CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CASH
By the time we arrive home, the sun is high in the sky, and Sylvie is resigned. She slept from takeoff until the wheels touched down. She hasn’t spoken a word since we boarded. I’m at a loss for how to approach this.
All I could think during the flight was that she’d always picked jocks, men who at least appeared to be on the up-and-up. I can’t offer her that. There isn’t a cell in my being willing to let her go, and yet I’m questioning whether every fear I ever had about being in a relationship was accurate.
My father wasn’t exactly the definition of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
He was more like a Siberian tiger—charismatic, impossible not to notice, and dangerously good-looking.
He commanded any room he walked into and could summon ladies to him with a mere wink.
Maybe they sensed it, but ultimately, they ignored that he was a predator.
He offered them the world, took everything he wanted from them, and shred them to pieces.
He ran the same resort my brothers and I run, associated with the same crooked circles we do, and yet when I compare Axel to him, it’s like a different species.
Hayden Noire stabbed anyone within reach in the back.
He didn’t even value his own family. And for years, when I was in my teens and twenties, women who’d known him would say that Maddox looked like him, but I had his charm and his essence.
The thought of being anything like him made my skin crawl. Still does. So, I decided I’d be the kind of guy who promised nothing, ensured that anyone I was with wanted a no-strings tryst as much as I did, and parted ways quickly so there was no confusion, no judgment, and no chance of attachment.
It always worked. Not that there wasn’t an occasional unhappy-clinger debacle, but for the most part, I didn’t have to explain my lifestyle or my choices or anything else. And no one looked at me like I was a monster.
Until her.
As soon as we walk into the penthouse, Tessa and Zara usher Sylvie upstairs, and she doesn’t even spare me a glance.
My brothers were already informed about how last night had gone, so none of them are floored by her demeanor.
Ryker kicks his chin toward the conference room, urging me to join them there, so we all trek down the hall, get ourselves some drinks, and take our seats.
Axel cocks his head at my glass. “It’s a whiskey kind of morning?”
It’s too fucking early for his fatherly admonishment.
I guess I’m the only one who didn’t go with coffee, but that wouldn’t cut it. “Probably gonna be a whiskey afternoon and evening too.”
“York sent a report that everything had gone smoothly.” Axel stares at me from his head-of-the-table seat with concern. “We haven’t gotten an ID from the pictures you took of the guys, but you said Sylvie got what she needed. Is this about what happened or about the two of you?”
“Both. I …” As if to emphasize how off I am, I finish my whiskey, grab the bottle from the bar, sit back down, and pour myself another. “I’m fucking everything up, and … I can’t even try to pull back on who I am because she’s in real trouble.”
“She is,” he confirms, his tone teetering on the ominous edge of warning. “More than she can fathom.”
That has my gaze snapping from the amber liquid, which isn’t solving a goddamn thing, to him. “Did you figure out what she’s stealing?”
“Not exactly.” He sighs, clearly in his head about what he should share. “But it involves Kratos one way or another. I’ve got some things in the works that will hopefully lend clarity.”
That was the theory he had after meeting with Sylvie the other day, the reason we decided to plan for every contingency.
Better to let our contacts know we might need them and never call in the favor than find ourselves in a bind and scrambling.
It was a smart move, but it was based on a hunch.
This sounds like it surpasses that, and I don’t know nearly as much as I need to.
I keep my eyes firmly latched to his so he doesn’t attempt to sugarcoat anything. “But we don’t know who runs this group or who’s a part of it?”
He casually sips his coffee, probably to mask how catastrophic this is. “I have leads.”
“Leads,” I mock. “And those are the people after Rena’s family?”
Maddox swings his balisong knife around, his gray eyes burning into me, while Axel answers, “Yes.”
My sister and her family have been mixed up in some twisted shit.
I don’t know all the details because it involves KORT, and Axel—as one of the five chairs who runs it—prefers that I have as little involvement with them as possible.
Jax is the only one in the room who has real access to their inner workings, and that’s complicated enough.
What I do know is that there have been various threats against Rena and her family, and they still haven’t identified who’s behind them.
“Well, that’s fucking fantastic.” I smack the table, unable to take one more thing today. “When we explain it to Sylvie, she’s going to view our involvement as self-serving.”
“She should.” Jax stalls there, waiting until my attention snaps to him. “It is self-serving. For good reasons—our need to protect Sylvie and get her through this and our need to protect Rena and her family.”
I pull out my deck of cards, sliding them between my fingers as I mull that over. “If she wasn’t ready to bolt, that would be fine. She’s levelheaded, strategic, and loyal, so she’d get it.”
“But?” Ryker presses, that one poignant word landing like a sack of wet cement.
In this moment, I envy him. I sprint from feeling anything heavy like my soul is on fire, and he embraces it. I always viewed his intensity as binding. Now I see how freeing it must be.
“But,” I begin, still playing with my deck—fanning, cutting, cascading—“she looked at me tonight like I was the devil. She said she couldn’t be with someone who handled those situations with such ease, and then I …
I compared her to a Van Gogh and said I was keeping her, but I essentially told her she was my captive.
” I let that hang in the air with the shuffling din of my cards before adding, “I feel like Dad.”
“In what fucking world?” Maddox snipes.
He’s been quietly taking me in this entire time because more than anyone, he knows what it looks like on the rare occasion that I’m defeated.
I pocket my cards, push my drink away, and scrub my hands over my face, trying to reconcile all the incongruent thoughts in my head before I just lay it all out.
“I have zero qualms about locking her down here, whether she fucking likes it or not, and I think I’ve fallen deep into obsessive territory because I’m fully prepared to take out as many motherfuckers as necessary to keep her safe.
And that’s probably a lot since we’re talking about a cabal that rivals KORT and has been harassing Rena’s family for years. So, she’ll be stuck with a psychopath.”
“Because you want to protect her,” Ryker counters, always able to justify anything. “Dad never cared about anyone other than himself.”
“I get that. I hear it. But the night of her birthday, she looked at me like …” I can’t find the words, but they understand what I’m not saying. That for a minute, in her eyes, I was all I needed to fucking be. “And after I took those assholes out, she viewed me …”
Like him.
“Doubt that.” Maddox slides his coffee toward me in a subtle demand for me to pull my shit together. “She’s probably in shock. It’s a don’t-shoot-the-messenger kind of situation.” He swats at the air when I raise a brow. “Disregard the pun.”
“Sure, but—”
“Definitely shock,” Jax cuts me off, plucking a joint out of his pocket and lighting up, without giving a fuck about the glowers from the eldest two, and taking his good ol’ time expanding on his interruption.
“This night was her personal hell. Everything was burning down around her. And you were the face”—he sucks in a hit, holding it either for emphasis or to screw with me—“of both salvation and inferno. Her stress had her focusing on the flames, but she knows you were the one who actually pulled her from the fire.”
A spot behind my left eye throbs, as if my brain has simply had it. I guzzle Maddox’s leftover coffee, hoping the shot of caffeine will lend clarity, and glare at Jax because I hate it when his rambling makes sense. “Deep, man.”
“They’re right.” Axel spins roulette on his watch, his sapphire eyes rising to mine when the ball lands. “And you were right to tell her you wouldn’t let her go.”
That perspective from him is astonishing. He’s always been so adamant that we shouldn’t force things, only choosing people who would choose us back. His insight and approval mean everything. And yet there’s still something unsettled in my gut.
They want to use her.
“Why is that, Papa Axe?”
He doesn’t hesitate to tell it like it is, though he’s still cryptic. “She’s the answer.”
“For me?” I challenge, standing to get the hell out of here. “Or for you?”
But it isn’t Axel who answers. It’s Jax.
“For everything.”
Sylvie hasn’t left my room, not even for the girls. They’ve made sure she’s eating since I’ve been trying to give her space. I do intend to sleep beside her tonight, whether she wants me there or not.
I’ve spent the majority of the day oscillating between wanting to take her and flee and needing to tell her how entangled she is with something important to my family.
But at the root of both desires is this craving for her to assure me she sees more than one part of me, that there’s something here.