Page 47 of Black Sheep

I mean it, Cleo. I see so much as a scratch on you, someone will fucking die.

That was one of a few conversations in the same vein. I listened to them with a giddy little flame in my heart, convinced they fell from the lips of my one true love. The one who would protect me, cherish me above everything else.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Axel told me he would kill for me. What I didn’t realize was that he meant it literally. Or cold-bloodedly. Or that the victim he picked would be one who mattered to me.

Worst of all, that the life-changing event would matter so little to him that he could carry on with his life as if it never occurred.

I watch him square off with his brother now, and my heart shreds with hopelessness.

“She’s not worth a one-dollar dare,” Ronan tosses out. “She never was. Too bad you’re too blind to see that.”

Axel delivers a chilling smile I feel in my bones. “You see blindness. I see the final act in a script I couldn’t have written better if I had a host of heavenly angels wielding the pen.”

My heart lurches despite the fact that this is what I’ve wanted all along—the Rutherfords at each other’s throats, destroying each other the way Axel destroyed my family.

Ronan is eyeing him, wariness I’ve only seen him exhibit around Finnan crawling over him. After a minute, having failed to decipher the cryptic meaning, his eyes narrow. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“Front-row seat,” Axel repeats.

Chapter Twelve

THE DEAL

Axel

A door opens at the far end of the hallway. I watch Ronan turn to face the approaching footsteps, his expression morphing into one of fear-tinged compliance.

I stay where I am, my back to my father, my hand gripping Cleo’s tightly. Maybe too tightly. She flinches and tries to pull away. I turn to her. “Stay.”

Whatever she sees in my face makes her eyes widen and her mouth close.

What I feel is naked loathing so depraved that I wonder how the lethal force of it doesn’t consume me. Again, she tries to disentangle her fingers from mine.

I let go of her hand for two reasons.

Delivering pain that isn’t sexually oriented or has pleasure balancing it out was never my thing. And I need all my functioning faculties to deal with Finnan.

More than the cold fear of walking into my first ambush in the urban battlefields of Fallujah, more than the harrowing nightmare of waking up the morning after blood was forced on my hands…this is going to be by far my deadliest battle.

And it’s one I intend to win.

My abs clench with revulsion as I sense him behind me. As I hear him breathe the free air that his greed has helped snuff out of so many.

“Since it seems that you don’t intend to grace me with your hallowed presence, I’m forced to come to you.”

I turn. Face the embodiment of every evil that lurks beneath my own skin. I don’t make excuses for what I am.

“Are you going to stand there like a deaf mute, boy?” The distinct Northern Irish brogue Finnan wears with pride curls around every word.

“I find it saves me a lot of time and effort to contribute only when there’s actually something useful to say. You taking a walk from your den to your hallway doesn’t constitute a useful conversation topic for me.”

The muted curse comes from Ronan, the shocked gasp from the woman I intend to reclaim this very night.

Finnan smiles. A white, ample smile that slashes his weathered cheeks. But only his lips smile. Eyes the same color as mine remain flint hard. Coldly toxic. The way they’ve been every time he’s looked at me.

I used to think he deliberately withheld any show of positive emotion until it was earned. Time and experience and the evidence within my own twisted DNA has proven that he’s incapable of it.

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