You wanted to beat the weakness out of me, Dad?A feral smile tugs at my lips.You mis-fucking-calculated.
Now everyone standing between me and my wife will learn exactly what that costs.
The video freezes on the casino entrance. Las Vegas. Sin City. My father brought her to Sin fucking City. Of all cities built on excess and vice, temptation and appetite, men who think money buys absolution—he chose that one. Could have been worse. Reno, maybe. My jaw tightens until it aches.
Seraphina doesn’t belong in a city that chews women up and spits them out. She doesn’t belong anywhere near my father’s violence, his appetites, his belief that people exist to be shaped into tools. Yet he walked her into it like a trophy, hand on her back, as if she were something he had a right to escort.
Every heartbeat feels like fire in my throat.Why return just to take? Is it to hurt me?I made promises, and I will uphold them. Is he working with Gideon?
The thought of her standing there, surrounded by men who mistake desire for ownership, makes something savage claw up my spine. I feel consumed, raw, ready to destroy. My father sells love as weakness. He’s wrong.Love isn’t weakness—it’s why I breathe, why I survived.
I don’t look away. My father has made his choice.
Chace watches me, waits. Silence stretches thick and heavy. He exhales slowly, bracing.
“What’re the chances of you staying behind while I go get your wife?”
I laugh, humorless, sharp. “Absolutely fucking zero.”
Chace’s jaw tightens, but I don’t let him speak. “I trust you,” I say, voice rough, burning. “With my life. You got me set up with the dogs, security at my place…”
I turn to the window, letting the city lights blur around me.
“Trey, this world you’re stepping into…it’s dangerous.”
“And cults are usually mellow affairs? Always orgies or death, no in-between.”
“We’re not talking about a cult here, Trey.”
“Nope, we’re talking about my old man, and Vegas, baby.”
“Yet another reason to stay the fuck off the Strip.”
“My wife is there.”
“She’s been taken by your cunt of a father.”
“More reason to stop talking and go kick him in the scrotum.”
“Even if I let you come, we’re entering a place controlled by the mob.”
“That’s what I’ve got you for…” Chace pauses, hand running through his hair, weary.
“Fine. Fuck it, but if you die out there, you are not haunting me. Mac, Logan and Sam only.”
Hm, what about the Hallmark twins?
“Clay and Dean too,” I add.
“You really close with the brothers?”
“Na, not really. But just the idea of watching them share a girl…”
“Dude…”
He gets it. That look tells me everything.
“I call them the Hallmark twins…” Chace snorts, shaking his head.
