Chapter Five
TOREN
I bite the inside of my cheek so hard I taste copper, desperate to keep from crying out.
Tears burn behind my eyes, scalding, relentless and no matter how many times I blink, they won't disappear. They spill down my cheeks in silent rivers as I watch the man I've fallen in love with without meaning to, without wanting to, without any ability to stop it, beat my brother into oblivion.
Cas doesn't try to intervene. Doesn't even flinch. He just stands there watching as Xaden lands punch after devastating punch on Masen's face.
Each impact makes a wet, sickening sound that reverberates through my bones.
There is something that has always bothered me about Masen and my father's relationship that I never found the right words for until right now, watching Xaden's fists land on my brother's face.
My father loved hockey. He attended every game.
He spoke about Masen's career the way other fathers spoke about investment portfolios, with the long-view certainty of a man who had already calculated the returns.
But he never once, not in all the years I watched them together, treated hockey as the point. He treated it as the front.
I never understood what it was the front for.
I think I am starting to understand.
Even now, with the bones in his face rearranging under the force of Xaden's precision, Masen looks, in the specific moments when the pain recedes enough to let him less like a boy who was cornered and more like a man who knew there were outcomes to this night and is calculating which ones he can still influence.
That is not the expression of someone who was unprepared.
I push the thought away. There is too much happening right now to follow it.
But I don't lose it entirely.
I file it.
A roar of pure agony tears from Masen when Xaden's fist connects with his nose, the cartilage shattering with an audible crack that makes my stomach lurch.
Blood pours from the ruin of his face. His lip is split open, swelling grotesquely. One eye has already disappeared into puffy, discolored flesh.
But Xaden doesn't stop.
He's a monster. A beautiful, terrible monster who's shown me exactly who he is, and I was too blind, too desperate to truly see it until now.
To teach is to learn. To learn is to excel. To excel is to thrive. To thrive is to live.
I repeat the mantra silently, desperately, the words I used to cling to in Walter House when the world became too much. I’m hoping against hope that they'll bring me the peace they once did. That they'll create some distance between me and this nightmare.
But there is no peace.
No distance.
No escape.
My father makes a horrible gurgling sound, choking on blood or tears or his own broken pleas, but Xaden doesn't even pause.
His fists keep falling with mechanical precision, each blow calculated to cause maximum pain without granting the mercy of unconsciousness.
This is what he promised me.
What he warned me about again and again.
I'm not a good man, Tink. I'm the villain in everyone's story, including yours.
I didn't believe him. Didn't want to believe that someone could touch me the way he did, with such devastating tenderness and still be capable of this level of brutality.
But love and violence aren't opposites for men like Xaden Devlin.
They're two sides of the same coin.
And I'm watching both with tears streaming down my face, his child growing inside me, knowing that there's no version of this story where I walk away whole.
Masen's head lolls to the side, barely conscious, and still Xaden doesn't stop.
Won't stop.
Can't stop.
Because this isn't about justice anymore.
This is about the grief that's been eating him alive from the inside out.
This is two years of pain, rage and loss finally finding a target.
And that target is my brother.
The brother who killed his sister.
The brother who destroyed four lives and walked away without consequence.
The brother who deserves every second of this suffering.
But he's still my brother.
And watching him die is killing me just as surely as Xaden's fists are killing him.
To teach is to learn. To learn is to excel. To excel is to thrive. To thrive is to live.
The words mean nothing anymore.
They're just sounds. Empty syllables I'm using to keep myself from screaming.
Because if I start screaming, I'm afraid I'll never stop.
I’m powerless to turn away.
I sit here still as a statue and watch. Unable to stomach the sight but unable to look away. I need to see it. I have to. I was blinded by him before, but not anymore. My eyes are wide open and I see him for who he really is.
The devil in the flesh.
Masen’s eyes find mine for a brief second, a second that feels like hours.
I see the brother I once loved, idolized and who cared about me more than anything in this world.
The person who raised me. My protector. Not the monster my father shaped him to be or the murderer who blamed me and sent me away to take the fall for his crime.
I see my Masen.
“Take me,” I choke out barely above a whisper.
I don’t expect Xaden to stop or even hear me over the grunts of pain coming from my brother but he does.
He stills with his fist raised ready to land another blow.
I watch as his body grows tense. Cas shoots me a warning look, but I ignore it as I swallow and meet my brother’s gaze once more and tell him with a look that I will take Xaden’s anger for him.
This is my last gift to him, the last thing I will ever do for the brother I once loved beyond measure.
“Give me your anger. I know you want to.”
Xaden slowly drops his arm then straightens, the muscles in his back ripple. I brace myself for his fury, I prepare my body for the pain as best as I can. When he turns to face me, I swallow the gasp.
For a moment, I don’t see him as I look into those gray eyes.
I see her.
For a fleeting moment I find comfort in those eyes until I remember she isn’t here.
It’s not Emery looking at me with disdain, it's her brother who embodies death and darkness like a cloak.
I begin to tremble as he stalks toward me, slowly.
My breathing turns shallow. He no longer looks like my Xaden—or the version of him I fooled myself into thinking cared about me.
The version in front of me is the Xaden Devlin the world knows, the man, the monster who cuts the lips of his victims from their face and stores them in his treasure jar, to reminisce with when he gets lonely.
He’s a killer.
Believe half of what you hear and all of what you see. When you see it for yourself, then make a judgment call, but don't presume to know me based on rumors you have heard about my family, because I can promise you, Tink, the rumors aren't even close. We are much, much worse.
He told me the first time we met that he was worse than the rumors and now, I believe him.
He stands before me, covered in the blood of my father, brother and old friend.
His face is harsh, cold and emotionless.
His body is taut with tension begging to be released but it’s his eyes that spear me.
The look of hatred is present but I see beneath it.
I see the broken boy who couldn’t stomach seeing his best friends’ graves because he refused to feel the loss fully.
I see the brother who lost the light of his sister.
I see the boy who thinks he isn’t good, that he’s unloveable and beyond repair.
“I see you,” I whisper brokenly. The pain exploding inside my chest isn’t for my family, it’s for the life I envisioned with him being ripped away. “Make him feel the pain you felt,” I implore him with a sad smile.
If my death is what he needs to feel whole, then so be it.
I’ll die knowing what love is. Even if it's not reciprocated, I can die knowing what it felt like to feel it because I feel it for him and our unborn child.
Wars have casualties.
I’m one of them.