Across the terrace, in the shadows where monsters don’t bother pretending to be human, Kai mouths the words I feel more than hear:
Run.
Kai
I’m perched on the stone balustrade outside her suite, a gargoyle carved from pure, unadulterated hate. I haven’t blinked in an hour. My eyes are fixed on the glass, watching the domestic nightmare unfold through the sheer curtains.
Noah is pacing. He’s stripped off his jacket, his white shirt damp with the sweat of his own pathetic insecurity. He looks small. He looks like a man who knows he’s holding a handful of sand and watching it slip through his fingers.
And Scarlett—my Scarlett—is standing by the bed, her head bowed, looking like a fucking saint about to be fed to the lions.
“Who was it?” Noah’s voice muffled through the glass, but the vibration of his rage is clear enough. “I saw the way you looked at the trees. I saw the way you flinched when I touched you. Who the fuck is on this island, Scarlett?”
She doesn’t answer. She’s smarter than that.
“Answer me!” He lunges, his hand catching her shoulder and spinning her around.
The viper in my chest strikes. I’m already moving, my hand sliding to the hilt of the knife, my boots silent on the stone. I’m waiting for the moment. I’m waiting for the excuse to turn this villa into a goddamn abattoir.
“There’s nobody, Noah,” she says, her voice a thin blade of defiance. “You’re losing your mind.”
The sound of the slap is sharp. It’s a crack that echoes through the room and straight into my marrow.
Her head snaps to the side. She stumbles, her hip hitting the edge of the bed, and when she looks up, a thin, jagged line of red starts to leak from the corner of her mouth.
That’s it.
The world goes white. The “plan,” the “wait,” the “forty-eight hours”—it all burns to ash in the furnace of my fucking brain.
I don’t slide the glass door open. I kick the fucking thing.
The glass doesn’t just break; it disintegrates, a rain of diamond shards exploding into the room. Noah spins around, his face a mask of shock, but he’s too slow. He’s a civilian playing at being a man, and I am the thing that nightmares are made of.
I’m across the room before the first shard hits the rug.
I don’t punch him. I launch him. I grab him by the throat and the belt and hurl him toward the marble wall. His head hits the stone with a sickening, wet thud that I feel in my teeth. He slumps, his eyes rolling back, but I don’t let him fall.
I catch him by the hair, hauling him back up until his toes are barely scraping the floor, and I slam him into the wall again for the pure, unholy joy of it.
“You put your hands on her?” I roar, my voice a jagged rasp that sounds like it’s being dragged over gravel. “You touched what belongs to me with those soft, pathetic fucking fingers?”
I pull the knife. The steel is cold, a silver promise of the end. I press the edge against his throat, right over the pulse point, drawing a thin, perfect line of red that matches the one on Scarlett’s lip.
“Kai!” Scarlett screams, her voice a mix of terror and something that sounds dangerously like relief.
“Shut up,” I growl, my eyes never leaving Noah’s. He’s semiconscious, a string of drool and blood hanging from his lip. “Look at me, you piece of shit. Look at the man who’s going to haunt every second of the life you thought you were going to have.”
I press the blade harder, feeling the skin give, the metal starting to bite into his windpipe. I want to do it. I want to slide it across and watch his life spray all over the white silk sheets he was so proud of.
I want to hear him gurgle.
But killing him now is too easy. It’s too merciful.
I drop him. He hits the floor like a sack of wet laundry, crumpled and broken, his breathing a wet, rattling wheeze. I kick him in the ribs—not to kill, just to remind him that I’m the apex predator in this jungle.
I turn to Scarlett.
She’s shaking, her hand pressed to her bleeding lip, her eyes wide as they take in the wreckage of the man she was supposed to marry and the monster she actually belongs to.
