The sight soothed me, though. Just a little…not enough.
“Hi,” a feminine voice whispered from the phone clenched in my bloody and sticky hand. “Are you still there?”
I didn’t even realise I had finally picked the call.
My lips curled in a slow, dangerous grin. Did she even know that she was talking to someone else? That the man she had been giggling with over the phone was gone for days now?
My fingers tightened around the phone, wishing it was that delicate vein in her neck fluttering beneath the weight of my hold.
“Callan,” she whispered his name like a prayer, soft like a gentle kiss, and something rotten and bitter stirred in my gut. How dare she call me by another man’s name?
“Are you still there?” she asked again, her voice a plea, as though she was walking on a sliver of hope, and my reply would change something vital. “Please, answer me. Are you still–”
Her words began to blur, stretch, and warp. A high-pitched ring screeched in my head as I staggered and lost control of my limbs.
“Marshal?” A hand caught my shoulder, firm and grounding. The phone was ripped from my hand, and the sudden absence of weight in my palm infuriated me.
Peppermint and smoke filled my nostrils as Sebastian Razzo–Eugene Raskov’s grandson, born of his only daughter–held me still.
“You need to sit–”
“I am fine–” I tried to speak, but my tongue felt swollen, my mouth heavy,wrong.
Then suddenly, the momentary paralysis. For a split second, I felt nothing. I wasn’t dying, for sure. But I knew this feeling. Callan was really forcing himself out.
Fucking again.
My body tensed, every muscle locking as rage flooded my veins. My twin brother, that self-righteous bastard, was trying to smother me like I was some plague, trying to erase me because of her. That fucking girl out of nowhere.
A woman.
A fragile, little thing.
Had Callan really lost himself to some fairytale? And why was he so desperate to keep me away from this girl? Did he think that I was unworthy of her?
That alone snapped something inside me; a wire pulled too fucking tight. My fingers twitched with the phantom sensation of wrapping around someone’s throat.
I would not be discarded.
I would not be locked away like some unwanted memory, all because of a girl from nowhere. I would not be denied my right.
Since Callan was so desperate to keep this girl hidden, I would have no choice but to meet her somehow. If she was the reason my brother was trying to finally bury me, then she must be deliciously dangerous.
My vision flickered, the word tilting. My mind thrashed against the pull, against the hands dragging me into the abyss.
Not yet.
Not yet.
Not yet—
Darkness. Then silence.
No problem. I would surrender. But not for long.
I grinned into the void.
This was not over.
