I would do anything to get her back.Anything.
Because I was fucking obsessed with Evangeline Vallen. I didn’t care about what kept us apart. Her brother, my dangerous life, our families’ feud, anything.
Despite all of the rules, I wanted her. And I wouldn’t stop until I had her.
This was merely a temporary setback. I had lost my Queen, but a King could still win the game. I just had to think through a strategy—after I slept away some of the ringing in my ears. Now that I’d gone fourteen days without my sunlight, the darkness was taking over my mind, my thirst for blood even stronger than before. It wouldn’t be satisfied until I got her back.
“Kill,” the monster within me hissed. “Fucking kill.”
“Alek!” a voice shouted through my fog. “Alek, stop! You’re going to kill him!”
Good,I thought.I will fucking murder this city if I’m away from her any longer.
I was becoming feral, the urges inside of me growing and growing. How dare Julian Vallen think he was enough to stopme?How dare Evangeline jump in front of that bullet for me? How dare the world think it could keep her from me?
“Alek! Jesus Christ, dude,stop!”
Two arms shoved me to the ground, a knee pressing down onto my back. I snarled, turning to face the person who thought they could restrain me.
Only to come face to face with my cousins’ bright eyes.
“Dude, you need to fucking calm down,” Nikolai said before gesturing to the bleeding man in the corner. “You could have killed Pavel.”
I blinked a few times, my monster receding from the surface, simmering deep inside of me. Looking around at the ring I was standing in, the horrified faces around the room, I finally remembered what I was doing. Nikolai had brought me to the gym where many of my men practiced their hand-to-hand combat skills. I rarely came because I rarely needed it, but my cousin thought I should blow off steam.
Hence, the unconscious man who sat in a puddle of red.
The man blinked a few times, looking at me with fear.
“Sorry, Pavel,” I said gruffly, though I didn’t mean it. I was only sorry because I wished it were Julian Vallen I’d almost murdered instead.
Nikolai sighed, scrubbing a hand down his face like it would help wipe the tension from his bones. I knew he felt it. We all did. Everyone was uneasy, afraid I would decide enough was enough and go on a killing spree, uncaring of whether the men I was shooting were Vallens or Drakovs.
I was still toying with the idea.
“This isn’t healthy,” Nikolai said quietly. “You can’t keep sending every man to the hospital. We’re going to run out of people, peopleyou need,by the way. And anyway, you can’t keep fighting like this. This fire inside of you is going to burn you alive before you even get to her.”
I rolled my shoulders, blood drying on my knuckles, my pulse still roaring in my ears. My body buzzed like I’d been plugged into a live wire, every nerve screaming for release.
“I don’t care,” I replied flatly. “If burning myself alive gets me closer to Eva, then I shall burn.”
“Aleksandr, you know what I mean.” He stepped closer, lowering his voice so the others couldn’t hear. “You’re notyourself right now. You’re not thinking anything through. This is going to get all of us killed.”
I laughed, sharp and humorless. “No. This”—I gestured vaguely to the rage still clawing at my chest—“is me thinkingveryclearly. Julian took something that belongs to me. There is only one outcome for that: his head mounted in my fucking living room.”
Nikolai held my gaze for a long moment before exhaling deeply. My cousin rarely argued morality with me. We’d been raised in darkness, bathed in blood for as long as we could remember. Neither of us pretended we were anything but dangerous monsters lurking in the city’s shadows.
But now, there was something cautious in his expression. Not fear of me—but fear of what came next. Fear of what I would be willing to do to get to her.
“You have to be smart,” he said. “I’m all for getting her back. You know that. I like Eva, and when you told me who she was, my opinion didn’t change. She’s a sweet girl, and she brings out something soft in you that I haven’t seen since Liza died. I want to help you get her back, but we can’t do this if you don’t have some sort of strategy, and storming the Vallen house, guns blazing, isn’t the right one. It’s going to get you killed.”
“I don’t care if I get killed.”
And I meant it. Because this half-life I was living—this miserable existence spent clutching the pillow she slept on to my face, hoping to smell her shampoo again—was nothing. I would rather have died than move on without my Eva.
“You should care. Because right now, if I know Eva like I think I do, then she’s just as miserable without you, pining and waiting for her Prince Charming to rescue her. But if you die, if you let your thick skull get yourself fucking killed, then she will be forced to move on with another man. And I’m going to guess you don’t want that.”
No.
