Page 2 of Pucked Around and Found Out

My sister was supposed to be here. She had the mind for it. The patience. The ability to see the board and play twenty moves ahead without losing herself. She would have led this family into something worth leading.

All I know how to do is break and kill.

When Toren starts to sway, I push off the car and move toward her. Not out of concern. I have no concern for the bitch, whatever softness existed between us was a weapon I deployed and I do not regret it. I move because she is not allowed to fall. She is not allowed to do anything that isn't on my schedule tonight.

The Kellars end tonight.

All of them. This war they thought they could win comes to a close tonight, and she will be present for every second of it.

I close my hand around her arm. She flinches, a small, involuntary thing and straightens. She looks at me, and there it is. The devastation. Raw and unguarded for just a moment before she tries to bury it.

“I told you, Tink.” The words come out quiet, almost gentle, which is worse and we both know it. “Fairies die when no one believes in them.”

Something sharpens in her eyes. She pulls herself upright, pale, sweating, still half-undone from the side of the road and tries to look like someone I should be afraid of.

“I've learned I don't need anyone to believe in me. I just need to trust myself to survive.”

I look at her for a moment.

“How’s that working out for you?”

She holds my gaze. “It was working well until some bastard bugged my phone, shot my friend, raided my house and knocked me up.”

The last three words land like a lit match.

The anger that moves through me is white and structural, the kind that could bring something down. I keep my face still because I am very good at keeping my face still. Chance calls from the car and I drag her back before the anger becomes something I can't account for, shoving her into the car, I ignore her whimper as I reclaim my seat up front.

The drive to Stormsend is silent and charged and I let it be both.

I reach into the glove compartment and retrieve my greatest possession.

My treasure jar.

The sight of all the lips of my victims brings a smile to my face. I bite back a groan of satisfaction. Each one of these fuckers deserved the end they got. These lips are my reward for all the hard work I put in to get them to talk.

The ones I want most are currently attached to the cunt sitting beside my friend.

Hers I will frame. I will hang them above my bed so they are the first thing I see in the morning and the last thing I see at night. Because she was the key to all of it, the fulcrum the entire Kellar operation balanced on and her own family never recognized it. They counted her out. Underestimated her. Made her feel like nothing.

I didn't. I saw exactly what she was and I used every inch of it.

One carefully placed obsession. One slow, methodical seduction. One hand on her throat, one around her loyalty and she dismantled her own family from the inside while believing she was fighting for them.

Toren Kellar destroyed the Kellar Cartel.

She just doesn't know it yet.

When the warehouse emerges from the dark ahead the tension drains out of my shoulders like water finding its level. I breathe for what feels like the first time in months.

This is it.

Everything I built since the night of the accident, every calculated step, every night spent in the dark listening to her voice through a stolen signal, every piece of patience I forced myself to hold when all I wanted was to burn it all down immediately, it ends here. It becomes something.

It becomes theirs. Emery. Neave. Miles.

The fairy wanted to believe she could survive me. She wanted to believe she was the kind of story that gets to keep going. Her plotting and scheming was for nothing, I was ten fucking steps ahead of her the whole time.

It’s time for the fairy to watch me work, it’s time for her to see why my last name has the right letters to spell devil.