The whites of his eyes had gone bloodshot, that telltale crimson rim I’d seen only when rage burned beneath his careful control. I couldn’t have looked away if I’d tried, pinned by the intensity of his gaze.
“I knew about meetings to handle Citadel threats. But this? With her?” His jaw clenched, a muscle twitching beneath the salt-and-pepper stubble. “Never.”
My bottom lip quivered like a child’s. I sank my teeth into it until I tasted copper, warm and metallic.
“I tried to keep you away tonight because the men he’s dealing with make Darius seem like a goddamn choirboy,” he confessed, telling me more than Alaric would have allowed. "You believe I'd stand by while you walked into this? Selene, you might as well be my own daughter. I would have burned this city down brick by brick, watching it all turn to ash before letting you face this blind.”
He cupped my face between calloused palms.
"I knew nothing. If I had I would have dragged her through these halls by her throat and put her in the ground before she ever laid hands on what's yours."
Something between a laugh and a cry escaped me, raw and broken. He wiped another tear with the edge of his thumb, the gesture incongruously gentle from hands I’d seen break bones.
“You deserved better than this,” he swore.
The elevator announced our arrival with a soft chime that echoed in the confined space, and Santos guided me through theclub’ s private exit, his six-foot-three frame angled like a shield to make sure no one saw me break.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The phantom of my wife’s rage hung in the air like cordite after a firefight.
I had witnessed men gutted alive, throats opened ear to ear, skulls crushed beneath boots, and women burned alive, but nothing prepared me for Selene’s hands tangled in Coraline’s hair trying to tear it from her scalp, or the way her knuckles split open when she knocked them against the tumbler now shattered on the floor.
Violence and I were blood brothers. It had raised me in a cradle of broken bones, molded me with bruised flesh through the classes required of heirs, served as my weapon, my armor, and my mother tongue, but watching the woman I cared for deeply shatter because of my betrayal?
That wasn’t just destruction.
That was watching my own carelessness stare me in the face.
Had it been directed at anyone else or reason, I might have found her rage exhilarating. Most women in the Dominion learned early to swallow their anger, to let it die unspoken behind locked doors. My mother and cousin aside, the women I’d known moved through the Dominion like ghosts.
The proof my wife was capable of more than that was still huddled on the floor when Derrick entered the room andsurveyed the destruction much like my brother had. "Holy shit what happened here?"
"Selene caught them," Cassian replied, jabbing a finger between Coraline and me.
Derrick let loose a string of curses.
I couldn’t shake the image of her trembling. Selene—who stared down the worst kind of men without blinking, who’d grown up under the boot of a father who collected broken women like trophies, and who moved through rooms full of deceit in cocktail dresses, and never once revealed a wound.
The only other time I’d ever seen her body betray her control was when her nails were nearly drawing blood from my shoulders, her voice breaking on my name—but even then, it was ecstasy ripping through her defenses, not raw, feral devastation that made her look like something wounded and cornered and dangerous.
I had shredded her to the bone with my carelessness—gutted her over what amounted to a few minutes of something that had nothing to do with desire or lust or falling for some cheap pussy-trap.
For months I'd been putting men in rooms to extract information, taking out women close to Darzi that he’d never look for again to gleam what I could from them. Moving beneath the guise of our Citadel issues, I hunted any and all fragments of intel to keep Selene and our entire family protected from whispers that were hardening into certainties.
Most were useless—regurgitating intel I’d already verified or spewing delusions. Coraline had survived longer than any of Darius’s other whores, clawing her way into his inner sanctum. She knew exactly how to bait the hook when she approached us—dripping just enough blood in the water to make us circle.
She whispered about a vault where he kept evidence of Selene’s mother’s slaughter. Not just killed.Butchered. The kindof death that haunted survivors for generations. We’d always suspected, but lacked the proof our code demanded to rip Darius’s still-beating heart from his chest. But I couldn’t move on that front until I knew who and why he was involved with Citadel—with proof.
Coraline had seen it all through lowered eyes. Darius had sent his broken toy to infiltrate us, never realizing she’d developed a hunger for vengeance after years as his punching bag and sexual offering—forced to her knees before whatever woman he was grooming, her tongue working their cunts while he fucked her ass.
“How did this happen?” my brother asked, then shook his head. “I knowhowit happened. Why did it happen? I wouldn’t have suggested she come up here with you I knew she’d be slobbing all over your knob.”
“Well I knew better than to bring her to the family house.”
“She shouldn’t beanywherealone with you that Selene has access to,” Derrick snapped, throwing his hands up. “You’re smarter than this.”
“Are you?” I challenged, making myself a drink. “You weren’t even supposed to be in town tonight.”