Chapter 3
Kane
T wo Years Later
My alarm clock blared to life and I smacked it hard enough to send it skittering across the nightstand. The shrill noise cut off mid-screech, leaving behind a silence that was its own kind of punishment.
I stared at the ceiling for a long moment, dreading the effort it would take to get out of bed. Another fucking day. Another twenty-four hours of this half-life I’d been dragging myself through for the past two years.
There was a time when I woke up with purpose. When the alarm had been a starting gun rather than a death knell, signaling the beginning of another day of doing a job that mattered. Protecting people. Solving cases. Being part of something bigger than myself.
Now I woke up to an empty apartment, an empty life, and a hollow ache in my chest that never seemed to ease.
The man I used to be—Detective Kane Adair, decorated officer, respected colleague, someone who believed in justice and brotherhood and all that idealistic bullshit—he was dead.
Buried under a mountain of headlines and accusations and the deafening silence of people I’d once called friends.
What remained was... this. Whatever this was.
I couldn’t avoid the world forever, though God knows I’d tried. So I heaved myself out of bed and started my morning workout.
The routine was the one thing I refused to let slide no matter how little I wanted to face the day.
Push-ups, pull-ups, weights, core work. I moved through the exercises with mechanical precision, letting my body take over while my mind went somewhere else.
Somewhere quiet. Somewhere that didn’t hurt.
It was a bit like being at The Players Club, actually.
That same mindless escape, that same sense of existing purely in the physical, but I wasn’t in the same headspace I’d been in before everything changed.
The playful, confident dom who’d once walked through those doors looking for connection and release? He was as dead as Detective Adair.
I still went occasionally but the scenes were harder now. Darker. I wasn’t the kind of dom that just any sub could handle anymore, and I didn’t have the patience or the desire to gentle myself for someone who couldn’t take the hard edge of simmering anger I carried with me everywhere.
Next to dominating in a scene, my workout was the closest I got to that pleasantly empty headspace. So even though I wanted nothing more than to stay in bed and stare at the ceiling until the world ended, I never skipped a day.
It was the rest of the day that made me want to stay horizontal.
After the workout, I checked my phone and found a text from Sutton asking me to come into the office. I showered, choked down a protein shake that tasted like chalk, and headed into Noble and Associates, where I now worked as an independent contractor for the firm as a security specialist.
The drive gave me too much time to think, which was always dangerous.
My mind wandered to the same dark corners it always did—the case files I wasn’t allowed to close, the badge I’d been forced to give up, the way everyone I’d ever trusted had turned their backs on me the moment things went to shit.
Sutton, though, had done me a solid, reaching out to me after the scandal when no other firm would touch me.
He’d offered me work as an independent contractor, small jobs here and there, just enough to keep me from drowning completely in my misery.
He’d even hinted that he could bring me on full-time if I wanted it.
I didn’t want it.
I’d just left the police “brotherhood” I’d truly believed was real.
I’d bought into all of it—the camaraderie, the loyalty, the idea that the men and women who wore the badge would have your back no matter what.
The moment I became a target, I watched that brotherhood evaporate.
They let me take the fall for someone else’s crime rather than ask the hard questions about who was really responsible.
I had no interest in joining another brotherhood. No interest in trusting people who might decide, someday, that I was expendable.
I still didn’t fully understand why Sutton had taken a chance on me, when I’d been a guy who’d just been kicked off the force for supposedly helping disappear a massive amount of seized drugs and cash.
A guy whose name had been plastered across every local news outlet as the face of police corruption.
Most people saw me and assumed the worst. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and all that.
But Sutton had listened to my side of things and looked at the evidence—really looked, not just skimmed the headlines—and he’d seen what no one else had questioned.
That the case against me was circumstantial at best, fabricated at worst, which was why it never went to trial.
That I’d been set up by someone who knew exactly how to make an innocent man look guilty, and the fact that I’d never been prosecuted spoke volumes about being framed for something I didn’t do.
He’d believed in my innocence when no one else had. He’d offered me a flotation device when everyone else was content to watch me drown.
The accusation had destroyed everything.
Not just my career, but my identity, my relationships, my sense of who I was and what my life was supposed to look like.
I’d given fifteen years to the force—fifteen years of missed holidays, failed relationships, sleepless nights, and putting my life on the line for people who would never know my name.
And in return, I’d gotten a target on my back and a one-way ticket to professional exile.
The bitterness sat in my chest like a stone, heavy and permanent. I’d learned to live despite it, the way you learn to live with chronic pain—not by making it go away, but by accepting that it was never going to disappear.
I was grateful to Sutton, I really was. But gratitude wasn’t enough to override two years of hard-earned cynicism. For the most part, I kept my distance from the other guys at Noble and Associates, did my work, collected my pay, and went home to my empty apartment. It was safer that way.
Everyone I’d ever called a friend had abandoned me. Everyone I’d ever called a brother had bailed the moment things took a turn for the worst.
Even Kohen. My actual brother, the one person I’d assumed would stand by me no matter what—even he’d kept his distance since the scandal broke.
He was still on the force, still wearing the badge, and I knew why he chose to detach himself from the situation, and me.
Because associating with me was career suicide.
Defending me publicly would have painted a target on his back, too.
I understood his reasons. That didn’t mean his silence and rejection didn’t hurt like a knife between the ribs every single day.
So I was on my own. And in my opinion, that was exactly where I needed to be.
But I did have to pay the rent, which meant I wasn’t about to ignore Sutton’s summons.
I pulled into the parking garage at Noble and Associates—one of Las Vegas’s premiere security firms—and headed inside and up the elevator.
I stepped out and nodded to the receptionist, a pretty brunette whose name I could never remember, and passed through to the area where everyone tended to gather between assignments.
The other guys called it “the bullpen,” a joking reference to police headquarters, but I knew what a real bullpen looked like—the smell of burnt coffee, the constant ringing of phones, the undercurrent of tension that never quite went away.
This was nothing like that. This office was all chrome and glass and expensive furniture, the kind of understated luxury that came from working for clients who could afford the best.
This morning, everyone seemed to be clustered around one of the tables near the windows, looking at something.
I could see Ford grinning, which was notable because Ford was probably the most reserved of the group.
Chase, another one of the security guys, stood beside him with a relaxed expression on his face that I’d rarely seen.
It was the look of a man whose life had recently gotten a lot less complicated thanks to his wife, Andrea.
As I got closer, I could hear their voices.
“You think she’ll like it?” Ford was asking, and there was something in his tone I’d never heard before. Uncertainty. Maybe even nervousness.
Ford wasn’t the kind of guy who lacked confidence.
None of the men at Noble and Associates were—you needed a certain level of innate trust in yourself, in your instincts and training, to be a bodyguard at this level.
These were men who’d spent time in the military in war zones, had faced down armed attackers, navigated hostage situations, and kept their cool under the kind of pressures that would break most people.
They took their natural abilities and honed them into razor-sharp tools.
But right now, Ford sounded almost tentative.
Curiosity got the better of me and I stopped just outside the ring of men and glanced down at what they were all staring at.
Ford had a small velvet box opened in his palm, and nestled inside was a ring.
But not the traditional diamond solitaire I might have expected.
This one had a large blue stone in the center—sapphire, maybe—flanked by smaller stones in pale blue-green and soft pink. It was unusual. Striking, actually.
“It’s very…non-traditional,” Xavier observed, leaning in for a closer look.
“Violet’s not very traditional,” Ford replied, and there was a warmth in his voice when he said her name that made something twist uncomfortably in my chest. “She likes art and the unexpected. I picked the colors based on the palettes of her favorite pieces.”
“That’s actually incredibly thoughtful,” Chase said, sounding impressed. “Did you come up with that yourself, or did Andrea help you?”