“I know.” My voice sounds hollow and broken. “I know.”
Why can’t I stay away from him?
He’s bad for me!
He’s dangerous and pulled me into his world of hate.
I’ve lost everything because of him and my own family.
I should hate them all.
I'm drawn to Xaden Devlin like a moth to a flame, and we both know how that story ends.
In ash and ruin.
The crowd starts to disperse, people flooding toward the exits, but I stay rooted in place, staring at the ice where Xaden still celebrates with his team.
The game is over.
But the real battle?
It's just beginning.
And I have no idea if I'm going to survive it.
“Let’s go,” I whisper as I turn my back on my devil. Just as we make it outside my phone pings with a text.
Halo - Get back here now! It was a set up. They knew we were coming.
I’m torn between meeting Meekan and wanting to check in on the guys but then another text comes through and it makes the decision for me.
Halo - They took Carn down, he’s hurt… bad
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
XADEN
The second the final buzzer screams across the ice, the war begins.
Not the game. The real war. The one I've been building toward since the night I put a blade through my father's throat and inherited everything he left behind: the empire, the enemies, the blood debt.
Tonight, I collect.
I move fast through the locker room, ignoring the noise, the shouts, the slaps to my back from the team. We won. Good. That's what we wanted. I drilled it into them all week and they performed, but I don't have the luxury of celebrating. Not tonight. Not when I can feel the threads of everything I've been planning finally pulling taut.
“X.” Cas falls into step beside me before I've even cleared the hallway. He knows. He always knows when something's about to happen, it's what makes him the only man in this city I trust at my back. “You good?”
“When am I ever not?” I say without looking at him.
He snorts. “Right.”
My jaw tightens. He's been watching me all week, tracking the edge I've been walking. After what happened in my sister'sroom, after Meekan's boys tore through Emery's sanctuary like it was nothing, the darkness inside me stopped being something I managed and started being something I fed.
I need them.
Steven Kellar. That sanctimonious, corrupt son of a bitch who thinks a senate seat and being the head of a cartel with a golden fucking boy son makes him untouchable. And Meekan, that dirty, bought-and-paid-for cunt, who's been sniffing around my territory, using Harper to get to me, using everything and everyone as a pawn in someone else's game.
Tonight, they run out of moves.
