Page 157 of Pucked Around and Found Out

“I kept myself alive!” Cas roars.

“How’s that working out for you?” Alex counters.

“Fine, until you showed up.” Cas shouts. “You think you can—” He stops, jaw clenched. “You know what? Fuck this. Fuck you. We're not family. We're nothing.”

He turns to leave, awkward on the crutches.

“Cas,” Alex calls.

“Go to hell, Bitcher,” Cas throws over his shoulder, I bite back my smirk. Looks like Alex is going to have a hard time connecting with Caspian. Good, Cas needs to make him grovel. Alex knew about him for years and still never came for him.

He doesn’t leave though, just hobbles to the far side of the room and leans against the wall, glaring at Alex.

I watch him watch Alex.

That's the thing about Caspian Vought that most people miss, he thinks his face is unreadable. It isn't, not to me, not after years of standing beside him in rooms where reading people was the difference between walking out and not. He is doing the thing he always does when he's cataloguing someone, the slight forward lean, the eyes moving in that specific pattern, not threatening, not scanning for exits, just taking inventory. Learning.

Alex is working. Unhurried. Precise. The way he holds himself at the table, contained, quiet, every movement deliberate is the way Cas holds himself in a fight. The same economy. The same quality of stillness that other men mistake for coldness because it leaves no room for performance.

Cas's jaw is tight.

He sees it too.

I say nothing. It isn't my conversation to have. But I file it, the particular expression on Caspian's face as he watches the brother he won't claim, the way his eyes track and can't stop tracking, the war between fury and something that looks uncomfortably like recognition.

Whatever happens between them from here, it starts tonight in this room whether Cas is ready for it or not.

Still here. Still wanting to watch. Still family, whether he admits it or not.

Silence falls.

“Family drama aside,” Alex says, turning back to Fiona, “we have work to do.”

He pulls out a case of tools—surgical steel, pristine, and fucking beautiful. Scalpels, bone saws, pliers, needles. Everything needed to take someone apart piece by piece. I feel excited, I never fucking get like this but seeing his tools, has me wanting to beg him to let me go first and play with his toys. I make a mental note to upgrade my tool box, after seeing his I’m glad I didn’t bring any of mine.

“Where do you want to start?” Alex asks me.

I study Fiona, who's trying to scream through the gag. Her eyes are wild with terror. She knows what's coming and knows what men like us are capable of. When her eyes lock with mine, I see the shift. She knows she’s looking death in the eyes and there is no escape for her. She’ll fucking die in this place.

“Her fingers,” I say. “Then her lips. Then we see what else she's willing to give up to make it stop.”

“Solid plan,” Alex agrees.

He selects a pair of medical pliers, the kind designed for removing teeth, but they work just as well on other things.

“You want to do the honors?” he asks. “Or should I?”

“You start,” I say calmly, I don’t want to appear too eager. “I want to watch her face.”

Alex moves to stand behind Fiona, and one of his men comes forward to hold her hand flat against the armrest. She's thrashing now, trying to break free, muffled screams coming through the gag. She’s the head of the CIA, she’s used to having protection around her at all times but now, she’s all alone with no back up, no badge to hide behind and she’s all out of fucking blackmail.

“Shh,” Alex says, almost gentle. “Fighting just makes it worse.” He positions the pliers around her pinky finger at the first joint. “This is for threatening those I care about,” he snarls. “For thinking you could use the Denver Kings. For believing you were untouchable.”

He squeezes.

The sound of bone crunching is beautiful.

Fiona's scream—even muffled—is music.