Page 4 of Saint Valentine

I ran back downstairs, my heart pounding, and handed it to Aria without a second thought.

“This was my mother’s,” I said, my voice shaking. “I want you to have it.”

She took the ring from my hand, her eyes wide with surprise. “It’s beautiful,” she whispered, her fingers tracing the ruby. Her father eyed me like he was trying to figure out if I was a boy or a man in a boy’s body.

Aria just stared at the ring like she was mesmerized by it. It was the first time she wasn’t talking a mile a minute. Her father looked at me with a smile. “So, is this a formal engagement, Saint?” he asked, sounding like he was teasing me. “Are you asking for my blessing to one day marry my daughter?”

“Maybe,” I shrugged. “I don’t know, sir. I just wanted her to have it.”

He looked down at Aria. “Do you accept his proposal, princess?”

“Yes, daddy,” she giggled, bouncing in place. “I’ll marry him.”

He laughed again, clapping me on the shoulder. “You’ve got my blessing then, son. If you do one day ask,” he said. “If you survive this life, you’ll need someone strong like her to help you.”

His words resonated with me because even at ten, I knew survival wasn’t guaranteed. Not in my father’s world.

As they left, he added, “You’ll need a strong woman like my daughter to stand by you through the thick of it, like her momma does me.” He laughed, shook his head, then told Aria she would see me later, but it was time to go.

I wanted to tell her father what I knew—that my father was planning to kill him. But I stayed silent. Fear held my tongue, and loyalty, misplaced or not, kept me rooted. When Aria lookedback and waved, I couldn’t help but feel like I was losing a part of myself.

Chapter one

Saint

The summons to my father’s side of the compound came without explanation, as it always did. The message said I was needed it at home.

But this place wasn’t a home to me, though I had grown up in it. It was just a structure, a stage where performances of family and duty played out. It was a battlefield. A fucking dump, where the air reeked with memories of a childhood filled with abuse and manipulation.

My father’s guards didn’t look at me as I passed. They knew better. Their loyalty was to him—but their fear? That was mine.

I nodded at the guard in front of his office door. “Where is he?” I asked.

“In the room,” he answered.

I didn’t need to ask which room. I knew.

I made my way a few feet to the elevator. The doors slid open, and I stepped inside, pressing the button for the bottom floor. The elevator dropped, and as the doors opened, the metallic tang of blood hit me. The pungent smell of iron was unmistakable. It clung to the walls, the floor, the air—like the house itself was bleeding.

But the violence that happened down there had lost the power to disturb me a long time ago.

I kept walking. The muffled sounds of my father’s anger echoed in the distance.

When I pushed open the door to the makeshift dungeon, I found a man in the chair, barely conscious, his ribs being cracked by my father’s baseball bat. The sound of metal meeting flesh was loud, jarring, and visceral the first time you heard it, but the thousandth time didn’t even register. It was background noise.

When my father saw me, he let the bat drop from his hands. He was covered in sweat and blood, his white button-up sticking to his skin, his thinning hair looking like it hadn’t been combed in days. His sunken eyes met mine—his breath coming in heavy pants that made him wheeze, his face splattered with blood. He wiped his hands with a towel while he caught his breath.

“Saint.” His tone was clipped and serious. “This motherfucker stole from us.”

He tossed the towel aside and reached for his phone.

“Kill his son. I just sent the address to your phone.” He ordered me like I was a dog he had told to go fetch.

The man in the chair, about fifty, overweight, bloody, broken, and barely able to speak, pleaded through cracked lips. “Please... kill me... not my son...”

He was wasting his breath. His son was as good as dead.

My father grabbed the man by his shirt, holding him still, then he folded himself to look him directly in the eyes. “Your son will die. And you? You’ll live. A father shouldn’t have to bury his child. But you—you’ll carry that weight until it buries you because you were stupid enough to cross me.”

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