Chapter 31
Havoc
My alarm goes off, and I throw the blanket off with an exhausted groan. I slept like shit last night, yesterday’s events playing in my head on repeat. Sitting up, I reach for my phone to swipe away the alarm when I catch sight of the sheet of torn notebook paper tucked beneath it.
Deal accepted. Family’s off limits.
I crumple the note in my fist, pissed off on an entirely new level. He broke into my home. Snuck into my room while I was sleeping.
And I never noticed he was here.
If he’d wanted to, the King of Carnage could have easily slit my throat. Which begs the question… why didn’t he?
This psychopath not only knows where I live, but can get in and out of the guild hall without anyone noticing.
He’s a threat; even more so than I gave him credit for.
Gods, with that power of his? If he ever wanted to, he could go on a crime spree that would go down in history, only ending when someone was lucky enough to catch him off guard.
Ice creeps up the walls, my breath coming in visible puffs, and I slam my eyes shut. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” I mutter, taking a few deep breaths to center myself before I completely lose my shit, and my men pay the price.
It’s the fundamental difference between me and Carnage.
He thrives on chaos, doesn’t give a single shit about who he hurts, but the casualties are a byproduct of ‘wrong place, wrong time,’ and some of them even recover if they get to a hospital fast enough.
If I lose control? There’s no chance of surviving.
Dozens of souls ripped from their bodies in an instant, no matter if they deserve it or not.
All it takes is me slipping for one moment, and anyone could pay the price for my failure.
A pregnant woman. The love of someone’s life.
A child.
That death still haunts me to this day. At fourteen, I knew better.
But after being relentlessly bullied for months and hormones raging…
my control slipped. For one second, I let my anger get the best of me, and the damage was done.
There was no way to fix it or apologize.
The one moment I wasn’t completely in control, someone died.
His parents deemed me a monster, rallying the community for revenge because it couldn’t be proven in human courts.
My parents decided to move, but they weren’t quick enough.
The night before we were supposed to leave, I woke up to all of the doors barricaded and the house on fire.
I was too scared of hurting my family to let my powers out in full force, too afraid of cannibalizing their souls to trust that the cold that accompanies my power would be enough to extinguish the flames.
By the time I escaped my room, it was too late.
My parents and younger siblings were gone.
And at the head of the angry mob was the father of the boy I killed, sneering at me.
“Monsters like you don’t deserve a family.
If you had any conscience at all, you’d do the world a favor and kill yourself. ”
I devoured every single soul that had a hand in murdering my family. and vowed to myself then and there that no one would ever touch anyone I loved ever again.
The King of Carnage isn’t going to break me. Not while I have Kiara to protect.
Taking another deep breath, I exhale slowly, forcing down the riot of emotions clogging my throat. All that’ll do is end in disaster.
He became a part of the walls. Moving Kiara to a safe house won’t do shit against a power like that to keep him out. The only advantage I have is making sure he doesn’t know where she lives, get someone else to move her while I keep him distracted. Never visit her in case he’s watching me.
My stomach flips. I can’t live like that.
He said ‘his girl,’ though. So maybe I was reading into my own fears and assuming he was targeting Kiara with his Mrs. Carnage comment?
The sooner he’s dead, the better.
But the more I mull over our interaction last night, searching my memory for anything that could help me track him down or weaknesses to exploit, the more his words nag at me as much as I’m afraid to face them.
“You already took my brother from me, you don’t get to steal my girl, too.”
He brought up Arson too many times for me to write it off as coincidence, and a sinking feeling settles in my stomach.
There’s no way. Yeah, Arson has a brother, but I already know about him; Myles.
One that was adopted as a baby, and as soon as I verified the rumors had some merit, Arson left the guild to track him down, and the both of them ended up mated to my mate’s best friend.
I searched every record available at the time.
If there was another brother, I would have known.
Heard a whisper of a rumor, at the very least.
He was only five when I took him in, though, and his parents were connected to human traffickers. What if they’d already sold him off before Arson was born, or too young to remember?
My stomach lurches, and I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve made a grave mistake.
“Artemis.” I wait until she grunts in acknowledgement on the other side of the phone to fill her in on the abridged version. She’s the one that tipped me off about Myles; if anyone can dig up dirt on someone or chase down leads with nothing but a hope and a prayer, it’s her.
“It’ll cost you,” she warns, and I roll my eyes.
“I expected nothing less. There’s a bonus in there if you can also get me the King of Carnage’s real name.”
“When you ask for a favor, you really go all in, don’t you?” she chuckles.
“Only because you’re the only one I trust to get results discreetly and quickly.”
Artemis sighs. “Gimme a few days. If I come up with nothing, it won’t be for lack of trying, and I’ll still expect payment.”
“Obviously.”
She hangs up, and my phone vibrates with an incoming text message from her.
I open it up to a GIF flipping me off and shove it into my pocket.
She’s a pain in the ass, but that woman has a knack for finding people that the rest of the world has given up on.
If anyone can make sense of King’s claims, it’s her.
“Focus on what you can control here and now,” I murmur as I get around for the day.
I can’t do anything about the King of Carnage beyond research and being prepared.
He agreed to family being off limits, and insanely enough…
I believe he’ll keep his word. If I’ve learned one thing from being surrounded by criminals, it’s that they tend to put a heavier weight on their vows than normal people.
Honor amongst thieves is a complicated, precious thing.
Any one of them will lie through their teeth to provide one of their friends with an alibi, but if they say they’ll do something? They always find a way to come through.
I can’t kill Carnage right now, but I can begin repairing my relationship with my mate. Even if she isn’t ready to forgive me yet, I can prove she can depend on me.
Misting outside the barrier, I start the long trek into town, trying to get my head on straight before I go to see Kiara. I’ve already handled her mortgage, bills, and groceries. So how else can I take something off her plate?
The clinic.
I could arrange for some upgrades; new equipment and supplies.
Find her some potential clients and hype her up so she gets more business.
She prefers working with rare animals; I’m sure I have a few decent contacts that’d love to hire her.
The guild usually receives job requests for assassinations, but we get plenty of odd jobs, too.
Tracking down a missing person, rescuing a loved one from dangerous criminals when the proper channels have failed them.
And we always have our ears to the ground to keep up with the criminal underworld.
It wouldn’t take much to bribe a few of my men to intercept a few illegal transports of mythologicals.
“Shit, but what would she do once she had them? Nobody to pay the vet bills and then she’d have more mouths to feed and nowhere to put them,” I mumble, trying to riddle out all the plot holes before my gift turns into a burden.
I could buy her land to open up an animal sanctuary, maybe?
Pick up more jobs so I could fund it with ‘donations’?
Or we could turn it into a humane zoo, one prioritized on the animals’ comfort and humans could walk through clear tunnels throughout so they wouldn’t disrupt them. Help offset the cost.
I’m lost in thought when I bump into someone, his shopping bag crashing to the ground and spilling out across the frigid sidewalk. “Shit, sorry.” I bend down automatically to help pick things up, pausing when I see his face.
Killian Sterling.
When I freeze for too long, he frowns at me. “I’m sorry, have we met?”
I’m your brother in law. Or I would be if your sister didn’t hate me.
“I… know Kiara.”
He gets instantly defensive, but once his gaze falls on his sister’s mark branded on my wrist, he pauses with his hand half toward the fallen items I offer up. “You’re her mate?!”
My lips press into a thin line. “I am.”
Killian frowns. “She never said…”
I sigh. “She wouldn’t.”
His gaze hardens. “Why not?”
I open my mouth to reply, but nothing comes out.
How do I even go about justifying what happened?
Sure, it wasn’t completely my fault. Someone has been sabotaging my relationship with Kiara, gods only know why.
But every explanation on the tip of my tongue feels like an excuse, and I can’t bring myself to utter a single one. Because… she was right.
Miscommunications happened on both sides, but that doesn’t erase the fact that I could have tried harder. Asked Arson to get her number. Said to hell with it and misted inside her house so nobody else would see me coming and going, and confronted her about why she hadn’t texted me.