Chapter Thirty-Four
XADEN
The second the final buzzer screams across the ice, the war begins.
Not the game. The real war. The one I've been building toward since the night I put a blade through my father's throat and inherited everything he left behind: the empire, the enemies, the blood debt.
Tonight, I collect.
I move fast through the locker room, ignoring the noise, the shouts, the slaps to my back from the team.
We won. Good. That's what we wanted. I drilled it into them all week and they performed, but I don't have the luxury of celebrating.
Not tonight. Not when I can feel the threads of everything I've been planning finally pulling taut.
“X.” Cas falls into step beside me before I've even cleared the hallway. He knows. He always knows when something's about to happen, it's what makes him the only man in this city I trust at my back. “You good?”
“When am I ever not?” I say without looking at him.
He snorts. “Right.”
My jaw tightens. He's been watching me all week, tracking the edge I've been walking. After what happened in my sister's room, after Meekan's boys tore through Emery's sanctuary like it was nothing, the darkness inside me stopped being something I managed and started being something I fed.
I need them.
Steven Kellar. That sanctimonious, corrupt son of a bitch who thinks a senate seat and being the head of a cartel with a golden fucking boy son makes him untouchable.
And Meekan, that dirty, bought-and-paid-for cunt, who's been sniffing around my territory, using Harper to get to me, using everything and everyone as a pawn in someone else's game.
Tonight, they run out of moves.
Cas and I break from the main corridor, cutting through the back of the rink toward the exit near the parking lot.
My men are already in position, I made sure of that before the game even started.
Everything has been mapped, every angle covered, every variable accounted for.
I was my father's greatest weapon. The difference is I aim better than he did.
The cold air hits me the second we step outside.
My breath mists in front of me. The parking lot is alive with noise, parents and students flooding out of the main entrance on the other side of the building, and I feel the familiar pull, that other thing, the thing that clouds my thinking when I don't want it to.
Her.
I shove it down. Hard.
She doesn't get to distract me tonight. Whatever she's doing, wherever she's gone after the game, it's not my fucking problem. She made her choices and I've made mine, and right now my choice is standing in a parking garage two blocks from here with nowhere left to run.
My phone vibrates. I glance at the screen.
Andrade - They're inside. Both of them.
I feel it then, that slow, boiling heat that rises up through my chest every time I'm close to something I've been starving for. I slide the phone back into my pocket and roll my neck.
“Let's go.”
The parking garage smells like concrete and petrol and the particular staleness of a place that never gets enough light. My footsteps are quiet. I've always moved quietly, Lorenzo made sure of that, one of the few useful things the bastard ever gave me.
Four of my men are already inside when Cas and I arrive. They've handled the exits, killed the cameras, and cleared the level. In the middle of the second floor, bathed in the harsh, flickering glow of a single working light, are two men.
Senator Steven Kellar. And Federal Agent Meekan Di-Leo.
I stop walking when I'm fifteen feet from them and take a moment to just look.
Steven Kellar looks older than his press photos suggest, the kind of man who has had other people doing his dirty work for so long he's started to believe his own hands are clean.
He's dressed in a suit that costs more than most men in Stormsend make in a month, and he's standing with his spine rigid and his chin lifted like a man who has never truly been afraid in his life.
That's going to change in the next few minutes.
Meekan is a different creature entirely.
I've been watching him operate for months, the smug fuck with his badge and his warrants and his self-righteous crusade against me.
He showed up at Lorenzo's house with a search warrant and tore the place apart, but when he walked into my sister's room, I felt something shift inside me that I haven't been able to put back since.
He stands a half-step behind Kellar now, shoulders tense, eyes moving.
He knows this is bad. His instincts are better than the senator's, I'll give him that.
Too bad his instincts aren't good enough.
“Xaden Devlin.” Steven's voice is smooth and measured, the voice of a man who has given a hundred speeches and shaken a thousand hands. “I have to say, I'm disappointed. I expected you to be more subtle.”
I let the silence breathe for a moment before I answer. “Subtlety is for people who need to hide what they are.” I take a slow step forward. “I don't.”
His jaw tightens. “You're making a mistake—”
“No,” I cut him off, and there is nothing warm in my voice, nothing human.
“You made a mistake. A long time ago, when you decided that my sister was an acceptable casualty. When you partnered with my father and helped him consolidate power that was never his to hold. When you sent men into my house.” I pause, letting each word land.
“When your dog,” I flick my gaze to Meekan, “put his hands on everything Emery left behind. "
Meekan's expression doesn't change but I see it, the flicker behind his eyes. Fear dressed up as defiance.
“I don't know what you think you know, son—”
“Don't.” My voice drops and the temperature in the garage seems to drop with it.
Something shifts in the air. My men go still.
Even Cas doesn't move. “Don't call me son.
Don't talk to me like I'm one of your constituents or one of your foot soldiers.
I'm not Masen. I don't need your approval.
I don't want your speeches.” I stop walking when there are only a few feet between us.
Up close, he's less impressive. Up close, he's just a man with soft hands and hard enemies.
“I want answers. And then I want you to understand exactly what is going to happen next.”
Kellar's composure is cracking at the edges. He glances at Meekan like he's expecting backup and finding none. Meekan is standing very still now, hands visible, watching me with the eyes of a man calculating odds and not liking the numbers.
“There's nothing to answer for—”
I move.
It's fast and it's deliberate, nothing like rage. Rage is messy, rage makes mistakes. This is something colder. I have his jacket in my fist before he can finish the sentence. I twist the fabric and drag him forward until there is nothing between his face and mine.
“The crash,” I say quietly. “Let's start there.”
His breath is sharp. His eyes go wide. I have him and he knows it.
“I don't know what—”
“Meekan buried it.” I don't look away from Kellar's face. “Kept it out of the news. Kept it clean. Because he’s connected to you and if that crash went public it would have dragged you into it.” I feel the tremor that runs through him and I relish it the way I relish most things, quietly, thoroughly.
“Masen was driving. Your golden boy. Your legacy. And you let a girl take the fall to protect his career and your name.”
The garage is completely silent except for the distant noise of the crowd outside, muffled and irrelevant.
“I had nothing to—”
“Don't,” I say again, softer this time, which is somehow worse. “I know everything. Every wire transfer. Every call. Every time you used Meekan to get at me and used my father's ambitions to serve your own. The Hollow Hills expansion wasn't Lorenzo's idea, was it? He was the weapon. You aimed him.”
Something breaks in Kellar's face then. Not guilt, men like him don't do guilt. It's something else. The particular horror of a man who has spent decades controlling narratives, then realizes that the narrative has slipped entirely out of his hands.
“You can't prove—”
“I don't need to prove it in a courtroom.” I release him and take a step back.
“I'm not the law. I don't play by those rules. Your pet Fed over there spent months trying to pin me inside his system.” I finally look at Meekan, and the look I give him is the kind that makes men who know what I'm capable of take a step backward.
He doesn't cower, I'll give him credit for that, but his throat moves when he swallows.
“You used Harper to get to me. Used her to get intel on my operation. And you buried what Masen did to that car to protect your business with this man.”
Meekan's voice is rough when he finally speaks. “Whatever you think you have—”
“I have everything.” My voice is calm. Absolute.
“I have records. I have paper trails you didn't know existed because my people are better than yours. I have the kind of leverage that ends careers and fills prison cells and, if I choose to use it differently—” I smile and it doesn't reach my eyes “—ends lives.”
Cas moves up to stand at my left shoulder. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't need to. His presence alone communicates everything that needs to be communicated about what happens to men who push back against me.
Steven Kellar looks at me and I watch him do the mental accounting, running through every person he's ever paid off, every favor owed, every arm he could twist, and coming up empty. It's a beautiful thing to witness. The moment a powerful man realizes he has run out of power.
“What do you want?” he asks. His voice is quieter now. The senator’s voice is gone.
“What I want,” I say slowly, “is for every single thing you've built on the backs of people you destroyed to be dismantled brick by fucking brick. I want the Kellar name to mean nothing. I want the people in Somerset and Stormsend to know exactly who you are.” I pause.
“I want you to know that after tonight, the Kellar name will no longer exist.”
He says nothing.
I nod, unsurprised. “Time to go round up the other two.”
I look at Meekan one more time. He's watching me with the expression of a man who has made a career arresting criminals and is only now understanding what it feels like to be on the other side of that particular equation.
“You came after me,” I say to him. It isn't an accusation.
It's a statement of fact, the way you'd describe weather.
“You came to my house. You tore through my sister's fucking room. And you did it while you were dirty, while you were on his payroll, while you were blackmailing people, while you were covering up crimes that got people killed.”
He straightens his jaw. “I was doing my job.”
“No,” I say. “You were doing his job. There's a difference.”
I step back and look at Cas. “Get them comfortable.”
Cas dips his head and turns to the men. The garage fills with movement, purposeful and unhurried. These two aren't going anywhere.
I move toward the exit and pause at the edge of the light.
“Senator.” I don't turn around. “You told Toren you'd bury her alongside me. That you'd take my town and hand it to your boy.” I let the words sit in the dark for a moment. "I want you to think about that while I go get Frank, your golden boy, and that darling daughter of yours I’ve been fucking.” I finally glance back at him over my shoulder, just enough to let him see the hunger for his demise in my eyes. “I’m going to cut the lips from each of your faces and add them to my treasure jar. Your daughter’s will hang framed above my bed, hers will be my greatest trophy.”
“Fuck you, Devlin,” the senator grits out.
“Fucking one Kellar is enough,” I snarl. “Who would have thought, to take down my enemy all it took was the stroke of my cock inside the princess and it was game over.”
I walk out into the cold.
Behind me, the garage is silent.
It won't stay that way for long.