15. Samson
SAMSON
I leave her apartment because staying would be the worst thing I could do.
The problem?
I want to stay. I want to stay and grab her, rip her clothes off, and fuck her until morning.
Her taste is still in my mouth when I step into the corridor.
Her fragrance clings to my shirt. I can still feel the wall at her back, the line of her body, the way she tried to resist even while heat flashed through her eyes.
Most women shrink from me.
Delaney Cross steps closer.
She doesn’t know when to stop. That should make her foolish. Instead, it makes her dangerous.
And irresistible.
I stalk down the stairs instead of taking the elevator. My body is too keyed up for stillness. Too full of something that feels like fury but isn’t. Fury is useful.
This is not.
By the time I hit the street, my jaw aches from how hard I’ve been clenching it. I head for my car, unlock it, slide behind the wheel, and shut the door with more force than necessary.
Then I sit there.
I don’t start the engine.
I just sit with both hands braced on the steering wheel and my pulse still hammering like I’ve come out of a fight I didn’t win.
That’s the truth of it.
I didn’t win up there.
I warned her. I told her to stop. I told her she had no idea what she’d stepped into.
And then she looked at me with those bright and furious silvery eyes.
A sane man would have walked away.
A better man would have.
Instead I put my hands on her.
I kiss her all over again in my memory, and my grip tightens on the wheel until the leather makes my palms sweat.
Her lips locked tight beneath mine.
Her breath catching.
Her body betraying her.
Mine betraying me.
I close my eyes for a second. It’s enough to see her.
A tiny tremor in her breath when I crowd her space. A pulse beating hard in her throat. Not surrender. Not fear.
Want. Desire.
That’s what’s going to destroy both of us if she keeps this up.
I open my eyes and start the car.
I should go home.
I don’t.
Instead I drive east, toward one of the old Vexley properties the family still owns but rarely uses. It used to be a private dining club decades ago, the kind of place where men in dark suits made decisions over brandy. My father kept it after the membership fell apart.
Now it’s mine. For all intents and purposes, I live here. Nate shows up now and then, though.
The building sits back from the street behind wrought-iron gates. No sign out front. If you squint hard enough, it looks like a castle.
Every beast should have a castle.
I park in the private drive and head inside. The place is mostly dark, only the low amber sconces lit in the hallway. The air smells faintly of old wood. My footsteps echo on black-and-white marble as I cross the foyer.
I know Nate is here before I see him.
He has a way of occupying a room without disturbing it. He doesn’t press his presence outward the way I do. He lets a place fold around him until it looks like it belonged to him all along.
We both know how to own a room, just in different ways.
I find him in the back room, standing near the fireplace with a glass of whiskey in one hand. The fire is low, and the dim light hits his face. Dark hair. Green eyes. Our mother’s eyes, colder in his face than they ever were in hers.
He doesn’t look surprised to see me.
That pisses me off before he says a word.
“You took your time,” he says.
I shrug off my coat and toss it over the back of a chair. “You were waiting for me?”
“Yes.”
I pour myself a drink from the decanter. The whiskey burns all the way down. When I turn back, he’s watching me over the rim of his glass.
Does he notice the slight swelling in my lower lip where Delaney’s teeth caught me for half a second?
“Interesting,” he says.
I set the glass down. “Try finishing a sentence.”
“You went to see her.” He draws in a breath. “After her apartment was searched.”
“And?” I say.
“And that wasn’t wise.”
A laugh scrapes up my throat. “You think you summoned me here to lecture me?”
“I didn’t summon you. I knew where you’d come. Where you always come.”
I raise my eyebrows. “You told me to keep her close.”
“I didn’t tell you to get involved with her.”
“Be careful, Nate,” I say, gritting my teeth.
“Or what?”
I step closer, enough that the firelight catches the ring on my hand. “Or I stop being polite.”
He laughs dryly. “Were you being polite in her apartment?”
My blood turns hotter. Faster.
I turn away before I put my fist through his teeth.
My father used to say men like us were not made. We were revealed. Strip enough away and the truth stands there naked.
“She found the contractor,” Nate says behind me.
That gets my full attention. I turn back slowly. “How much does she know?”
“Not enough.”
“But she’s close.”
“Yes.”
I pick up my drink again. “Who marked her?”
“We’re still sorting that out.”
I stare at him. “That answer irritates me.”
“It irritates me too.” Nate sets his glass down on the mantel and folds his arms. He looks relaxed.
He isn’t. I know him too well.
“The contractor matters,” he says. “But not in the way she thinks.”
“She thinks he ties back to us.”
“He does.”
“Directly?”
A pause.
Then, “Not exactly.”
That means yes, but only through enough layers to make any proof difficult to hold.
Vexley business in a nutshell. Fronts behind fronts.
Names moved through shell companies and dead men and handshakes that never happened.
My father doesn’t build walls. He builds mazes.
Mazes that no one can get through without marking themselves.
Delaney’s apartment being searched means she reached one of the corridors he wants hidden.
“They didn’t take anything,” he says.
“I know.”
“Then they weren’t looking for an object.”
“No.” I set my glass down. “They were sizing her up.”
“Yes.”
I look at him. “And?”
“So far she’s not backing down.” The faintest thread of admiration winds through his tone. Not for Delaney. Not really. For the problem she presents. Nate admires difficult things.
“How much does our father know?” I ask.
“Enough.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning he knows she’s still asking questions.”
Still.
Still asking. Still digging. Still stepping closer to a door she doesn’t understand.
Still not frightened enough.
I think of her facing me in her apartment, chin lifted, fury bright on her face even with her pulse jumping at her throat. I think of her telling me I don’t get to tell her what to do.
It would be funny if it wasn’t going to get her killed.
“You shouldn’t have touched her.”
I give him a flat look. “Who says I did?”
“Be serious, Sam.”
“Spare me your moral outrage, Nate.”
He rolls his eyes. “This isn’t moral outrage.”
“No, of course not. You’d have to actually have morals first.”
He laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “You think you’re going to lecture me on morals? You? The brute force of this operation?”
My laugh is low and ugly. “That isn’t going to work on me.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose. “I’m not trying to work you, Sam. But you’re already too close.”
I stop closer. “Say what you came to say.”
He holds my gaze. “She got to you. Compromised you. Now she’s a weakness.”
“She is not a weakness,” I return.
Nate’s expression doesn’t change. “Then what is she?”
I don’t answer.
I won’t give him that much.
He steps closer. “You went to her after the search. You put your hands on her. You kissed her instead of shutting her down.”
My middle brother notices everything. He clocked the swollen lower lip. Maybe something else about me. No problem. A beast doesn’t try to hide.
“You’re not protecting the family,” he continues. “You’re not even protecting yourself.”
I curl my hands into fists. “Say it again,” I tell him.
His merciless green eyes hold mine. “She’s a weakness.”
I am twenty-two again for half a second, standing in a training room with blood on my knuckles and my father telling me the first man to name your soft spot is the first man to use it against you.
I learned that lesson.
I learned it well.
Which is why it takes everything in me not to drive Nathaniel backward into the mantel and teach him a different one.
Instead I smile. “Be very sure of your next move.”
He folds his hands behind his back. “That sounds almost protective.”
“It is.”
“Of her?”
I close the distance, chest to chest now, the fire snapping behind him. He doesn’t flinch. I didn’t think he would. We’re Vexley men. Flinching was trained out of us before we were old enough to shave.
But he knows exactly how dangerous I am.
“She keeps digging,” Nate says quietly, “and she won’t get another warning.”
I hear what my brother isn’t saying.
She keeps digging and the people who only searched this time will return with a different purpose.
She keeps digging and I may be ordered to be the hand that ends it.
When I was young, my father told me the story of Samson in the Bible, my namesake. He loved that story. Loved to remind me how the strong fall. Not because the world defeats them, but because they mistake desire for devotion. Because they let themselves be made foolish by a woman.
It was a warning.
I look at Nate.
In another life, in another family, maybe he and I could have been allies. But Arthur Vexley didn’t raise allies. He raised tools. Different edges of the same blade.
Nate is the hand that signs.
I am the hand that breaks.
And Cain—
Cain is the son our father watched in silence, because even he knew some monsters are born, not made.
For one second, I think of my youngest brother, the silent genius who learns more by looking than by doing. If he were here, Cain would laugh at this. He’d call it inevitable. He always did enjoy watching men walk willingly toward the one thing that could ruin them.
I take a breath through my nose. Let it out slow. “She is not to be touched,” I say through a clenched jaw.
Nate lifts an eyebrow. “That sounds like an order.”
“It is.”
He almost smiles. “You’re not in a position to issue those.”
I don’t move. “Try me.”
Nate stares at me, and I see the shift behind his eyes. He isn’t worried about right and wrong. He isn’t warning me as a brother. He’s reassessing the danger.
Delaney isn’t just a woman asking the wrong questions anymore.
She is something that can move me.
That makes her useful to men like Nate. And right now? I hate him for it.
“You don’t get to use her,” I say.
“I didn’t say I would.”
“You thought it.”
He smirks. “One of us has to think.”
I smile again. “Keep telling yourself that.”
He shifts his weight. “If she matters this much, you should have stayed away from her.”
Right.
As if distance could undo what’s already happened.
As if I could go back to before I knew what her mouth felt like under mine.
Before I knew the precise silvery shade her eyes turn when anger and desire crash together.
Before I knew she would walk straight toward the dark if she thought there was truth inside it.
Beauty in the beast’s house.
Beauty demanding answers.
Beauty with no idea the house has teeth.
Maybe she should be afraid of me. Maybe that would save her.
But it’s too late for maybe.
Nathaniel lifts his glass again. “What exactly do you intend to do?”
I think of Delaney standing in her apartment.
I think of the old tale everyone gets wrong. The beast is never dangerous because he’s ugly. He’s dangerous because he’s starving. Because once he loves something, he wants it inside the walls where nothing can take it.
Mine is not a noble instinct. It is ancient. Male. Brutal.
I want her away from this. I want her out of reach. I want her where no one can touch her.
I want, and want is a bad place for a man like me.
I step past my brother and toward the door but then stop and look back.
His green eyes are fixed on me.
“Call her my weakness again,” I say, my voice low, “and I’ll show you exactly how strong I am.”