Kai
I’m perched on the stone balustrade outside her suite, a gargoyle carved from pure, unadulterated hate. I haven’t blinked in an hour. My eyes are fixed on the glass, watching the domestic nightmare unfold through the sheer curtains.
Noah is pacing. He’s stripped off his jacket, his white shirt damp with the sweat of his own pathetic insecurity. He looks small. He looks like a man who knows he’s holding a handful of sand and watching it slip through his fingers.
And Scarlett—my Scarlett—is standing by the bed, her head bowed, looking like a fucking saint about to be fed to the lions.
“Who was it?” Noah’s voice muffled through the glass, but the vibration of his rage is clear enough. “I saw the way you looked at the trees. I saw the way you flinched when I touched you. Who the fuck is on this island, Scarlett?”
She doesn’t answer. She’s smarter than that.
“Answer me!” He lunges, his hand catching her shoulder and spinning her around.
The viper in my chest strikes. I’m already moving, my hand sliding to the hilt of the knife, my boots silent on the stone. I’m waiting for the moment. I’m waiting for the excuse to turn this villa into a goddamn abattoir.
“There’s nobody, Noah,” she says, her voice a thin blade of defiance. “You’re losing your mind.”
The sound of the slap is sharp. It’s a crack that echoes through the room and straight into my marrow.
Her head snaps to the side. She stumbles, her hip hitting the edge of the bed, and when she looks up, a thin, jagged line of red starts to leak from the corner of her mouth.
That’s it.
The world goes white. The “plan,” the “wait,” the “forty-eight hours”—it all burns to ash in the furnace of my fucking brain.
I don’t slide the glass door open. I kick the fucking thing.
The glass doesn’t just break; it disintegrates, a rain of diamond shards exploding into the room. Noah spins around, his face a mask of shock, but he’s too slow. He’s a civilian playing at being a man, and I am the thing that nightmares are made of.
I’m across the room before the first shard hits the rug.
I don’t punch him. I launch him. I grab him by the throat and the belt and hurl him toward the marble wall. His head hits the stone with a sickening, wet thud that I feel in my teeth. He slumps, his eyes rolling back, but I don’t let him fall.
I catch him by the hair, hauling him back up until his toes are barely scraping the floor, and I slam him into the wall again for the pure, unholy joy of it.
“You put your hands on her?” I roar, my voice a jagged rasp that sounds like it’s being dragged over gravel. “You touched what belongs to me with those soft, pathetic fucking fingers?”
I pull the knife. The steel is cold, a silver promise of the end. I press the edge against his throat, right over the pulse point, drawing a thin, perfect line of red that matches the one on Scarlett’s lip.
“Kai!” Scarlett screams, her voice a mix of terror and something that sounds dangerously like relief.
“Shut up,” I growl, my eyes never leaving Noah’s. He’s semiconscious, a string of drool and blood hanging from his lip. “Look at me, you piece of shit. Look at the man who’s going to haunt every second of the life you thought you were going to have.”
I press the blade harder, feeling the skin give, the metal starting to bite into his windpipe. I want to do it. I want to slide it across and watch his life spray all over the white silk sheets he was so proud of.
I want to hear him gurgle.
But killing him now is too easy. It’s too merciful.
I drop him. He hits the floor like a sack of wet laundry, crumpled and broken, his breathing a wet, rattling wheeze. I kick him in the ribs—not to kill, just to remind him that I’m the apex predator in this jungle.
I turn to Scarlett.
She’s shaking, her hand pressed to her bleeding lip, her eyes wide as they take in the wreckage of the man she was supposed to marry and the monster she actually belongs to.
I step over Noah’s body, my boots crunching on the broken glass, and I stop inches from her. I smell like the jungle and adrenaline; she smells like fear and jasmine.
I lift the knife.
She doesn’t flinch. She just watches as I use the tip of the blade to tilt her chin up, forcing her to look at me through the haze of her own tears. The cold steel is a reminder of the ‘K’ on her chest, a reminder that the pain I give is the only thing that’s real.
“Look at the mess you made, little sister,” I whisper, my voice dropping to a low, lethal hum.
I lean in, my lips ghosting over the blood on her mouth, tasting the copper and the salt. My thumb brushes the bruise starting to form on her cheek, and for a second, my grip on the knife trembles with the urge to go back and finish the job on the floor.
“He’s not dead,” I rasp, my eyes boring into hers, stripping her down to the soul. “But he’s done. This wedding? This life? It’s over. I’ve burned the bridge, Scarlett. There’s nowhere left to go but the dark.”
I pull the knife back, the edge trailing a thin line of red down her throat, stopping right above her heart.
“You wanted to see if I’d come back for you? You wanted to see if I’d still bleed for you?”
I grin, a jagged, terrifying expression that promises nothing but ruin.
“Now you know.”
I step back toward the shattered balcony, the wind whipping the curtains into a frenzy. I look down at the pathetic, broken heap of Noah one last time before focusing on her.
“Run, Scarlett.”
My voice is a whip, a command, a final dare.
“Run into the trees. Run until your feet bleed. Because if I catch you before the sun comes up, I’m never letting you see the light again.”
I don’t move. Neither does she.
The silence in the room is a living, breathing thing, punctuated only by the wet, rhythmic wheezing of the man bleeding out on the marble floor.
The wind howls through the jagged teeth of the shattered glass, tossing the sheer curtains around us like ghosts, but my world is reduced to the two inches between my blade and her throat.
“I said run, Scarlett.”
My voice is a low, vibrating snarl, thick with the kind of possession that doesn’t just want to hold her—it wants to consume her.
I don’t give a fuck about the villa, the guards, or the billionaire dying at my boots.
I only care about the way her chest is heaving, the way the ‘K’ I carved into her is pulsing with every panicked strike of her heart.
She doesn’t move. Her feet are rooted to the rug, her eyes locked onto mine with a terror so pure it makes my blood boil.
“What’s the matter?” I step closer, my chest grazing hers, forcing her head back further with the tip of my knife. “Are you waiting for him to get up? Are you waiting for your ‘husband’ to save you?”
I glance down at Noah’s crumpled, pathetic form. I kick his limp hand away from her hem, the sound of my heavy boot against his bone a dull, satisfying crack.
“He’s not coming for you,” I hiss, leaning down until my lips are brushed against the shell of her ear. “Nobody is. You’re in my world now, little sister. A world where the only law is what I decide to do with you.”
I slide the knife down, the cold steel tracing the line of her collarbone, lingering on the edge of her silk robe. I want to rip it off her. I want to see the brand. I want to remind her that I’ve already written my name on her soul.
“You have a ten-second head start,” I whisper, my hand coming up to tangle in her hair, jerking her head back until she has to look at the feral, unhinged light in my eyes.
“If I find you out there in the dark, Scarlett—and I will find you—I’m not bringing you back to a bed.
I’m bringing you back to a cage. I’m going to keep you so deep in the shadows you’ll forget what the sun looks like.
I’ll be the only thing you breathe. The only thing you feel. ”
I let go of her hair, the strands slipping through my fingers like silk. I step back, my eyes never leaving hers, my body coiled like a spring, ready to tear the world apart just to get to her.
“Run, little sister. Run until your lungs burn and your heart screams. Because if I catch you, I fucking keep you. Forever. No more courtrooms. No more weddings. Just you and the monster you created.”
I flick the blood from my knife onto the floor, a red splatter across the white marble.
“Ten.”
She gasps, her eyes darting to the shattered balcony.
“Nine.”
I grin, and it’s the most terrifying thing she’s ever seen. It’s the look of a man who has already won.
“Eight.”
She finally moves. She turns and bolts, her bare feet hitting the stone of the balcony before she disappears into the black, suffocating mouth of the jungle.
I stand there for a moment, listening to the sound of her frantic flight, the snap of branches, the panicked rhythm of her retreat. I look down at my hands—bloody, shaking with the kind of adrenaline that makes a man feel like a god.
“Seven,” I whisper to the empty room.
I look at Noah, his eyes half-open, staring at nothing.
“She’s never coming back for you,” I tell his dying ears. “She’s mine.”
I step over his body and walk toward the edge of the terrace, the humid air of the jungle hitting me like a physical weight. I can smell her. The jasmine, the fear, the salt.
“Six.”
The hunt is on. And I’ve never been more hungry.