Page 7 of Pucked Around and Found Out

Finger after finger falls to the floor with wet, sickening thuds.

I stopped counting after the fourth finger.

Not because I went numb. I tried that, tried the old trick of building a wall between what my eyes were seeing and whatever lived behind my sternum. It didn't work. The wall kept collapsing. I'd get it halfway up and then the sound would come again, that wet architectural crack of bone giving way to steel, and it would fall and I'd be back in my body, back in this chair, back in the precise center of the worst thing I have ever witnessed.

Meekan is barely recognizable.

I think about Kenna.

I don't mean to. I try not to because I know that if I let myself go there—if I let myself look at what is left of her brother and think about what she would say, what her face would do, whether she would hold my hand or tell me to look away. I will break completely. And I am not allowed to break completely. I told myself that on the drive here. I told myself that when Xaden handcuffed me to this chair. I have been telling myself that on a loop for the past forty minutes and it is getting harder to believe.

KennaDee used to call Meekan the only Kellar worth knowing.

She meant my family, not his. She meant that her brother, her difficult, complicated, grief-shredded brother was a better man than Steven or Masen had ever been to me. And she wasn't wrong. Meekan Di-Leo was not a good man, I understand that clearly now, but he was someone's person. He was someone's whole world once. He was Kenna's brother before he was Fiona Williams' informant and before he was my father's corrupt insurance policy and before he was the man strapped to a chair in this warehouse.

I watch Xaden take the bolt cutters from Caspian.

I watch Cas's face over Xaden's shoulder. He isn't enjoying this. That matters to me more than I expected it to. Whatever Caspian Vought is and he is complicated, he is compromised, he is someone I am going to have to reckon with, he is not this. The tightness around his jaw, the way his eyes keep sliding sideways and then snapping back like he's forcing himself to witness what he helped create, tells me that the man inside the betrayal is still in there somewhere, still recoiling from the thing he set in motion.

The screaming has stopped.

That's worse.

When Meekan was screaming there was something human in the room. Now there is just the soft wet sound of Xaden working and the particular quality of silence that follows agony when the body has simply run out of ways to express it.

My father is crying.

Steven Kellar, who built an empire on ruthlessness, who sat across boardroom tables and dismantled lives with the efficiency of a man taking apart machinery, is crying. Silent tears tracking through the grime on his face, eyes fixed on what is happening to the man his money bought. I look at him and feel nothing that resembles pity. I have tried pity on and off for my entire life where my father is concerned and it never fits right. It costs too much. It asks me to carry something that was never mine to carry.

What I feel instead is something quieter and more final.

Grief.

Not for him. Not for Meekan. For the girl I used to be, the one who sat at this man's dinner table and believed the version of the world he sold her. The one who thought Somerset was the good side of the river. The one who looked at her father and saw ambition instead of corruption, who looked at her brother and saw a protector instead of a coward waiting to use her.

That girl is gone.

I know it in the same way I know the warehouse is cold and the chair is hard and my wrists hurt where the handcuffs have been biting for the past hour. Not as a dramatic realization. Just as a fact. The girl who arrived back in Somerset believing she could fight a war with love and right intentions is gone, and whoever is sitting in this chair watching a man be dismantled in her name is someone else.

I'm not sure yet if that's better or worse.

Both, I think.

It’s definitely both.

I breathe.

In. Out.

I keep my eyes open.

I don't look away.

CHAPTER FOUR

XADEN

His screams soothe the beast inside me.