Chapter 4 #3
Hayden tightens his grip, pulling me away and guiding me through the chaos.
I try to choke back my sobs and compose myself, but as I’m pulled away from my brothers and through the front entrance, I can barely catch my breath. I don’t know where he’s taking me. I don’t know what happens next.
But I do know one thing—nothing will ever be the same again.
The night presses in thick, with the sinister images from just moments before flashing in my mind. My skin is damp with sweat and the sticky remnants of spilled champagne and blood. Too much blood. The scent of lilies—once cloying, now nauseating—clings to the air.
The bodies were soaked in blood.
My father. My brothers.
Their blood is pooling on the marble floors and plush cream carpeting beneath the crystal chandeliers, soaking into the silk of their tailored suits. The maids will be busy all evening with the mess.
The room behind me hums with hushed voices, gasps, and quiet sobs, but no one dares move too quickly. No one dares to run now that things have calmed. The guests are all associated with the Society; the men understand what is happening with far more certainty than their wives do.
The wives, so innocent and ever-endearing, usually standing like marble statues at their husbands' sides, are currently cowering in fear.
I see a woman vomit up her champagne on the marble floor, unable to contain herself around the gore of death, but she tries her best to contain herself after her outburst. So perfectly put together, a true woman of high Society.
Because in this house, the only thing more dangerous than grief is fear.
I barely register the movement of my own body—just the grip of his hand tight around my wrist, pulling me back, dragging me away from the carnage and whipping me about like a doll out of the estate and onto the front lawns.
“Let go of me,” I hiss, twisting against his grasp.
He doesn’t release the firm hold he has on my waist, pressing my back into his side as he drags me, my stilettos slipping and sliding against the gravelly ground as I fail to find my footing once outside the estate's large entryway doors.
We reach the side of the estate where a black town car sits idling. The headlights slice through the fog rolling over the gravel, the driver waiting for us like this was planned all along.
Coldness seeps through my bones as I start to shiver. The cold is taking over my senses, making me start to gag. While trying to shove him away from me, I collapse to my knees and begin to dry heave. The gravel hurts my knees as I choke and blubber—trying to force myself to get sick.
I gulp down sharp breaths of icy air, my lungs stretching to the brink of bursting. When no sound escapes, I struggle to rise—only to be grabbed by Hayden once more.
I dig my heels into the ground, a sharp ache twisting through my ankles. “I said let go—”
Hayden moves fast.
Too fast.
He spins, and in one violent motion, my back slams against the cool stone of the estate’s exterior. The impact knocks the breath from my lungs, and before I can recover, his hand is at my throat—squeezing slightly, warning.
My pulse slams against his palm. The back of my head hurts where it made quick contact with the stone wall.
My body trembles not with fear but with fury. My body can’t mourn; it feels impossible to digest what’s happened. It’s too much for one person at once. It’s far too much for me to comprehend.
The air outside is crisp with the autumn chill, as I continue to shiver, partly from the cold and partly from fear.
It’s the kind of night that sinks its teeth into your skin, that whispers winter is almost here.
A cold reminder that death has arrived. The type of weather I usually love to ride Lilibet in.
I’m in so much shock, all I can think of is my horse.
I think about the work the maids will have with all the blood. How can they possibly get that much out of the carpets?
I wrench against the hand holding me around my waist and against my throat, but it’s pointless. It’s like fighting against a stone wall, just like the one I’m pressed against.
“Let me go,” I snap. Desperate to be released. I think I need to vomit. My hair sticks to my neck, sweaty from terror.
“You’re in shock,” he murmurs, his voice low like smoke curling through the dark. “You need to breathe.”
His face is so close, too close, the flickering light from the town car’s beams catching on the sharp cut of his cheekbones, the tension in his jaw. He smells clean, crisp, with the faintest trace of a deeper, more dangerous scent.
I recognize the smell instantly. It’s gunsmoke. It takes me back to summers spent on hunting trips with my brothers.
I hate him for touching me. I hate him for being calm. I hate that my body reacts that somewhere beneath the grief clawing at my insides, there is something inside me desperate for his direction.
His hand remains caged around my neck, simply squeezing as a warning.
“Fuck you,” I breathe.
His lips quirk—just barely. It was so quick I could have missed it, but the bastard smiled.
I want to claw at him to scream to demand answers that I know he won’t give me.
Instead, I press both palms against his chest, shoving him hard.
He lets me. He lets my anger wash over him as if it were nothing. Like I’m nothing.
“You knew this was going to happen,” I accuse, my voice shaking.
Hayden’s expression remains unreadable. “Get in the car, Martine.”
I shake my head as best I can against the iron grip at my throat. “Tell me what the fuck is going on.”
A muscle ticks in his jaw. For a second, I think he’s going to ignore me. That he’ll just throw me in the car and silence me by force, but then he leans in slow and measured until his breath ghosts against my temple.
Standing here, draped in the shadow of my family’s massacre, he is unhurried and unbothered.
Dressed in black. A specter. A goddamn omen.
I shouldn’t be surprised. This world has always belonged to men like him. Men who prefer the edges but at no expense to their power, who watch, who pull strings from the dark.
His hand slides from my waist to my forearm, slow and deliberate, his fingers pressing just lightly enough against the inside of my elbow.
A silent warning.
“You’re shaking,” he murmurs.
His voice is deeper than I remember—low and slow, as if he’s savoring the words on his tongue, turning them over before releasing them into the air between us.
I pull my arm away. “My family was just slaughtered, you bastard.”
And while I expect my words to bite, in return, I’m granted nothing—no flicker of sympathy. No apology or support in my grief.
Only his gaze. Steady enough to strip me bare with every passing second.
Then, finally, he tilts his head. “Yes.”
That’s all.
Yes.
Like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
A roaring fills my ears. My pulse slams against my ribs, thick with horror and rage. “Did you know this was going to happen?”
Silence. Long enough to be an answer in itself.
“Yes,” he says finally.
Somehow, it’s worse than a lie.
My breath leaves me in a ragged exhale. “You’re sick.”
The corners of his mouth twitch like he’s amused. “I’ve been called worse.”
The realization is sinking in now, slow and suffocating—my brothers, my father—all of them gone. And I’m standing here with a man who feels less like a nightmare and more like the thing nightmares are made of.
Not a man.
A predator.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I whisper.
Hayden watches me for a beat. Then he steps closer, so close I have to tilt my chin to hold his gaze. His suit-clad chest brushes against me, the silk of my gown a whisper between us.
I’m practically painted in this dress, the fabric pooling at my feet, my body wrapped in it like a second skin. It clings to my curves, a mock-neck reminder of my place in high Society—covered, poised, proper.
I want to rip it off.
His gaze darkens, something shifting between us, crackling in the air like the hush before a thunderstorm.
“Get in the car, Martine.” His voice is softer now, coaxing as if I’m something wild. Something volatile.
A wild beast who needs wrangling, and it’s then I realize. It’s me.
I hesitate, lips curling into a snarl, clawing up my throat. My lip lifts over my teeth in something feral, something new—a part of me I don’t recognize born from the wreckage of my life.
Fordham and Dexter are dead.
And I wish I were, too.
Hayden exhales just a fraction harder, and the scent of his cologne curls around me. Smoky metallic edged with something I know could ruin me.
A perfect contradiction.
I go still.
Everything inside me screams to shove him away, to spit in his face, to claw at his throat until he bleeds—
But I don’t move.
I hesitate.
Because the logical part of me—the part that was raised in this world among power and bloodshed—knows he’s right. I know now that whatever comes next is bigger than my grief. Bigger than my rage.
But the other part of me—the part still clinging to ghosts—wants to fight.
To defy.
To burn it all to the fucking ground.
“Please,” the word slips out before I can stop it. I don’t even know what I’m begging for.
Hayden tilts his head, watching me in a way that sends ice down my spine.
Then, slowly, he raises his other hand, his fingers brushing against my chin before cupping my jaw. His thumb drags down feather-light, like he’s committing the shape of me to memory.
If he weren’t so cold, so utterly terrifying, I might mistake it for tenderness.
But I know better.
Because beneath the rage, beneath the grief, something else stirs.
A sick twisting ache curls in my stomach, heat licking up my spine. My body betrays me, nipples tightening against the silk, breath catching in my throat.
I want to kill him.
I want to obey him.
I want.
I swallow hard as he releases me, turning toward the car, shoving me away as if he can feel it too.
The loss of his touch is jarring. The clashing thoughts racing through my head and body are infuriating. There should be no reason my breath catches when I think of him. I should feel unadulterated hate, but instead, my desire to please outweighs my desire to continue my fit.
My breath comes in a gasping inhale, my hands curling into fists at my sides.
I can’t tell what I feel more as I teeter between need and rage.
Then, without another word, I climb into the car.