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ADRIAN

K illing a man was easy. I didn’t mean that in a deep, existential way.

Remove the outside factors—morality, fear, the fact most people were programed to appreciate and protect human life—and the act of killing was relatively simple.

Just like puncturing a hole in a juice box and watching the contents spill free.

Or squashing a fly beneath your palm until it stopped buzzing.

Until its insides popped out and dampened your skin.

Until its legs detached from its little carcass and it took a bit of effort to scrape them off into the waste bin.

But I didn’t want to kill Tate. I wanted my big brother to suffer.

I wanted him at that brink of death, craving it, only to be ripped back again.

I wanted his body to give out but his brain to remain active.

To sense everything that was being done to it.

To feel it. The same way I’d felt that stab to my heart every time he touched her.

Every time he fucked her. Every time he humiliated her by fucking someone else .

And she’d finally given me the okay. She’d asked me to do it for her. Maybe not in as many words, but she did say she didn’t care. Which was basically the same thing as far as I was concerned, and I wasn’t about to sit around and wait for my little lamb to change her mind.

There were no take-backs.

I glanced down to where big brother was strapped to my surgical table. His chest cavity splayed open and the various devices humming in rhythm with the sound of his heartbeat. And realized how right I was. How easy it would be to puncture his pericardium. How simple it would be to squash him.

It really was a pity I didn’t like things easy or simple. If I did, our little sibling rivalry would have been over as soon as I was old enough to hold a carving knife.

I maneuvered the tattoo gun Casper had fashioned out of a ballpoint pen and an electric toothbrush around Tate’s rib cage, pressing the tip against the outer most layer of the heart, and slowly moved from one letter to the next until her name stared back at me from a mixture of black ink and pooling cardiac fluid.

“Who’s Marisela?” Dr. Michaels grunted from the other side of the metal slab. From where he was watching me with rapt attention. The type of fascination that very few of us shared.

It was a loaded question, one I didn’t have any desire to answer but couldn’t avoid either. Not without showing all my cards. “Our client. Also his wife.”

It was the truth as much as it was a lie. She had hired us. I just refused to take her money. And the fucker’s name might be next to hers on a piece of paper but she was never free to belong to anyone else. Not when she belonged to me.

John had been right about one thing. Sometimes it was nice to watch.

To get the full picture, the three-sixty view you didn’t get when you were the one holding the scalpel.

Though watching my half-brother flatline and be forcibly resuscitated on the operating table for the last few hours, his muscles spasming each time the paddles touched his chest, brought me a different type of satisfaction from the one Rath enjoyed.

A sense of gratification that ran much deeper than a hard-on.

Bugs gestured to the screen in front of us, row after row of monitors lining the sanctum of his security room. “How long are you gonna let this shit go on?”

“As long as it takes for the fucker to pull his head out of his ass,” I grunted in reply, not taking my eyes off the image of Dr. Michaels breathing life into our patient for the third time. I’d told him we weren’t gonna get paid if he couldn’t keep Tate alive.

Truth was he wasn’t gonna get paid. Our newest recruit needed a little more motivation and a lot less self-pity.

He didn’t have an option but to use his newly-reconstructed hands.

Something he’d realized the moment he’d seen the operating room door slam shut in his face.

The moment I’d stared at him from the other side and gave him the ultimatum.

It wasn’t cruel. It was just ripping the bandage off and giving the wound some air to breathe. In this case, we were talking about his wounded ego more than the scars on his arm and fingers.

“And what about your girl?”

I twisted in Bugs’s direction and quirked an eyebrow. “What about her?”

“When you gonna tell her the kid isn’t his?” he asked.

“Who says it isn’t?”

“The results from the paternity test you ran, or maybe the fact we both know you had him snipped years ago.”

I grinned, even as I was trying my damnedest not to.

He wasn’t wrong. The paternity test was conclusive.

Tate Prescott was NOT the father. There wasn’t much of a possibility he would have been anyway.

Considering I’d blackmailed a plastic surgeon into convincing my brother to undergo an experimental procedure “to increase his stamina in the bedroom.” All it really was, was a quick vas deferens tie-off and a handful of blue pills in place of antibiotics.

It wasn’t about Tate, though. It was never about him.

I didn’t give a shit about how many kids he spawned over the years.

It was about her . I refused to let him taint her with his seed.

To let her carry it to term. I also knew she wouldn’t like it if I intervened.

So I didn’t. I never touched the fucker. Not until she asked me to do it .

Call it a loophole. I called it being resourceful. Working with what I had in front of me. Nudging pieces in the right direction and letting fate do the rest for me.

And right now, fate would decide how quickly my little lamb went from dutiful wife to widow.