Page 14

14

Reckoning

The roar of Edge’s motorcycle carried us through the day, eating miles of highway between the mountains and the bayou. Jace’s body was a wall of tension against my chest, every muscle coiled tight as we pushed south. No words passed between us—just the wind, the rumble of the engine, and the knowledge that our assassin wouldn’t be far behind. By the time we pulled up to the secluded property Jace now called home, evening shadows were stretching across unfamiliar ground. I’d never seen this place before, this life he’d built while I rotted. The pristine house stood like a monument to everything that had been stolen from me.

Jace’s house was too quiet.

He’d stormed through like a hurricane—slamming doors, muttering about Misty, vanishing out the front door without another word. Now, just silence. Heavy, watching silence. I stood in the hallway, listening to my own pulse thudding in my ears. I should’ve gone after him. Asked what the hell was going on. But something in his face had stopped me. Rage, sure. But also fear.

I wandered through the house instead, absorbing the life Jace had built without me. It was beautiful. Perfect . Pristine floors, furniture that matched, photographs I didn’t belong in. I felt like a ghost slipping through a stranger’s memories. A version of our life that never got to exist.

The version where monsters like us got happy endings.

In the kitchen, the sun cut through the bayou trees in slanted gold bars, striping the clean counters. I stood there, my hand on the edge of the island, grounding myself. In the moment I allowed myself to breathe in the bayou breeze that drifted though the open windows. Not so different than a night fifteen years ago when someone I loved shared it with me. Hot, moist earth, and sweet magnolias with a hint of citronella.

Then the air shifted.

A presence—not imagined. Not a memory. Real .

I turned, and Edge was there.

He stood in the doorway like he belonged there. The last light of the day caught on the blade at his side and the cruel smile that never reached his eyes. My blood ran cold.

“Miss me?” he said.

My breath caught. I didn’t answer. I didn’t dare move.

“You look good,” he said, tilting his head like he was examining me for damage. “Little more fire in you now that you aren’t bound to a chair. This should be fun.”

My body remembered before my mind could catch up. The restraints. The fear. The humiliation of being at a biker’s mercy again.

I moved. Fast. I lunged for the hallway, for anything that wasn’t this room, but he was faster—they always were. His hand closed around my arm like a vice, and then I was flying.

My back hit the cabinets hard enough to knock the wind from my lungs. Pain sparked across my spine, my ribs. I gasped, vision swimming, but not out.

Not this time.

I scrambled to my feet, dragging open the nearest drawer and yanking it clean off the rails. Silverware clattered to the floor as I swung the empty drawer like a club, smashing it into his shoulder. It splintered on impact.

Edge barely flinched.

He slammed me into the island, the edge cutting into my hip. I screamed and shoved at him, flailing for anything—my hand found a coffee mug and smashed it into his face. He reeled back a step, laughing.

“You don’t get it,” he said, wiping blood from his temple. “You can’t win this time. No Jace. You just can’t count on him. He’s never there when it matters . Just you and me.”

“You know shit ,” I spat, tasting copper and fury.

He lunged again. I dodged. Not gracefully, not cleanly, but enough to grab a knife off the counter—serrated, small. It wasn’t going to be enough. I knew it. Jace still had my blade, this was all I had. He knocked it from my hand with a brutal twist of my wrist. Bone cracked. I screamed again.

Then he said it.

“You know she’d still be alive if it weren’t for you.”

I froze. The world narrowed to a pinpoint. The brutal truth I would never escape issued from a hitman’s lips.

Edge bared his teeth. “Honey. If you hadn’t stabbed her, they’d have taken her too. She’d still be breathing.” There was only one way he could know that.

“I know,” I said quietly. The truth a lead weight in my chest. “I wish I could take it back every damn day.”

He blinked. Something flickered in his eyes—confusion? Disappointment? Whatever he’d wanted from me, that wasn’t it.

I coughed, blood pooling in my mouth. One eye was swelling shut. I couldn’t keep this up. I couldn’t win in a straight fight.

But monsters don’t fight fair.

I let my knees give. Dropped to the floor like I was done. He followed, looming over me, knife in hand now, breath ragged. My life stripped down to moments ticking by.

I deserved to die bloody, to know how it felt to take a knife in a vital organ instead of always in my back.

“You die here,” he whispered. “VP said to clean up the mess Jace made. That includes you.”

I looked up at him, my vision spinning, and whispered back, “Honey was pregnant.”

The words hung in the air, jagged and impossible.

Edge froze.

“What?”

“She was pregnant.” My voice cracked, but I forced the words out. “You didn’t just lose her. You lost your kid.”

His mouth opened. Closed. The knife wavered in his hand.

The only trick I had left at my disposal—a harsh truth wrapped up in a lie.

I didn’t wait. I reached under my body—where I’d kicked the fallen knife—and threw it.

It landed. Dead center of his chest.

Edge gasped. Stumbled back, eyes wide, blood pouring down his shirt.

“Naomi—”

I was on him before he could finish.

I tackled him to the floor, straddled his chest, and drove the knife deeper. I didn’t stop. I grabbed the others from his belt, his boots, his wrist sheath—used every one. Some broken fragment of my mind noted he didn’t fight me as I drove his beloved blades deep inside him.

Over and over. Until his chest looked like a sacrificed voodoo doll. Until my hands were cut up, soaked and slippery and numb.

Until the monster in me drank its fill.

Until the rage bled out with him.

Silence returned. Not the quiet kind. The after kind. The kind that settled over corpses and bitter unspoken truths.

I knelt there, staring down at him. At what was left.

“It wasn’t her, I lied to you,” I whispered. “It was me.”

No one heard my darkest secret but the blood-soaked walls and the floor beneath my knees.

The baby I never got to have. The life I never got to live. One more thing stolen.

I didn’t know how long I sat there. Minutes. Hours. Long enough for my body to stop shaking. Long enough for the numbness to spread.

Footsteps pounded the porch. Then the door.

Jace’s voice shouted my name, frantic.

His bootfalls stopped short.

The house smelled of blood and broken things. Furniture splintered. Walls dented. One man dead.

In my mind’s eye I could visualize my predator as he moved through the wreckage like a sleepwalker, eyes wide. But still cunning, always calculating.

He’d follow the blood trail I left on his pristine hardwood floors. His nice clean walls.

I sat in the middle of the nursery. Blood on the crib. The walls. Mine. Edge’s. The air was thick with it.

I looked up as Jace appeared in the doorway.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” I asked. My voice didn’t sound like my own.

He stared at me, at the carnage I wore.

“She took my son,” he said.

He said it like it was a statement of fact. Like it was only his son. Like Misty didn’t even exist. Like this wasn’t his secret until I walked into a blue room with teddy bears.

Seven days he never showed concern for anyone other than himself. Seven fucking days. Never once mentioned he was a father.

After the fifteen years he lived without me. He gave my promised life to someone else, a clubwhore who hated me so much I received a new scar each year on the day the Jackals took me.

I didn’t reply. I didn’t tell him about the other child—the one we’d lost. The one I’d never told anyone about . Not when it slipped out of me as I cried for Jace to come make it not real to make it all, the horror of each day go away. The truth was too hard to bear, he would always choose someone else over me… he would always choose Jace. Edge was right he was never there when I needed him to be. His love and attention was never my blessing, it was my fucking curse.

The gun I’d found on the side table in the hallway rested in my lap, it was loaded and discarded there. I knew exactly how it felt.

I just watched his face. The cracks in it. The fury, the horror, the confusion.

I stood up. My muscles sore, but painless compared to the feeling where my heart used to beat for him. The cold ice that replaced the warm blood in my veins was more than comforting.

He didn’t move.

He looked at me like he still thought we could crawl out of this nightmare. Like any of this could be salvaged. Like he would still get his way like he always had. The president of Mayhem wins at any cost.

“I never got to know if ours was a boy or not,” I said softly.

Eight days ago I failed. Fifteen years of suffering and wondering about why my life became a hell I’d never escape and I couldn’t pull the trigger. But, the answer looked at me with surprise, a genuine response for maybe the first time in our bitter lives.

“Kitten.” His voice a warning, a condescending platitude that infuriated me further. I wasn’t his kitten, I was a pissed off lioness scenting a fresh kill. Then I pulled the trigger.

Jace hit the floor like a marionette with the strings cut.

And for the first time in fifteen years, I smiled.