Maxen’s fists curled tighter, the phantom pinch of old violence burning in his knuckles. He could see it—hell, he could taste it—the urge to tear the whole place down. Smash her candles into wax-splattered shards. Shove the shelves until they split in pieces. Grind every shard of broken wax further into paste beneath his boots. Reduce her pretty little shop to rubble.
Like she had reduced him to wreckage.
He saw another room then, his mother’s, all those years ago. He had wrecked that place, too. After her body went slack beneath his hands. His fingers remembered the tremor of death, the convulsion, the desperate clutch at his wrists as she fought for breath. He remembered the madness that told him the ending was a mercy, an to end her suffering.
And when it was done—when the last breath left her broken body—he had laid waste to everything within reach. Tables overturned. Chairs splintered. Curtains ripped from their rods. He’d smashed his head into a wall until blood ran hot into his eyes. Because he couldn’t bear the silence that followed. Couldn’t bear what he had done.
That same madness whispered now.Slaughter this place. Tear it apart so there’s nothing left to remind you she was here.If he destroyed it all, maybe he could purge the hollow she’d left behind.
His hand twitched toward the nearest shelf. He could already hear the satisfying crash of wood and glass, smell the explosion of scent, and all the bloody things she’d bottled and created with her own hands. He wanted to ruin it. To prove she hadn’t mattered. That none of it had mattered.
But there was no mistaking the truth.
The image of her face, eyes bright, lips curved in that stubborn little half-smile, rose unbidden. He’d cupped her cheeks more times he could count, carefully, as if she might vanish beneath his touch. That same hand now curled into a fist, because the beast inside him only knew two hungers: to cradle or to crush.
And God help him, he didn’t trust himself to know the difference at the moment.
He wrenched back from the shelf with a growl, shame searing his chest. He would not destroy her place. Not as he had destroyedhers. Not as he had destroyed his own mother. He could not destroy that. He would not.
Because if he did, he would prove every fear true. That he was nothing more than a monster in a man’s skin, doomed to strangle out anything good the moment it came within reach.
He felt the surge of anger rise—fast, hot, riddled with those old contempts. But a quieter, stubborn truth tugged at him.Calliope was not like them.She was... sunlight dressed in boy’s clothes who did not back down from a challenge. So he would not wreck this place. He would not wreck her memory.
Not yet.
He shut his eyes against this last thought and opened them at once, angry with himself for the weakness. His world had room for facts, not fancies. Fact: she was not here. Prince was not here. And he might have believed she’d run out for an errand had he not been standing in this very position for three hours.
Three hours of thinking. Of cursing. Of intolerable numbness.
She wasn’t coming back. Fact.
His jaw locked until something threatened to crack. “Damn you,” he cursed into the quiet.
The instinct was immediate, bone-deep: hunt. Track her as he would any debtor, any enemy who thought to cross him. He could follow the smallest trace. Brighton bent when he wanted it to. She could not vanish from him, not if he didn’t allow it. Not without any trace.
His fists flexed.
A part of him already saw the path, already planned the questions, the threats, the coin to loosen tongues.
But damnation. What then? Would he drag her back if he found her? A woman who had already chosen to walk away. A noble, bredfor another world, who had humored him with promises she could never mean. He’d be chasing nothing more than an angel he could never truly catch. Never truly hold onto.
The thought lodged bitter in his mouth.
He had chased enough illusions in his life. He would not chase another.
Maxen slowly forced the tension from his jaw.
No.
He would not hunt her. He wouldn’t chase what didn’t want to be kept. He turned on his heel and left the shop without a backward glance.
Calliope Turner belonged to the past now. And he would leave her there.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Go,” one ofthe men barked, shoving Calliope toward a carriage that rattled to a halt only yards away from where they’d been waiting for an hour or so. She thought the ride to this location took about the same time, but she couldn’t be certain. Time moved differently when one was in a state of panic and frantically thinking of ways to escape. Fortunately, they never once showed any interest in her after she’d been apprehended.
She stumbled to the carriage step, her wrists chafing raw from where they’d tied her hands. Prince’s absence rubbed raw as well, a hollow ache that grew sharper with each passing mile she was dragged from him.
