Chapter Three
TOREN
I see the devil in his eyes.
Brutality is an armor he wears much like his shadows, he wants me to see the monster lurking beneath his skin. He craves feeding the beast and relishes every second of it. I see it burning in his eyes, the way he comes alive in moments like these.
This isn’t just violence.
It’s his religion.
He crouches in front of me and secures each of my ankles to the chair legs with cable ties, the plastic biting into my skin.
When Xaden stands to his full height and looks down at me, his expression is completely unreadable, but the cold emptiness in his eyes destroys me more than any physical blow.
It’s too much.
I can’t hold his gaze.
I’m the first to break, dropping my gaze to the floor because I can handle him hurting me, can handle him wanting me dead but I can’t survive that blank, frozen void where warmth used to live.
He grips my chin in a painful hold and forces my focus back to him. “Look away or try and close your eyes, I will make it worse for them. You’ll watch everything, Tink.” His voice is granite and razors. Panic unfurls inside me but I snuff it out, I can’t break down.
He releases me and moves to stand in front of Masen, every muscle in my body tenses.
I shouldn’t care. I shouldn't feel this crushing weight in my chest for the fate he is about to face. He’s a monster. A killer who destroyed four lives and let me take the fall.
But he’s still my brother.
And watching him die is going to shatter whatever’s left of my soul. I know that’s exactly what Xaden wants.
He wants me broken. Destroyed. Dead inside before he finally grants me the mercy of my own end.
Xaden removes the gag from Masen, methodically moving to do the same to my father and Meekan. All three of them sit there with that infuriating air of superiority still clinging to them, glaring at Xaden and his men like they are somehow beneath them irritates me.
It makes my stomach turn.
When did Masen change?
Was he always this person and I just refused to see it?
Did I love him so blindly that I missed all the warning signs until it was too late?
“You will regret this—”
Xaden whirls around to face Masen, cutting him off with a look so cold, so utterly devoid of humanity, that it promises no mercy whatsoever.
“You’ll regret crawling out of your mother’s fucking snatch by the time I’m done with you.” The words drip with the promise of agony.
I see Xaden now, I really see him for who he has been trying to tell me he is.
It’s terrifying to see it with my own eyes.
I’ve allowed this man to corrupt my body and turn my own heart against me and I can’t even hate him for it.
He warned me about who he is but I ignored it.
I chose to see something redeemable beneath the darkness.
“I’m a fucking federal agent, Devlin. Touch me and I will make sure you spend the rest of your miserable life rotting behind bars.” Xaden lazily pivots back to face Meekan, the smile on his face has my breath hitching and my heart rate skyrocketing.
He had that same look in his eyes when he killed Kellan.
“You aren’t shit,” Xaden hisses. “Cas, bring me my tools, Andrade, Flint, Benson, hold those other three. I want them to watch everything so they know what’s coming.
” Meekan tries to act unaffected and keeps his chin raised.
Men grip my father and brother’s heads from behind and hold them so they are facing Meekan.
Before the other asshole can get to me and touch me, I turn and face Meek.
I will watch everything he does, not because I’m a masochist but because I need to.
I have to prove to him, even if it’s the last thing I do, that I’m the enemy he underestimated.
I’m the one he counted out and thought was weak.
I’m none of those things. I may have lost the fucking battle and the war, but I’ll go out like a Samurai warrior with my respect and honor still intact.
I’ll look death in the eyes as he comes for me.
I’ll not beg. I’ll not plead. I’ll face my end like a warrior born in the ashes of her past that shaped her into this villainous version of herself.
Cas wheels over a cart laden with surgical instruments: knives, hammers, pliers, saws, and countless other tools I can't let myself think about. Every single one is stained with dried blood, rust-colored evidence of previous victims.
My stomach lurches violently. I swallow again and again, forcing down the bile rising in my throat. I won't give him that satisfaction.
Won't let him see me break.
Meekan thrashes against his restraints. When Xaden picks up the hammer, he spews threats and promises of retribution, but they fall on deaf ears.
Cas moves to stand behind Meek without needing to be told.
They move like a choreographed symphony, it’s like they have done this so many times it’s now all muscle memory.
Caspian covers Meekan’s mouth with his hand to silence him, which only pisses Special Agent Di-Leo off more.
I should feel pity or try to help my best friend's brother, but I don’t.
He did this to himself. He allowed not only his sister's killer to go free, but a man who murdered three other people that night.
Masen may not have meant to take the lives of four innocent people, but he did and he tried to cover it all up so he could play hockey.
He left me to take the fall for him and allowed everyone to believe it was me.
“I’m gonna offer you something I have never offered anyone before.
” Meekan instantly stills and stares up at Xaden relief in his eyes.
“You get to choose which knee cap I break first.” I inhale sharply as the hope withers and dies in Meek’s eyes.
He really thought Xaden was going to give him a choice that involved his freedom and being able to survive the night.
What a fucking idiot.
Xaden Devlin doesn’t offer forgiveness or second chances.
The devil was never offered a chance to earn his way back into Jesus’s fold. Xaden will adopt the methods of his maker and ensure the end of each of us without a worry of ever making it up north.
Cas removes his hand allowing Meekan to speak. “There is no coming back from this if you—” The warning is obliterated by a gut-wrenching scream when Xaden swings the hammer down with devastating precision, shattering Meekan's left kneecap.
The sound of bone splintering echoes through the room with a wet, crunching crack that I know I'll hear in my nightmares forever.
Bile surges up my throat. I swallow convulsively, fighting the urge to vomit. Every instinct screams at me to look away, to close my eyes, to escape this horror but I force myself to keep watching.
I can feel the ghost of hands behind me, ready to grip my face and hold me in place if I even try to turn away.
I won't give them the satisfaction.
“Scream as loud as you want, Di-Leo. No motherfucker around here will help you. This is Stormsend and I fucking own this town.” The dominance and power that follows those words can be felt. “Elbow or knee?”
Meekan splutters and shakes his head. “Stop—”
“Elbow it is.” I watch, trapped in some horrible trance as Xaden circles around him and brings the hammer down on Meekan's elbow with the same brutal efficiency. He couldn’t even escape the blow since he’s restrained.
The scream that tears from Meekan's throat is inhuman.
But Xaden doesn't stop.
He methodically destroys both kneecaps. Shatters both elbows. Breaks each toe one by one with precise, calculated strikes.
When he hits one of Meekan's toes so hard it literally explodes…nothing left but a dangling piece of skin and shattered bone I nearly lose what little remains in my stomach.
He's so precise. So controlled. Moving like a predator, sleek and certain of every movement.
And my father and brother? They sit there in silence. Haven't said a single word. Haven't tried to help their supposed friend as he's systematically broken apart by the man they swore they'd destroy and claim his throne.
“Cutters.” Cas obeys, grabs the hammer from Xaden then replaces it with the cutters from the cart.
“S-stop… please,” Meek begs through his whimpers. My throat tightens as I fight back tears. I may be furious and angry but even I can’t stomach the sight of him being carved and broken like this.
“Did you stop for a single second to think about my sister and best friends when you buried the reports from the crash?” Xaden’s words are like a sucker punch.
“You’re a worthless piece of shit. Your sister died and you chose greed over justice for her.
” Meekan’s reply goes unnoticed as Xaden kneels behind him and—
Oh God.
The bolt cutters close around Meekan's fingers.
The crunch of bone and cartilage being severed makes my vision blur. Makes the room spin.
I'm going to be sick. I'm actually going to—
But I can't look away.
Won't look away.
Because this is my reality now. This is the world I chose when I decided to play in the darkness with monsters.
Meekan's screams fill the warehouse, bouncing off concrete walls, creating a symphony of agony that will haunt me until my dying breath.
And through it all, Xaden works with the focused intensity of an artist creating his masterpiece.
Finger after finger falls to the floor with wet, sickening thuds.
I stopped counting after the fourth finger.
Not because I went numb. I tried that, tried the old trick of building a wall between what my eyes were seeing and whatever lived behind my sternum.
It didn't work. The wall kept collapsing.
I'd get it halfway up and then the sound would come again, that wet architectural crack of bone giving way to steel, and it would fall and I'd be back in my body, back in this chair, back in the precise center of the worst thing I have ever witnessed.
Meekan is barely recognizable.
I think about Kenna.
I don't mean to. I try not to because I know that if I let myself go there—if I let myself look at what is left of her brother and think about what she would say, what her face would do, whether she would hold my hand or tell me to look away.
I will break completely. And I am not allowed to break completely.
I told myself that on the drive here. I told myself that when Xaden handcuffed me to this chair.
I have been telling myself that on a loop for the past forty minutes and it is getting harder to believe.
KennaDee used to call Meekan the only Kellar worth knowing.
She meant my family, not his. She meant that her brother, her difficult, complicated, grief-shredded brother was a better man than Steven or Masen had ever been to me.
And she wasn't wrong. Meekan Di-Leo was not a good man, I understand that clearly now, but he was someone's person.
He was someone's whole world once. He was Kenna's brother before he was Fiona Williams' informant and before he was my father's corrupt insurance policy and before he was the man strapped to a chair in this warehouse.
I watch Xaden take the bolt cutters from Caspian.
I watch Cas's face over Xaden's shoulder.
He isn't enjoying this. That matters to me more than I expected it to.
Whatever Caspian Vought is and he is complicated, he is compromised, he is someone I am going to have to reckon with, he is not this.
The tightness around his jaw, the way his eyes keep sliding sideways and then snapping back like he's forcing himself to witness what he helped create, tells me that the man inside the betrayal is still in there somewhere, still recoiling from the thing he set in motion.
The screaming has stopped.
That's worse.
When Meekan was screaming there was something human in the room. Now there is just the soft wet sound of Xaden working and the particular quality of silence that follows agony when the body has simply run out of ways to express it.
My father is crying.
Steven Kellar, who built an empire on ruthlessness, who sat across boardroom tables and dismantled lives with the efficiency of a man taking apart machinery, is crying.
Silent tears tracking through the grime on his face, eyes fixed on what is happening to the man his money bought.
I look at him and feel nothing that resembles pity.
I have tried pity on and off for my entire life where my father is concerned and it never fits right.
It costs too much. It asks me to carry something that was never mine to carry.
What I feel instead is something quieter and more final.
Grief.
Not for him. Not for Meekan. For the girl I used to be, the one who sat at this man's dinner table and believed the version of the world he sold her.
The one who thought Somerset was the good side of the river.
The one who looked at her father and saw ambition instead of corruption, who looked at her brother and saw a protector instead of a coward waiting to use her.
That girl is gone.
I know it in the same way I know the warehouse is cold and the chair is hard and my wrists hurt where the handcuffs have been biting for the past hour.
Not as a dramatic realization. Just as a fact.
The girl who arrived back in Somerset believing she could fight a war with love and right intentions is gone, and whoever is sitting in this chair watching a man be dismantled in her name is someone else.
I'm not sure yet if that's better or worse.
Both, I think.
It’s definitely both.
I breathe.
In. Out.
I keep my eyes open.
I don't look away.