Giving her one last look, I head back out the way I came, the lock to her front door clicking into place quietly. The early morning air greets me like a fucking slap, cold enough to bite but enough to chase away the intoxicating scent of her that still clings to my skin.
The city sleeps around me, unaware of the monster stalking its streets, unaware that something rotten has been allowed to fester in the dark. Lennon has no idea that death is imminent.No idea that I stood one foot planted firmly in her presence, and the other in whatever sick fantasy my mind conjured around her. I used to think that vengeance would feel different. Bigger. Warmer. Like setting fire to a church and watching the stained glass melt around me. I thought I’d feel righteous. Victorious. Like my mother’s ghost would finally stop looking so sad when I closed my eyes.
Instead, I just feel empty.
Empty, but haunted.
Because every step I take towards ruining Patrick’s daughter feels suspiciously like stepping closer to my own death. And maybe that’s the cruelest joke of all. Because I’ve spent years digging her father’s grave in my mind, only to realize somewhere along the way that I crawled into it myself. Perhaps that’s why cemeteries never frightened me as a kid. Death is honest. Dead men tell no lies. They simply rot quietly beneath the earth while the living pretend they’re doing something different. We’re all decaying. Some of us are just prettier about it. And Lennon? She’s too pretty and innocent to smell the rot beneath my skin.
But she will.
Soon enough, she’ll realize that the defensemen she’s tried so desperately to understand were never something she could crack open. I’m not a tragedy. Not a misunderstood hero. Not some broken little boy begging for someone to stitch him back together anymore. I am the scar left behind after the wound has long since stopped bleeding. And scars don’t heal. They just fade enough for people to forget what put them there. She’ll realize that every glance she earns from me, every word she mistakes for softness, was born from the same hands that learned how to survive with blood beneath their nails. Then she’ll join the long list of names who thought they could fix me. Make me better. Get me to fall in love with them.
And like all the others, she’ll learn what happens when you cross the path of a man who stopped believing in happy endings long before she learned how to spell the fucking word. Because I don’t want peace where she’s concerned. I don’t want healing. I want revenge. I want the ghosts that haunt me to finally shut the fuck up. I want the little boy who hid in closets while his father beat his mother bloody to know it wasn’t all for nothing. I want the teenager who cut his mother down from the ceiling to know there was justice waiting on the other side of grief.
And before I face my own death, I want someone to know that someone paid the price for what Patrick fucking Gilmore did to destroy my family. Even if I become the last corpse in the story to make sure of it.
“You are a fucking fool,” Dominic mutters, smacking me over the back of the head with my shoulder pads, “She was asleep, you neanderthal! What the fuck is wrong with you?”
His voice is a whispered yell, but I still look around the room, making sure no one is around. Not liking the chances of someone not being able to hear this conversation that my pack mate clearly insists on having, I grab his hand, dragging us out into the hall. At least this way, we will be able to see and hear if anyone is coming.
Turning to Dominic, I fold my arms over my chest. My eyes narrow as I level him with a glare. “How the fuck do you know where I was and what I did?”
He mimics my posture, rivaling me far better than I want. I can see the moment some of his bravado drops, though. Wherehe realizes it's not just me who has been caught doing something we hadn’t cleared with each other.
Still, he doesn’t back down.
“What I have or haven’t done isn’t relevant right now, Sasha. You snuck into her house and forced her to give you head while she was asleep! What the fuck, man?!”
I roll my eyes, hardly concerned with my actions like Dominic seems to be.
“You were there when the three of us agreed to break her, Dom, or has that changed?”
Not once in the many years since we formed our pack have I ever been given reason to question Dominic or his loyalty to me. He has always been steadfast.
When I told him I wanted to kill my father for what he did to me, what his actions caused my mother to do, he and Holden were all too happy to comply.
When I asked him to enact revenge on Patrick Gilmore for the damage he caused my father, he agreed without an ounce of hesitation. When I asked him to turn that need for vengeance towards Lennon, he agreed then, too.
But now, I can see something has changed in him. That while he has broken into her house, delivered the dead cardinal, and clearly set up cameras to watch her whenever he pleases, not that he thought to tell the fucking class, there is an air of hesitation. I can see it in his eyes.
But, he still shakes his head. “No, Sasha. You know that I will follow you in this plan. I just…” he sighs, his form slumping to lean against the wall.
“A part of me can’t help but question if your need for retribution is misplaced. Lennon might be her father’s daughter, but she wasn’t the one who saw your own father injured.”
I snort, feeling a sting of disbelief as I look at Dominic with a clearer outlook. Out of my mates, I hadn’t thought it would behimwho would bend. I had been waiting for Holden to come to me with these exact questions.
Guess the little Omega slut has her hooks into us further than I thought.
“You and I both know my reasons for needing to enact my revenge, Dominic. You have seen the scars. The nightmares that fucking plague me. You have seen every single ugly bit of me, yet you question me like it isn’t my right to seek justice for what that cunt did?!”
“Sash…” Dominic begins, holding his hands up, already prepared to surrender.
“Yet, one little whiff of something that could be yours, and you are ready to turn your back on me. Just like that? For a fucking no one? For someone that you have only known for a short time?”
I know I am being irrational now. That I have gone too far, but I can’t stop. The pain is too raw. Too all consuming. It makes me feel like I can’t breathe. Like if I don’t let all of my feelings out, they will burn me from the inside out.
“Fuck you, Domin—” I continue, but a mouth against mine silences me. The kiss isn’t sweet. Isn’t gentle. It's primal. Aggressive. Hungry. Desperate.
