Go.
Survive.
Breathe.
“Get back here, Kendra!” Gideon yelled, the sound like the crack of a volcanic eruption.
She heard him but didn’t react; her body moved, survival mode overwhelming a system that once automatically did as he commanded.
When she reached the front door, freedom just on the other side, she ignored the man bellowing her name, turned the knob, opened the door, and left.
Chapter Six
The shrill ringing of his cell phone from atop his home office desk made him drag his gaze from the bustling, snow-cloaked city sprawled out beneath the windows of his palatial penthouse, one hundred stories into the sky.
He hadn’t slept a moment the night before, and not just because he’d refused to climb into a bed that still smelled of his wife.
Sugar cookies, warmth, goodness, woman…his.
She smelled likehis…but was that even true anymore?
His thoughts still raced, still screamed at him, repeating, in shrieking wails, the words he’d said to her. Words that had burned like acid on the way out. Words that were malicious, manic, and utterly wrong.
So fucking wrong.
And he couldn’t put the blame on anyone but himself.
He’d taken the rage that had been boiling in his gut for the last two days, and he’d spewed it all over his soft, kind, innocent wife—a woman who’d been cooking him dinner. A woman who’d seen him at his worst in that moment and offered him a glass of wine, a gentle smile, and the comfort of her sweet spirit.
And he’d shit all over it, letting the Mancini’s and their bullshit drive his actions.
Walking into the warm, welcoming penthouse apartment, a home he’d never quite felt he’d deserved, and seeing the Christmas decorations—bright, cheery, all Kendra—and then hearing her in the kitchen, so fucking eager and happy to serve him, to please him, to soothe him—it had been too much for a man who’d spent decades holding up a steel wall between him and anything that could make him weak.
Kendra made him weak. Left him exposed to enemy eyes. Made him susceptible to enemy plots. She was his vulnerability, the only fucking thing in his life he couldn’t completely defend against. She was the soft pieces of him, the sensitive, naked, raw parts of him that he’d spent years telling himself didn’t exist. That he could hide it so well no one would ever find it—not even his brothers, not even Kendra.
But he hadn’t hidden it as well as he thought.
Like that one tiny area on the belly of the dragon without the scale—too small to see, but it only took one person, armed with a bow and arrow, a single shot to bring the great, fire-breathing beast down.
And fucking Adolfo Mancini had skillfully spotted that crack in Gideon’s otherwise impenetrable armor, and he’d struck a blow straight to Gideon’s core.
And then Gideon had struck out at the one thing he’d been so desperate to protect all along.
Even now, his beast was snarling, snapping, then whimpering, whining—missing her, his peace, his home, his kind and beautiful master.
Madness—absolute madness….
It was impossible to feel those things for someone he only ever meant for his convenience.
“…no one fucking wants you, you little shit…that’s why your mama left….”His father’s voice, slurred and malicious, sounded in his head.
Nathaniel Maddox was a real piece of work—a philanderer, a gambler, an alcoholic, a drug addict, a terrible husband, and an even worse father—nothing like his own father, Henry Maddox, who’d had the foresight to leave most of his fortune to his four grandsons.
That money had meant the difference between him and his brothers being homeless after his father drank and snorted and whored away his own inheritance, nearly bankrupting Maddox Enterprises before Gideon could take over.
He’d been terrified, inexperienced, vulnerable, and dealing with the abandonment of both his parents—and that’s when Adolfo Mancini had found him, sinking his claws into him.
And that fucker just drew blood….
