Page 99 of Pucked Around and Found Out

She isn't shocked.

She isn't afraid.

There's no flinch, no sharp intake of breath, no involuntary step backward. She stands in the doorway with her spine straight and her chin lifted and she looks at me the way she has always looked at me, like she's already decided something and is waiting for me to catch up.

Like she knew I was coming and she came out anyway.

Ready.

Like she's walked out of her own nightmare and stepped directly into mine and she isn't going to apologize for either.

And beside her, standing upright, unrestrained, moving under his own power like a man who has made a decision he intends to keep is Masen Kellar.

My jaw locks.

The fury is immediate and total… underneath it, beneath the cold clean rage that I know how to use, there is something else. Something I won't name. Something that has been growing since the warehouse floor, since a scalpel clattered to concrete and I stood there with empty hands and a chest full of things I don't have words for.

She managed it.

She walked into that building alone, into the place that was supposed to finish her, that her own father built to break her and she came out with the man I have been hunting for two years, walking voluntarily at her side.

I push off the hood of the SUV.

The gravel crunches under my boots as I move toward her and she holds her ground. Of course she holds her ground, she has never once in all the months I have known her taken a single step backward from me when she could have taken twenty.

We stop three feet apart.

The men on both sides of this equation have gone very still. Carnage is at her right, I feel him without looking, that cocksucker's presence is like a weather system. The kneeling men in the gravel. Halo somewhere in the dark behind her. My men fanned out, waiting for an order I haven't given.

Nobody breathes.

I look at her.

She looks at me.

The weight of everything we haven't said sits between us in the dark, like a third person, like it always does, like it has done since the first night I put my hands around her throat and she didn't look away.

“Tink.” Her name comes out of me before I've decided to say it. Rough around the edges. Not the weapon I've trained myself to make it.

Something moves through her expression. A flicker. Fast, involuntary and gone before she can hide it.

“You followed us,” she says. Not an accusation. Just the truth, laid out plainly between us the way she does everything.

“I followed you.” The distinction matters and we both know why.

Her jaw tightens. Barely. “He's with me, Xaden.”

I look at Masen over her shoulder.

He looks back at me.

I have spent two years building toward this moment. Two years of careful, meticulous, patient construction, one stone at a time, one sleepless night at a time, one piece of intelligence and one calculated move at a time, all of it aimed at the man standing behind her with blood drying on his face and the performance stripped clean away.

He doesn't look like what I expected.

He looks like a man who has put something down.

The rage in my chest is real and righteous and two years old and it hasn't gone anywhere. It won't. It lives in the same place Emery used to live, in the hollow she left behind, and nothing will fill that and nothing should.