Chapter Nineteen
XADEN
The shocked look on her face was fucking priceless. She can try and deny it all she wants but I know Meekan has a hard on for her and she is just too fucking stupid to see it. The sight of her is making me sick. She hasn’t uttered a word since I told her that she is what Meekan wants.
That slimy fuck is as dirty as they come.
He’s being paid off and he’s the one who buried the news of the crash and made sure no one looked into it.
The stupid bitch thought her best friend's brother was here to save her. Meekan was just using her to get intel on Cas and I, he’s in Steven’s pocket and being paid well by the senator.
When we pull off the main road, at her direction, I sit up straighter and look around.
There is nothing, no signs pointing to Walter House.
Just an endless stretch of nothingness as we drive down a deserted road.
The road is swallowed by a forest so dense that sunlight hasn't touched the ground beneath it in years.
The road that leads to it was deliberately left to decay.
Cracked asphalt is swallowed by creeping roots, with the tree line closing in on both sides like a slow, patient trap.
Those who find this place clearly don’t do it by choice.
We continue down this dark, haunted road for twenty minutes before it finally comes into view and I’m rendered fucking speechless at the sight.
I'd heard the name Walter House spoken in hushed tones. But nothing could have prepared me for the sight of it.
The car crests the hill and there it is. I feel something ignite in my chest the moment my eyes land on it. A cold, slow-burning fury that starts deep in my gut and rises like smoke.
It's worse than I imagined.
The building squats against the gray sky like something that was never meant to be built.
It’s all blackened stone and jagged spires, iron-barred windows staring outward like the hollow eyes of something long dead.
The grounds around it are a wasteland. Dead grass.
Skeletal trees that lean inward as though even they are trying to look away.
A rusted iron fence runs the perimeter, and beyond it, nothing.
Just flat, empty land stretching in every direction, as deliberate and cruel as everything else about this place.
He chose this on purpose. The thought hits me like a fist. Every detail—the isolation, the decay, the sheer impenetrable ugliness of it—was a choice. A message. A declaration that whatever happened inside these walls was never meant to be found.
I press my jaw tight and say nothing.
The gate hangs open as we pull through and the gravel crunches under the tires like broken teeth.
Up close, the building is even worse. The stonework is black with rot, the gothic archways over the entrance looming like the open mouth of something waiting to swallow you whole.
Thick ivy has strangled the eastern wing entirely.
One of the upper windows is shattered, its jagged edges catching the pale moonlight like a sneer.
My hands are balled into fists on my knees and I don't remember making them that way.
I think about the people inside. The ones who were driven down this same road in the back of unmarked vehicles, sedated, with no idea where they were being taken.
The ones who looked up at this building not with fury like mine, but with despair.
Who saw these walls close around them and understood, with horrible clarity, that no one was coming.
The anger shifts into something heavier. Something colder.
I've taken down operations before. Dismantled things that powerful men built and thought were permanent. But sitting here, looking up at Walter House with its dead windows and its rotting spires, I feel something I don't often allow myself.
I feel it personally.
He built a place designed to make people disappear.
I step out of the car after the others. The air here is wrong, damp and stale, carrying something beneath it that has no clean name. I tilt my head back and look up at the full height of the building, letting myself take in every ugly, deliberate inch of it.
Then I exhale slowly through my nose and crack my neck side to side.
I fucking found it.
I found his trump card and I plan to burn this fucking place to the ground.
I’m a cold, heartless son of a bitch but not even I, Xaden Devlin, would steal kids from their bed in the dead of the night and lock them away in this godforsaken fucking hole.
A small whine comes from beside me. I look over at Toren to see her gazing up at the building with such malice that it almost brings a smile to my face… almost.
She spent a year of her life in this place.
Her own father hid her away so his precious son’s reputation wouldn’t be tarnished.
Steven Kellar could never allow his heir to be broadcasted as a meme.
Meekan may have stopped the crash from being investigated, but he couldn’t stop teenagers from using the power of social media to label her as a Toren.
Carnage moves to her other side and ignores the scathing look I shoot at him when he places his hand on her shoulder.
I spot his three brothers ruffling through the trunk and loading their weapons.
Toren jolts in surprise at his touch and turns her head to look up at him.
I hate that I can no longer see the tormented look in her eyes.
“Your nightmare has ended, the horrors of your past can no longer taunt you. You survived. The ghosts inside there can’t haunt you if you don’t allow it.
Be the flame, not the match. Be the cause of destruction, not the start of it.
Tear this place down and grant those who are trapped freedom, and redemption will be yours to claim.
Fear isn’t a weakness, it can be a strength if you allow it.
Embrace it and channel it, Tor. Make it your bitch and reign hell down on this place and show your piece of shit family that you will be their nightmare, you will be their reckoning and nothing and…
” he flicks his gaze to mine as he continues, “No one will stop you.” I bare my teeth at the smug son of a bitch.
She shucks his hand off her shoulder, then presses into the cocksucker and wraps her arms around his waist, hugging him.
A growl slips free of me and I see her tense, but she doesn’t pull back when he encircles his arms around her.
The smug smirk on his face has me itching to retrieve my switch blade and slice his duck lips right off his hideous fucking face, but I manage to keep myself in check when I hear the sound of cars approaching.
“I’ll make them all see me. I’ll show them who I am through my actions, not my words. My plans haven’t changed, Carn. I still want the same thing,” she utters. He pulls back and stares down at her for a minute, then nods and moves to join his brothers.
I push forward until my chest is plastered against her back. I love the soft mewl that escapes and the way she clenches her fists at her sides, warring against her body’s need to melt into me. She stiffens her spine and tries to appear unaffected by my mere presence.
I dip down and brush the strands of her hair aside and ghost my lips over the shell of her ear as I say, “If those plans involve trying to fuck me over, think again, Tink. I will slaughter you before you ever get the chance.”
She whirls around and stares at me with the heat of the sun burning in her eyes.
Try as she might to hate me, she can’t. The Princess of Somerset has fallen for the Devil of Stormsend.
I’ve wormed myself under her skin, inside her mind and body and cemented my place inside her.
Our fathers thought women were the better rulers because they can’t be led by their cocks, but those fucking fools were wrong.
The way to rule a woman is through her heart and I fucking rule Toren Kellar.
“You’ve had ample chances to kill me and make true on your promise.
” Her tone is filled with iron and I relish the challenge in her fucking eyes, it has the beast inside me roaring.
“Deny it all you want, Xaden, but you don’t want to kill me.
” I snarl and close the sliver of space between us, forcing her to crane her neck back to maintain eye contact.
I grip the back of her neck in a punishing hold that has her wincing but she doesn’t fight to get free.
“You may choose to deny yourself the truth, but when the time finally comes after you have eliminated my father and brother and it’s my turn, you won’t be able to do it. ”
I bend down until we are eye level and ignore the lights of the approaching cars.
I stare into her blue eyes. “Half of what you hear and all of what you see, Tink. What do you see when you look into my eyes?” I push on, not allowing her to answer.
“Can you see the hate? What about disgust?” She doesn’t shy away.
“Do you see the hunger for your blood? I told you I wanted to carve the flesh from your bones and hold your heart in the palm of my hand as it beats for the last time, then slice your lips from your face and hang them above my bed.” I wrap my other arm around her waist and pull her flush against me as I ghost my lips over hers.
“I crave your pain, your hurt, your fall from grace, and long for the day that I get to taste your blood on my tongue and know I was the one who destroyed the Princess of Somerset.”