken women like trophies, and who moved through rooms full of deceit in cocktail dresses, and never once revealed a wound.
The only other time I’d ever seen her body betray her control was when her nails were nearly drawing blood from my shoulders, her voice breaking on my name—but even then, it was ecstasy ripping through her defenses, not raw, feral devastation that made her look like something wounded and cornered and dangerous.
I had shredded her to the bone with my carelessness—gutted her over what amounted to a few minutes of something that had nothing to do with desire or lust or falling for some cheap pussy-trap.
For months I'd been putting men in rooms to extract information, taking out women close to Darzi that he’d never look for again to gleam what I could from them.
Moving beneath the guise of our Citadel issues, I hunted any and all fragments of intel to keep Selene and our entire family protected from whispers that were hardening into certainties.
Most were useless—regurgitating intel I’d already verified or spewing delusions.
Coraline had survived longer than any of Darius’s other whores, clawing her way into his inner sanctum.
She knew exactly how to bait the hook when she approached us—dripping just enough blood in the water to make us circle.
She whispered about a vault where he kept evidence of Selene’s mother’s slaughter.
Not just killed. Butchered. The kind of death that haunted survivors for generations.
We’d always suspected, but lacked the proof our code demanded to rip Darius’s still-beating heart from his chest. But I couldn’t move on that front until I knew who and why he was involved with Citadel—with proof.
Coraline had seen it all through lowered eyes.
Darius had sent his broken toy to infiltrate us, never realizing she’d developed a hunger for vengeance after years as his punching bag and sexual offering—forced to her knees before whatever woman he was grooming, her tongue working their cunts while he fucked her ass.
“How did this happen?” my brother asked, then shook his head. “I know how it happened. Why did it happen? I wouldn’t have suggested she come up here with you I knew she’d be slobbing all over your knob.”
“Well I knew better than to bring her to the family house.”
“She shouldn’t be anywhere alone with you that Selene has access to,” Derrick snapped, throwing his hands up. “You’re smarter than this.”
“Are you?” I challenged, making myself a drink. “You weren’t even supposed to be in town tonight.”
“Jason asked him to come,” Cassian interrupted, his eyes narrowing on me. “He was worried about us.”
“For good reason. Why did you tell him to bring her up here?” Derrick asked, rubbing his temple.
“Coraline’s been making promises for months. Tonight was the first time she offered anything concrete. I suggested they come up here to talk,” my brother answered.
“What could she possibly tell you that would be worth...” Derrick gestured to the blood splattered across the floor and her still huddled in a corner. “This. Because I don’t see a path back from Selene walking in on another woman on her knees for you. Not that woman.”
Cassian moved toward Coraline, his expression hardening as he took in her battered face. “What are we going to do with her looking like that?”
I glanced at her dispassionately. “Nothing. She can crawl or walk out of here and go clean herself up. We don’t need her now. The deals off.”
“Alaric. Cass,” she breathed, eyes filling with fresh tears. “Please. This wasn’t my fault.”
My brother scoffed. “Don’t start that shit. What did you expect to happen now?”
I didn’t give a fuck what happened to her now.
Coraline was nothing but a means to an end—a knife we had been sharpening to reverse back into Darzi’s throat.
For months I’d endured her presence, never so much as allowing her to brush against me.
Months sacrificed away from my wife and son for this pathetic creature because she had leverage.
Months of nodding through her vapid stories, feigning interest while she drained our top-shelf liquor and drove us all to imagining exactly how we would dispose of her once she’d served her purpose.
And tonight I’d cast aside the tedious exhaustion of playing this game while keeping my wife in the dark and I’d said fuck it.
I let Coraline sink to her knees, watched her take me into her mouth with that hunger she reserved for those she wanted to manipulate.
I let her think she was sucking her way to freedom right until I looked down at her peering back up at me, and I realized I’d just crossed a line I had no right to breach. I’d executed men for less than what I was doing when their eyes lingered too long on my wife
Selene walking in as I was telling her to stop had to be some twisted sense of karmic retribution.
I had never cheated on her. I had never betrayed her.
Not when rival families sent their daughters before me like lambs to slaughter.
Not when there’d been a window after the wedding where women still tried.
The bold and the bored until they got the message to stop.
Selene never had to say a word.
Now I’ d committed the cardinal sin of men who live by violence. I miscalculated the damage.
Not to my reputation or my standing among the Dominion, but to her—my wife— with this fucking whore out of them all.
Coraline moved closer to us instead of toward the exit. “I can talk to her. She’ll understand this is—”
“Stop talking.” Before she could finish that absurd fable of a plan, I turned and cut her off. “One more word and I’ll carve your tongue out and feed it to you. Matter of fact, why are you still here?”
She flinched when I approached, but I grabbed her wrist, anyway, not thinking about optics, or restraint, or diplomacy as I dragged her across the room toward the exit.
This arrangement was dead and this woman was as good as dead if she didn’t disappear now that my wife was aware of her proximity.
I would handle the logistics later; I had more pressing issues to deal with first.
“Go down the hall, clean yourself up, and then you will be escorted back to where you belong.” Which was essentially a pretty cage.
“Alaric, wait. Please.” I opened the suite door and pushed her into the hall, slamming it in her crusted face when she turned back.
I returned to find my brother and Derrick waiting in the main room, faces grim.
They’d been in on the Coraline plan from the beginning.
I’d never be stupid enough to entertain someone who could compromise the Dominion without keeping my key players informed.
Jaden was the only one not present tonight.
“There’s a vault,” I explained without preamble. “Somewhere in Darzi’s private holdings. She claimed he keeps evidence there—everything from my mother-in-law’s murder to his dealings with the Citadel.”
The name hung in the air like poison gas.
The Citadel—a rival society to the Dominion that had been a thorn in our side for decades.
They operated by different rules, worshiped different traditions, and had their own territories carved out across the city and beyond.
The Dominion handled our problems internally, preferring quiet executions over loud demonstrations of power.
The Citadel fed their victims to sharks in international waters, occasionally leaving the remains where Dominion leaders would find them.
“There’s no alliance between Darzi and the Citadel,” Cassian denied immediately. “There’s no way. Not after what happened with their last representative.”
“He’s selling us out,” I replied flatly. “Not alliance. Betrayal.”
Derrick swore under his breath again. “We need to move on that pronto then.”
I nodded. “I plan to.”
I stared at the shattered glass scattered across the floor, thinking of Selene.
The intel could never measure up to what I would have to clean up now. I shot my drink back, an unfamiliar annoyance seeping in.
Derrick leaned against the bar, studying me with a gaze that made most men uncomfortable. “Well,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “did you at least get off out of this clusterfuck? Seems like the least you could get for destroying your marriage.”
I shot him a look that would have made a lesser man wilt. “She wasn’t on me long enough for that, and she wasn’t skilled enough to make it happen in the few minutes she was. It was like watching someone try to suck on a corn on the cob through a chain-link fence.”
Cassian snorted despite himself, then immediately sobered. “What the fuck, Alaric.”
Derrick held up his hands. “Alright. I get it. You didn’t enjoy it.”
“I was seconds away from shoving her off when Selene walked in.”
Cassian ran his fingers through his dark hair, exhaling slowly. “So what now? You can bet Coraline will run straight back to Darius and feed him bullshit story we’ve been feeding her these past ten weeks.”
“She’ll also be telling him what you just did to his daughter,” Derrick added.
Cassian’s eyes cut to me, furious and worried in the way only a brother can be because while he was unquestionably loyal to me, he cared about Selene like a sister. “What the fuck are we going to do about that, Adelfé?”
The question hung between us, heavy and damning.
I’d watched the light die in my wife’s eyes, the woman I was meant to protect and respect, be replaced by something feral and wounded.
I knew exactly what that meant. She’d spent a lifetime building walls around herself, and I’d just given her every reason to reinforce them.