Some of the malicious glee he’d let his cousin see died. “Don’t use that filthy tongue to speak his name.”
“He’s never loved you,” sensing the crack in Silver’s armor—and wrongly assuming he could use it to his advantage—Brixton struck. “He’s never even wanted you. It was always me. But when Uncle Sij found out, he shipped me off planet against my will. I never wanted to be separated from Nuri, but you Reins always think the world belongs to you.”
Because it did?
This was Ignite, and Silver was its ruler.
And even if, by some odd chance, there was a thing on this planet thatdidn’tbelong to him, it would not be Nuri Narek.
The thought of Brixton touching what was his…Kissing him…Fondling him…
Silver slashed the thin blade forward, cutting a line across the rise of Brixton’s right cheek, close enough to his eye to momentarily stun him.
When the emergency call from Nuri had come in, Silver had been in the middle of an important meeting with the engineers in charge of a huge project they’d been trying to get off the ground for three years. He’d paused them in order to listen in on the live recording, annoyed at first that Nuri was with Brixton, then irritated that his cousin thought he was clever enough to get one over on him.
All of that could have been waved off. Even the shares and the real risk they brought against Silver’s position as CEO. He could have had the mess cleaned and swept under the rug. Over and forgotten in less than twenty-four hours.
But the second Brixton had admitted to laying hands on Nuri, that had changed.
Incensed didn’t even scratch the surface of what Silver had experienced in that moment. He’d ordered the Imperial Guard to follow him and had left the company without so much as a word to the employees.
“You’re a place holder,” Brixton said with renewed vigor. “He was hired to put up with you, but me? He chose me.”
“Mere delusions of a mad man.”
His Nuri, the one who mewled and writhed beneath him nightly, wouldn’t dare fall for a pathetic parasite like Romeo Brixton. A loser with an inferiority complex the size of the sun, yet no accomplishments to his name. Even his startup was a front. Not even a very good one either. A single tip to the local authorities on Usurn, and his criminal dealings had been uncovered in less time than it’d taken for Silver to drop Nuri at the manor and travel to the palace.
“Oh? Then explain what he was doing there with me,” Brixton sneered. “Explain why he kept it a secret.”
“Because I hate your guts and he didn’t want to upset me.”
“And you call me delusional?” He leaned forward in the chair, his stabbed hands preventing him from going very far. “We went there to make up for lost time. To finally embrace one another the way we’ve wanted to since your father tore us apart. He loves me.”
“Lies.” Silver didn’t buy it for a second.
But that didn’t make hearing it any less distressing.
Even if it was a barbed fabrication, meant to poke the chaos within him, Silver couldn’t resist falling into the trap.
“He called me the moment you—”
“It was clearly an accident,” Brixton interrupted. “Didn’t you see him panic when he realized?”
Silver had arrived just in time to see Nuri scramble to remove the N.I.M. and order it to cut contact. But that didn’t mean anything. The way the device worked, he would have had to give it very specific commands in order for it to dial the emergency line and record.
It should have brought some relief, that obviously Brixton didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, and the implication that Nuri had discreetly recorded them, but it didn’t. The fact that his cousinthoughthe understood Nuri was still enough to make Silver want to gouge his eyes out.
Maybe he would.
He’d take his tongue for daring to speak his name.
His eyes for being impudent enough to set his sights on Silver’s man.
His hands for touching him.
His lips for that stolen kiss.
His feet for treading the same ground—Ah. To that effect, should he also carve out his lungs for breathing the same air?
