“Jason asked him to come,” Cassian interrupted, his eyes narrowing on me. “He was worried about us.”
“For good reason. Why did you tell him to bring her up here?” Derrick asked, rubbing his temple.
“Coraline’s been making promises for months. Tonight was the first time she offered anything concrete. I suggested they come up here totalk,” my brother answered.
“What could she possibly tell you that would be worth...” Derrick gestured to the blood splattered across the floor and her still huddled in a corner. “This. Because I don’t see a path back from Selene walking in on another woman on her knees for you. Notthatwoman.”
Cassian moved toward Coraline, his expression hardening as he took in her battered face. “What are we going to do with her looking like that?”
I glanced at her dispassionately. “Nothing. She can crawl or walk out of here and go clean herself up. We don’t need her now. The deals off.”
“Alaric. Cass,” she breathed, eyes filling with fresh tears. “Please. This wasn’t my fault.”
My brother scoffed. “Don’t start that shit. What did you expect to happen now?”
I didn’t give a fuck what happened to her now. Coraline was nothing but a means to an end—a knife we had been sharpening to reverse back into Darzi’s throat. For months I’d endured her presence, never so much as allowing her to brush against me. Months sacrificed away from my wife and son for this pathetic creature because she had leverage.
Months of nodding through her vapid stories, feigning interest while she drained our top-shelf liquor and drove us all to imagining exactly how we would dispose of her once she’d served her purpose.
And tonight I’d cast aside the tedious exhaustion of playing this game while keeping my wife in the dark and I’d said fuck it.
I let Coraline sink to her knees, watched her take me into her mouth with that hunger she reserved for those she wanted to manipulate.
I let her think she was sucking her way to freedom right until I looked down at her peering back up at me, and I realized I’d just crossed a line I had no right to breach. I’d executed men for less than what I was doing when their eyes lingered too long on my wife
Selene walking in as I was telling her to stop had to be some twisted sense of karmic retribution. I had never cheated on her. I had never betrayed her. Not when rival families sent theirdaughters before me like lambs to slaughter. Not when there’d been a window after the wedding where women still tried. The bold and the bored until they got the message to stop.
Selene never had to say a word.
Now I’ d committed the cardinal sin of men who live by violence. I miscalculated the damage.
Not to my reputation or my standing among the Dominion, but to her—my wife— with this fucking whore out of them all.
Coraline moved closer to us instead of toward the exit. “I can talk to her. She’ll understand this is—”
“Stop talking.” Before she could finish that absurd fable of a plan, I turned and cut her off. “One more word and I’ll carve your tongue out and feed it to you. Matter of fact, why are you still here?”
She flinched when I approached, but I grabbed her wrist, anyway, not thinking about optics, or restraint, or diplomacy as I dragged her across the room toward the exit. This arrangement was dead and this woman was as good as dead if she didn’t disappear now that my wife was aware of her proximity. I would handle the logistics later; I had more pressing issues to deal with first.
“Go down the hall, clean yourself up, and then you will be escorted back to where you belong.” Which was essentially a pretty cage.
“Alaric, wait. Please.” I opened the suite door and pushed her into the hall, slamming it in her crusted face when she turned back.
I returned to find my brother and Derrick waiting in the main room, faces grim. They’d been in on the Coraline plan from the beginning. I’d never be stupid enough to entertain someone who could compromise the Dominion without keeping my key players informed. Jaden was the only one not present tonight.
“There’s a vault,” I explained without preamble. “Somewhere in Darzi’s private holdings. She claimed he keeps evidence there—everything from my mother-in-law’s murder to his dealings with the Citadel.”
The name hung in the air like poison gas.
The Citadel—a rival society to the Dominion that had been a thorn in our side for decades. They operated by different rules, worshiped different traditions, and had their own territories carved out across the city and beyond. The Dominion handled our problems internally, preferring quiet executions over loud demonstrations of power. The Citadel fed their victims to sharks in international waters, occasionally leaving the remains where Dominion leaders would find them.
“There’s no alliance between Darzi and the Citadel,” Cassian denied immediately. “There’s no way. Not after what happened with their last representative.”
“He’s selling us out,” I replied flatly. “Not alliance. Betrayal.”
Derrick swore under his breath again. “We need to move on that pronto then.”
I nodded. “I plan to.”
