Page 98 of Pucked Around and Found Out

I don't trust him. I don't forgive him.

But I know that the war I've been fighting in the dark just found its first real light.

And I am done being predictable.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

XADEN

Hiding isn't in my nature.

I knew she would go after him.

The second she left that rink, I gave her a head start, then followed. Not because I needed the time. Because I wanted her to feel like she had it. I wanted her walking into that building believing she had the upper hand, believing she was one step ahead of me.

She wasn't.

She never has been.

I want to see the betrayal on her face when she comes out. I need to see it. I have to look into those blue eyes and see that she chose that conniving son of a bitch over me. That after everything—-the warehouse, the warehouse floor, the scalpel I couldn't drive home—-she still chose the brother who let her rot in Walter House over the man she claimed to love.

I need her to have done that.

I need something to be furious about that doesn't have her name all over it.

Taking out the soft bastards manning the perimeter was almost insulting. None of them are trained. They carry guns like accessories and throw their weight around because Kellar's name has always done the heavy lifting for them. Even without weapons my men can hold their own in a fist fight. The whole operation took four minutes.

I'm leaning against their SUV with my arms crossed over my chest. When it's done, Ken, Gauge and Johnson have all of Masen's pathetic men on their knees in the gravel in front of me, hands behind their heads, mouths shut because they are smart enough to understand what happens if they aren't.

This is me flexing.

This is me making a point to every man in a ten mile radius that I don't care how many of them there are or how long they've been loyal to the Kellar name, I am the Don of Stormsend and Somerset and I am not a man you place hurdles in front of. I will break through every single one until I get what I came for.

And what I came for is Masen Kellar.

I count the seconds.

That's what I do when the thing I'm trying not to feel gets too close to the surface, I count. I give my mind something mechanical to hold so the dark thing inside me stays on its leash. I've been counting since we pulled off the road three miles back and cut the lights. Since I pulled up to the building on my phone and I studied every exit without saying her name once.

I hear her before I see her.

That's how it always is with Toren Kellar.

I can walk into a room of a hundred people and know within seconds exactly where she is. It isn't something I can explain and I have long since stopped trying. It's like a frequency she occupies in my chest, a rubber band that pulls taut and leads me directly to her whether I want it to or not. Whether I'm trying or not. Whether it suits me or destroys everything I'm trying to build.

It's always her.

The doors open.

She steps outside and her eyes move immediately, not scanning the perimeter the way a trained person would, not clocking my men or the kneeling row of Masen's guards first.

She looks for me.

Directly. Deliberately. Like she already knew I'd be here and she's been deciding what her face will do when she finds me.

When her eyes lock onto mine something shifts in them.

I watch it happen. I catalog it the way I catalog everything about her because I am apparently incapable of not doing that, incapable of letting a single detail of Toren Kellar pass through my field of vision without filing it somewhere permanent.