Page 8 of Watch Me Burn
His expression holds that same granite composure he wears like armor. It only cracks when his daughter Mary Jane enters a conversation or during those rarechildhood visits when she’d light up his office with her presence. She turned twenty-two recently, though I haven’t seen her in years.
But then his face shifts as Maren crosses the kitchen, his eyes tracking her with the intensity of a hunter watching prey, absorbing every detail and every angle. The naked desire in his gaze is unsettling. I'm seeing something he didn't intend to share, something that wasn’t meant for witnesses.
What the fuck?
This can’t be the first time he’s seen her. He monitors Luna’s system, checking the camera feeds every couple of days to ensure nothing is amiss. Except for the ones inside Luna’s house. Those belong to me alone. But Maren lives all over that sanctuary. He’s had to see her dozens, if not hundreds, of times by now.
I file that observation away for later consideration. Whatever obsession is brewing behind Cade’s eyes, it’s the last thing Maren needs in her life. It spells trouble for a woman who isn’t even aware she’s being hunted.
“You’re the one who seems distracted.”
His head snaps toward me, eyes flashing with irritation I’ve seen maybe a handful of times in twenty-five years, the look he saves for when I’ve crossed a line he didn’t know he’d drawn.
“How’d dinner go last night?” The question comes out smooth, designed to pull attention away from his fixation on Maren.
“Mind your own fucking business, Cade.”
His eyebrows rise, but his expression remains otherwise unaffected.
Luna’s mouth crashes through my memory—soft, yielding, perfect—then the crushing weight of guilt follows like a tidal wave. Every lie I’ve fed her sits heavy in my chest, two sides of myself at war until I can’t breathe. My tie constricts around my throat. I tear it free.
Both versions of myself want her with equal desperation. The polished executive wants her laughter over wine and her smile when she heals an animal in her care. The wolf wants her gasps in the dark and her back arching under his touch.
But beneath both burns something more fundamental. The need for her to see through every mask and choose to stay.
“Just do your fucking job.” I turn my attention back to the monitors.
Cade doesn’t back down. Never has, not since that night twenty-five years ago when he walked in on something he wasn’t supposed to see. I was twenty-one, just starting to refine my methods. Still green enough, still careless enough that my COO pieced together what his young boss did when the sun went down. He figured out what lived beneath my skin, what I became when no one was watching.
“I was thinking about Desert Storm yesterday.”
I freeze. Cade rarely brings up his military service, and never the incident that ended his career. The classified mission that went sideways, the one that left him with blood on his hands and a discharge that looked honorable on paper but destroyed everything he’d worked for.
“Why?”
“Because it reminded me why I do this. Why I help you.” His voice takes on that haunted quality it gets when he talks about the war. “Some people deserve to die, Damien. They trade away their right to breathe when they choose cruelty.”
It’s the same conversation we had that night in 2000, when he walked into my office after hours and found me cleaning blood from under my fingernails. Instead of calling the police, he’d looked me in the eye and said, “You’re going to need help if you want to keep doing this without getting caught.”
He was thirty then, already carved hollow by things he’d done in service to his country. I was just a kid with too much blood money and vengeance that ate me alive from the inside. He became my right hand, my cleaner, and the voice of reason when mine drowned in fury. Twenty-five years later, he’s the closest thing I have to family.
Which makes his protective behavior both touching and fucking infuriating.
“I know what I’m doing with Luna.”
“Do you?” His gray eyes search my face. “Your survival is my business, Damien, and you’re getting careless. All for a woman you barely know.”
I look back at the screen, where Luna is filling the dishwasher, but the tension in her shoulders remains. That bastard of an ex is still affecting her even when he’snot here, and that just strengthens my resolve to hunt him down, wrap my hands around his throat and feel his pulse stutter and fade.
“I know every fucking inch of her, Cade. And she’s everything.”
The confession tastes like freedom, but speaking it out loud doesn’t solve the problem burning through my veins. It just makes it more real. It confirms what I’ve been trying to deny and that I was lying through my teeth a second ago. I’m way in over my head.
“I don’t know what the fuck to do.”
“Start by not killing her ex-boyfriend.” He doesn’t miss a beat. “We’ve avoided killing innocent civilians for twenty-five years. Let’s not start now.”
“He’s not innocent.” My jaw clenches so tight that a dull ache spreads toward my temple. “I want every available resource focused on finding him. Wolfe Technologies has the most advanced AI tracking system in the world.”
