Page 98 of Mystic's Sunrise

The moment Kain grabbed me, shoved me aside like I was filth. The look in his eyes wasn’t confusion. It wasn’t regret. It was hatred—pure and undiluted. He didn’t just want me gone. He wanted me destroyed.

Like I was the villain in his story.

I stared straight ahead, my eyes burning, and slowly dug my nails into the flesh of my palms. I welcomed the pain. It anchored me. It reminded me I still had control—even if he thought he’d taken it from me.

I let out a slow breath. Forced the fury to sharpen into something colder. Smarter.

I wasn’t going to let him win. I wasn’t going to letherwin either.

They hadn’t seen the last of me.

Mystic thought he could walk away without consequence? Let him believe he’d escaped. Let him think I was out of moves.

Because I wasn’t walking away—not quietly, and not without a fight.

A slow smirk curled across my lips, dark and deliberate as the plan finally clicked into place. One last play. One last card they didn’t know I was holding. And this time, I’d make sure the blow landed exactly where it hurt most.

He laid his hands on me.

He hurt me.

And now?

Now I was going to make him pay for every second of it.

And I knewexactlywho to call.

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

THE CLUBHOUSE HADquieted down, but it wasn’t peace.It was that heavy, loaded silence that settles in after a fight, the kind that tells you the damage has already been done and now everyone’s just waiting to see how deep it goes.

I wasn’t waiting. I didn’t need to.

I already knew.

I’d lost her.

Zeynep hadn’t left the clubhouse, not yet. But she was gone all the same. I could feel it in the way she looked through me earlier—eyes that once held love and trust now cold and distant. Like I was a stranger. Like I was a lie.

And hell, maybe I was.

I should’ve told her the truth. Should’ve laid it all out before it had the chance to rot everything between us. But I let the past own me. I let my wife—my ex-wife, as soon as I could get that damn paperwork through—sink her claws in deep enough to ruin the only good thing I’d ever had. The only person who saw all of me, scars and rage and all the ugly in between, and still looked at me like I was worth saving.

I couldn’t stand still. My boots chewed up the gravel outside the clubhouse as I paced back and forth, jaw tight, hands clenched. I was burning from the inside out.

Behind me, the door creaked open. I didn’t turn. Didn’t need to. I knew the sound of their boots, the rhythm of their steps. Devil and Chain. Brothers who’d seen this shit coming a mile away.

Their steps were slow, weighted—not with judgment, but with the kind of silence that comes when you know someone’s about to fall apart. They’d warned me. Both of them. And now here we were.

“Go ahead,” I muttered, dragging a hand down my face. “Say it.”

Chain leaned against the wall beside me, arms crossed casually like we weren’t standing in the wreckage of everything I’d just torched. “Say what?”

I shot him a look, sharp and tired.

Devil let out a low whistle. “He wants us to say, ‘I told you so.’”

Chain smirked. “Well, we did fuckin’ tell you so.”