Page 1 of Pucked Around and Found Out

CHAPTER ONE

XADEN

There is something devastatingly beautiful about looking death in the eyes.

Most men break before I even touch them. They beg. They weep. They lose control of their bodies just from the weight of my gaze settling on them, because they know. The moment they see my face, they understand that whatever story they were living has reached its final page, and I am the one holding the pen.

That kind of power doesn't just intoxicate.

It becomes you.

It rewires something fundamental. You stop being a man and become something older, something that has no clean name. You are the last thing they see. The last voice they hear. You are the answer to every prayer they ever sent skyward because whatever god they were petitioning turned his back. You are their judge. Their jury. Their executioner. Their ending.

No drug touches it. Nothing you can inject or inhale or swallow comes close to the clarity of holding someone's fate in your hands and deciding, with absolute calm, what to do with it.

I have waited a long time for this specific clarity.

Months of listening. Of sitting in the dark with her voice in my ear, her schemes, her plans, her carefully calculated moves against me and saying nothing. Doing nothing. Letting her believe she was building something when she was only ever walking into what I'd already built around her. When Cas came to me with his plan the day she arrived I wanted to break his jaw for suggesting I needed patience. I was wrong. He could see the shape of it when all I could see was red.

I'm grateful now.

She wasn't driving that night. She wants that fact to matter. It doesn't. She was in that car. She was there, and that’s all that matters.

Emery. Neave. Miles.

Emery who lit something in me I thought I was born without. Neave who could talk me back from the edge when I was ready to go over it. Miles who looked at the Cosa Nostra and saw a cage, who looked at me and saw something worth more than a foot soldier. He's in the ground now and I'm the Don, and I hope wherever he is he's made his peace with the irony.

Without bugging her phone she would have had everything. The upper hand. The element of surprise. Everything I wasn’t willing to give her.

Frank and Kellan are already gone. That just leaves Steven, Meekan, Masen and her. After tonight the weight that has been sitting on my chest since that accident will finally have somewhere to go. Their ghosts will find their rest.

So will I.

The sound of retching pulls me out of my head.

“Stop the car.” Her voice is a rasp, barely holding itself together.

I don't move. I shake my head at Chance.

“Xaden,” Cas's voice sharpens to something that means business, “stop the fucking car before she decorates my lap.”

I grit my teeth and nod. Chance pulls off the road and Carlos is out before the vehicle stops moving. She stumbles after him and makes it to the bank just in time, and I watch from where I lean against the car as she empties herself into the dark.

I don't move to help her.

I watch because I don't trust her. Because every move she makes, even this one, gets filtered through the question of whether it's calculated. Whether the vulnerability is real or whether she's waiting for the moment my guard drops.

She has faced a gun pressed to her forehead without flinching. But the thought of watching her piece of shit father and brother suffer in front of her? That will break her.

Weak ass bitch.

My mind and body are conducting their usual war. My mind wants to take her apart slowly, wants it to be surgical, deliberate and final. My body wants something entirely different, something I have spent considerable energy despising myself for. I want to consume her. To be so far inside her head and under her skin that she can't locate the boundary between herself and the destruction I intend for her. I want to be the last thing she thinks of. The thing she reaches for in the dark before she remembers what I am.

I’m rotten.

I know it.

Everyone who has ever stood close enough to me knows it, they can smell the decay. Everything good in me died with Emery, with Neave, with Miles. Whatever I might have been, whatever version of myself existed before that night is gone, buried under months of grief dressed up as strategy.