Chapter Forty-One
XADEN
The past week has dragged on, days moving slowly like time itself has lost the will to continue.
Cas convinced me to head back to school and part of me wants to break his jaw for it but another, quieter part is grateful for the distraction.
I walk through the halls feeling every set of eyes tracking me, cataloguing me, waiting for something. Not the eyes I want though.
I know she's not here. I can feel her absence the way you feel a missing tooth with your tongue constantly, compulsively, unable to stop pressing against the empty space.
Both towns sit in a state of limbo. I should claim her territory, absorb the cartel, consolidate everything into one clean empire. It's the logical move. The strategic move. Every instinct I've honed over years of ruthless calculation is pointing in that direction.
I haven't moved an inch.
I haven't even removed the divide from the school. The guards are still in place, keeping the two worlds from intersecting, because dismantling what she built feels like admitting something I'm not ready to admit.
I'm forced to a stop when Maddy steps directly into my path. She looks up at me with her signature scowl, no fear, no deference, just irritation.
“You owe me a new intern.”
“Fuck off, Maddison. I don't have time for your shit.” I try to step around her. She blocks me. I level a glare at her that has made grown men reconsider their life choices.
She doesn't blink.
“I mean it. I can't run that library alone, Xaden.”
“Then don't.”
“Fuck you.” Her voice sharpens. “Unlike you, some of us need that place to study and focus so we can actually graduate. Without Toren—”
“She'll be back.” The words come out before I can stop them, automatic, almost desperate in a way I hate.
“Uh, no she won't.”
Everything in me goes rigid. “What?”
Maddison frowns up at me, and something in her expression shifts, less irritation, more something that looks uncomfortably close to pity. “She's gone, Xaden.”
She's gone, Xaden.
The words echo in a way that has no business affecting me the way they do. “The fuck do you mean?”
“She sent me a text a few days ago—”
I step into her space. “What did it say?”
To her credit she doesn't flinch. She just narrows her eyes and answers. “She said she was sorry. That she wasn't coming back—”
I pull away before she finishes the sentence because I can't stand there and listen to the rest of it.
I can't stand there with my face neutral and my hands still and pretend those words didn't just detonate something inside my chest. I move through the building and out into the parking lot just as Cas pulls in.
He gets out of the car, takes one look at me, and his expression shifts immediately into something careful.
“You good?”
“She's gone.”
His brows raise but there's something in the way he doesn't look surprised that ignites a fury in me so instantaneous it nearly blinds me.
“You knew.” It comes out quiet. Lethal.
“I suspected.” He holds his ground. “There's a difference.”
“You didn't think to tell me?” The roar comes from somewhere I don't usually let out in public.
“Fuck you, X.” He doesn't back down, he never backs down, injured or otherwise, and right now I hate him for it.
“I told you to stop hiding. I told you to say it.
I begged you to say it. I warned you over and over and you chose to be the cold, closed-off bastard you've always been and shut her out.” His voice is rising to match mine, raw at the edges in a way Cas rarely allows.
“What did you want her to do? Stay here and be kept at arm's length for the rest of her life because you're too terrified to admit you're in love with her?”
I grip the front of his shirt and press my forehead against his. Hard. “Find her,” I order.
“No.”
The single syllable lands like a match hitting gasoline. I go very, very still, the kind of still that is infinitely more dangerous than rage.
“Come again?”
He shoves me off him, stumbling back slightly on his moonboot, and stabs a hand through his hair. When he looks at me there's no apology in his eyes. Just honesty, brutal and unflinching.
“You are my brother in every sense of the word.” His voice drops.
“But I won't help you hurt her anymore.” The words hit somewhere undefended.
“I'll admit months ago I wanted her broken. I wanted you to use her and discard her and I pushed for it. But not anymore. She is innocent, Xaden. She is innocent and she is running from something that should have been a reason to stay.” He exhales hard.
“You want to hunt her down and drag her back?
That's your choice. But I'm not helping you do it.”
“Fuck. You. Vought.”
I turn and head for my car. I can hear him following, the uneven rhythm of the moonboot on asphalt and I grit my teeth hard enough to ache. When I get behind the wheel he gets in beside me without an invitation, without hesitation, without a single shred of self-preservation.
“Get out.”
“Stop pushing everyone away,” He fires back without missing a beat. “You want her back? Then stop running from anyone who gives a shit about you.”
“I don't have time—”
“Go to the ring.”
“I'm not—”
“Carnage is there.”
Silence.
Complete, absolute silence.
“That cunt,” I say slowly, “is at my ring.”
Cas holds my gaze, steady and deliberate. “He was supposed to leave two days ago according to Harper.”
“Then why is he still in my town?”
“She said he won't leave until he talks to you.”
I don't remember the drive. One moment I'm in the parking lot and the next I'm pulling up outside the ring.
The familiar smell of sweat, chalk and old leather hit me the second I push through the door.
The place is mostly empty at this hour, just a couple of guys on the bags who take one look at my face and find somewhere else to be.
And there, standing in the center of the ring with his hands already wrapped, is Carnage De Santis.
He's not sparring. He's not training. He's just standing there, waiting, like he knew exactly when I'd arrive. Like he's been expecting this since the moment he decided to stay.
I don't say a word. I shrug off my jacket, pull my shirt over my head and grab the wraps from the table by the ropes.
My hands move with the automatic precision of muscle memory as I wind the fabric around my knuckles tight, deliberate, the way you wrap when you're planning to actually hurt someone.
Cas lowers himself onto the bench by the wall. He doesn't try to stop me.
I climb through the ropes.
Carnage watches me approach with dark, unreadable eyes. He rolls his neck slowly, loosens his shoulders. He's built like a man who's had violence done to him and learned to return it with interest, and under any other circumstance I might respect it.
Right now I just want to hit something.
“You've got a lot of nerve,” I say quietly, “staying in my town.”
“Someone had to.” His voice is even. Infuriatingly calm.
I throw the first punch without warning, no circling, no posturing, just a straight right hook that he slips past with the reflexes of someone who's been in enough rings to see it coming. He counters with a left hook that grazes my jaw and sends a jolt of white heat through my skull.
Good.
Good. I need to feel something other than this.
We fall into a rhythm with no rules, no rounds, just two men who both love the same woman, in entirely different ways, taking it out on each other's flesh.
He's good. Better than I expected. He moves with the kind of controlled aggression that comes from discipline rather than anger, and it pisses me off because I want him sloppy.
I want him emotional. I want someone to match the chaos currently tearing through my chest.
I land a body shot that folds him slightly. He comes back up and cracks me across the cheekbone hard enough that my vision whites out for a split second.
“She cried.” He says it between breaths, matter of fact, like he's reporting the weather. “In the car on the way to the airport. Thought no one could see her.” Another exchange. I duck, he catches my shoulder. “She had her hand on her stomach the whole time.”
“Shut up.” I drive forward, backing him into the ropes.
“She looked down that street for you.” He takes the hits without going down, absorbing them with a grit that infuriates me. “Right up until she got in the car, she was still hoping.”
“I said shut up.” My voice fractures slightly on the last word and I hate myself for it.
He grabs my arm mid-swing and uses the momentum to throw me back. I stumble, reset, breathe.
“You absolute fucking coward.” He's breathing harder now, a cut opening above his brow, blood running into his eye. “Everything she survived. Everything she forgave you for. And you couldn't give her three words.”
I charge. We grapple, crash into the ropes together, both of us breathing ragged and burning.
“You don't know anything about what's between us,” I snarl.
“I know she loves you.” He shoves me back and squares up again, his chest heaving.
“I know it the way you know something that's true all the way to the bone.
Not because she told me, but because of the way she didn't talk about you.
The way she'd go quiet. The way she'd look at nothing and be somewhere else entirely.” He spits blood to the side.
“She loves you, Devlin. And she left anyway because loving you wasn't enough to save her.”
The fight goes out of me.
Not all at once, but gradually, like air leaving a punctured tire. I'm still standing, still breathing hard, hands still up, but something has gone slack behind my eyes.
We stand there in the center of the ring both bleeding, both wrecked and the silence is different from the silence of before. This one isn't hostile. It's just exhausted. Two men who've beaten the truth into each other until it finally landed.
Carn reaches into the waistband of his shorts and produces an envelope, slightly bent now, marked with the kind of deliberate handwriting I'd recognize anywhere.
He holds it out.
“That's for Cas,” he says quietly. “She asked me to make sure he got it. Wouldn't trust the mail.”
I stare at it for a long moment before I take it.
Carn leans back against the ropes, pressing the back of his wrapped hand against the cut above his brow. His breathing is evening out. When he speaks again his voice is low and without performance.
“She named him,” he says. “Cas. Named him as head of her family.”
Everything goes very still.
“She did what?”
“It's all in there.” He nods toward the envelope.
“Cas inherits the leadership of the cartel but there's a condition. He has to finish school first. Alex runs everything in the interim.” He pauses, letting that land.
“She thought it through, Xaden. Every angle.
Alex won't move against Cas, not ever. And Cas won't move against you.” His eyes meet mine and hold them.
“Three towns. No war. Balanced like a tripod, pull one leg and the whole thing falls, so no one pulls.” A beat.
“She built you a peace you didn't even ask for, on her way out the door, because even leaving she was still trying to protect you.”
The breath leaves my body completely.
I stand there in the middle of my ring, bleeding and bruised, an envelope in my hand, addressed in her writing and feel the full, staggering weight of what she did.
She didn't just leave. She arranged things.
She thought about the towns, about the power structures, about the three-way balance that would keep everyone she loved alive, and she built it all on her way out the door like a final act of care from someone who never stopped caring even when she should have.
She gave Cas a future.
She gave the towns peace.
She gave me nothing to fight against.
Cas appears at the edge of the ring. He's been listening, I knew he would be. He looks at the envelope in my hand and something crosses his face that I rarely see there.
I climb through the ropes and hold it out to him.
He takes it carefully, turning it over. His jaw works.
“She didn't have to do this.” His voice is rough.
“No,” I agree. “She didn't.”
Carn drops down from the ring and lands beside us, rolling his neck, wiping blood from his face with the back of his hand. He looks between us both, the three of us standing there in the empty gym, connected by a woman who isn't here and then he looks at me directly.
“She's not gone because she stopped loving you.” His voice is quiet and final, like the closing of a door.
“She's gone because she loves herself enough now to know she deserves more than half of you.” He holds my gaze without blinking.
“The question is whether you're capable of giving her the rest.”
He doesn't wait for an answer.
He picks up his bag, nods once at Cas, and walks toward the exit. At the door he pauses without turning around.
“She's safe.” It comes out rough, like the words cost him something. “That's all I'll give you. She's safe, and she's okay, and she's going to be alright.” A beat. “The rest is yours to figure out.”
The door swings shut behind him.
Cas and I stand in the empty gym, the envelope between us, and say nothing for a long time.
Then Cas looks down at his name written in her handwriting, and something in his expression breaks quietly and privately, the way grief does when it finally finds a place to land.
“She always thought about everyone else.” He says it mostly to himself.
“Yeah.” My voice comes out rough. “She did.”
I look at my hands wrapped and bloodied, aching from the fight and think about a beach, and tail lights, and a woman who built a peace offering out of her own departure.
She loves you.
She left anyway.
The question is whether you're capable of giving her the rest.
I close my hands into fists at my sides.
And for the first time since I watched her walk away, I know exactly what I have to do.