Chapter Nine
XADEN
I'm sitting in the corner of her room, clutching the stuffed bear Miles won her at the fair.
It's old, ratty, missing an eye, but Em loved this fucking thing like it was precious. Neave joked around once and hid it from her. She absolutely lost her mind, nearly clawed his eyes out in her fury.
After that, we all stopped pulling pranks on my sister.
She was kind and good and gentle, but she was also a bad bitch who could be ruthless when she needed to be.
I rest my forearms on top of my knees and hold the bear in front of me, staring at its one remaining button eye.
“I fucked up, Em.”
I talk to the bear like it can understand me. Like it is my sister somehow. It's fucked up, I know it is, but now that I've started, I can't stop.
The words keep pouring out.
“I had them all right where I wanted them. Months of planning, months of careful strategy… gone down the fucking drain because I…”
I can't even get the words out. Can't admit it out loud because if I do, it becomes real.
None of my men said a word the entire ride back to the house. They didn't need to. The silence was deafening, heavy with judgment and confusion.
I rule with an iron fist.
I'm not the guy who offers second chances or shows mercy.
If I give you a job, even if it's to slaughter your own father, you do it or you risk my wrath.
Killing Meekan?
I enjoyed every fucking second. The way he screamed, the way he begged, the sound of bone shattering under my hands, it was beautiful.
Breaking Steven?
Better than I dreamed. The sound of his screams is imprinted in my mind forever. I'll replay it every night as I drift to sleep, letting it lull me into dreams of revenge fulfilled.
Beating the shit out of Masen and burying a bullet in his chest?
I feel robbed. Cheated. I should have had more time to make him suffer, to make him pay for what he fucking did, what he took from me.
The cunt got off too easily.
Tink...
The image of her looking up at me with understanding in those devastating eyes makes rage and something else, something I refuse to name, churn in my gut.
She ruined my moment of numbness. Destroyed my chance at claiming justice and finally making that cocksucker she shares blood with suffer the way he deserves.
I had her.
At my mercy. Vulnerable. Waiting for me to end it.
She's never been afraid of dying. From the first fucking moment I met her, she's been begging me to end her life and claim her rotten soul. She offered it to me freely, like it was worthless.
“Fuck!”
My grip on the bear tightens until I'm crushing it, and frustration boils over inside me. I can't escape my own thoughts and it's driving me insane.
I hate this shit. I'm Xaden Devlin, I don't fuck up. Don't make mistakes or hesitate.
I kill. I take life.
I don't... give it.
But that's exactly what I did.
I never meant to. I was fucking reckless, stupid and weak.
“Want to talk about it?”
I look over and see Cas leaning against the doorjamb with his arms crossed over his chest. He's showered and changed into clean clothes.
I'm still covered in blood, Meekan's, Steven's, Masen's and I'm not willing to wash the evidence of the Kellars' demise from my skin. I want to fucking bask in it.
The feeling of knowing I did what I set out to do should feel... something. Victory? Satisfaction? Peace?
But it doesn't feel like any of those things.
It feels hollow. Empty. Wrong.
“Are we gonna braid hair and talk about boys too?” I snap back viciously.
His eyes narrow. “Stop being a dick.”
“Fuck you, Caspian.”
He pushes off the doorjamb and takes a single step into the room, then freezes when a growl rumbles from my chest.
He knows better. No one is allowed in Em's room. Ever.
“Nah, fuck you, Xaden.”
I'm on my feet instantly, tossing the bear onto her bed as I stalk across the room. I don't stop until we're chest to fucking chest, close enough that I can see the fury and concern warring in his expression.
“You want me to fucking teach you a lesson?” My tone is controlled, but the malice in it is unmistakable.
“Stop fucking pushing me away!” He steps back, creating just enough space to breathe. “I'm here, X. I'm all you got.”
The words slam into me like a freight train.
“You're all I've got, Xaden. We started this together—” He reaches up and grips the back of my neck, pulling me in until our foreheads touch. “We'll finish this together, and I'll be by your side after it's all done and you're the Don of Stormsend and Somerset.”
The truth of his words resonates deep in my bones. I know Cas has my back.
I challenge him constantly. Push him to break, to turn against me. But he never does.
He's always here. By my side. Watching my back every second of every fucking day.
I pull out of his hold and drop down onto the edge of Em's bed, hanging my head in shame.
I have no right to throw my weight around after the colossal fuck-up I made tonight. I'm not angry at Caspian—I'm fucking furious at myself for freezing, for not following through.
For being weak.
“I had her…” My voice comes out rough, broken. “She was right fucking there. I just had to—”
“Stop.”
I look up sharply.
“I fucked up—”
“No.” He cuts me off again and I grit my teeth to keep from lashing out. “You let her go, and it was the right thing to do.”
“How the fuck is that right?” I explode off the bed. “She'll be running her mouth to the fucking cops right now! Telling them everything!”
Cas scoffs—actually scoffs—and I glare at him with enough venom to kill.
“If you think that girl would turn on you, you're a fucking idiot.”
“Say that shit again. I dare you.”
“Toren isn't ratting on you.” His voice is certain, unwavering. “She'll turn on her own family before she fucks you over.”
“Did you miss the part where the bitch has been plotting with the Denver Kings to take me down for months?” I'm shouting now, all my control shredding.
“Did you miss her scheming with fucking Kyle? Your ex-best friend was a fucking snitch, Caspian. He was ratting on us and Kellar both. If I was Masen, I would have slaughtered the cunt and made him suffer for thinking he could betray me. If any of my men tried that shit, I would spend weeks making them pay.”
The silence that follows is deafening.
Cas stares at me for a long moment, then shakes his head.
“Yeah. Enough about that snitching shit.” His tone shifts, becoming more businesslike. “We need to find out where Toren is and if Masen and Steven are dead. If they aren't, we prepare for war and take everything from them while they're in the hospital.”
He meets my eyes, and I see the cold determination I know so well.
“Then we kill them all, brother.”
The words should satisfy me. Should fill the emptiness with purpose and direction.
But all I can think about is the way Toren looked at me when she said it was okay. When she told me she loved me.
When she offered me her life like it was a gift instead of a curse.
And I don't know how to reconcile the man who wants to destroy her family with the man who couldn't bring himself to hurt her.
I'm going to have to figure it out.
Because this war isn't over.
It's only just begun.
Cas went to bed over an hour ago.
I didn’t.
I don’t sleep often.
This is not unusual. I have never been a good sleeper, not since I was a child, not since the particular quality of the dark in my father's house taught me that staying alert was a more valuable skill than staying rested.
I sit in the kitchen at three in the morning and I don't turn the light on. I sit in the dark with my hands flat on the table and I let Cas's words sit in the room with me the way you let something air out that has been shut in too long.
She's trying to survive you.
I have turned that sentence over about forty-seven times in the last two hours. I keep waiting for the angle from which it stops being true and I haven't found it yet.
Meekan is dead. Steven is somewhere between dead and dying.
Masen has a bullet in his chest. The three names I've had circled in red for two years are accounted for and the only thing I feel is the particular flatness of a man who burned something down and is standing in the ash trying to remember why he lit the match.
I remember why.
I remember exactly why.
Emery. Neave. Miles.
I say their names in my head the way I always do, not as grief, not yet, but as the spine of everything. The reason the machine keeps running.
Except the machine ran tonight and it didn't feel like I expected.
I thought it would feel like it was finished. Like a door closing on the right side of something. Instead it feels like standing in a room where someone just left and the air still holds the shape of them.
She said make him feel the pain you felt.
And I couldn't.
I'm not examining that right now. I've filed it under things that don't mean what they appear to mean and I'm leaving it there until I have the structural capacity to look at it without the whole building coming down.
What I will look at is this, Caspian is right that she is trying to survive.
And I have been making that as difficult as possible on purpose, because her surviving was never part of the plan and somewhere between the beginning of this and tonight that plan started to feel like a different kind of loss.
I don't know what to do with that.
I get up. I make coffee. I stand at the window and watch the dark outside and wait for the city to get light.
Focus.