Page 118 of Diamond In The Rough

“Christabelle doesn’t take orders from you.” He pushes me back. “She doesn’t clean up your mess. And your girlfriend doesn’t get to be a fuckin’ Fed and eat at my dinner table where my family is supposed to be safe. Did you kill her?”

“No.” I look past him to Christabelle. “Fresh clothes. Get her dressed. Put her back in her apartment, and then you walk away.” I look at the guard who waits at the end of the hall. “Stovic. You’ll escort them both and ensure no harm comes to either woman. Put Hale in the East Village, and bring Cannon back here.” I meet Felix’s ferocious stare. “You stay the fuck away.”

“She’s a Fed, Micah!”

She’s my whole fucking universe, and now it’s imploded.

“We’ve caught and released them before. We don’t kill them, Lix. We send them home with a reminder we’re smarter than them.”

Except we’re not.

I’m not.

Because Tiia Hale sashayed her ass into my life, cast a line, and waited for me to take the bait. And I, the Malone I considered the most measured, the most careful, fell for it, hook, line, and fucking sinker.

Anger washes through my veins, like a wave of lava that burns everything it touches and leaves me in agony. In despair. But Felix isn’t done yet. He hasn’t had time to process what I have. He attempts to dash past me, to get through the door and head out to do what he does best—protect his family—but I grab his arm and slam him back against the wall, so we land with a thud.

Our chests touch. Our breaths mingle.

It’s like looking into my father’s eyes—the rage. The unrestrained violence of his anger.

“Don’t. Don’t go to her and start a war you can’t win.”

“She’s a fucking traitor who spent the night in my home!”

“I will kill you if you touch her.” I push him back again and press my palm to his throat. “I’ll end this with your blood on my hands. Don’t go anywhere near her. I’m begging you.” My voice breaks. “Don’t even look at her.”

Releasing him with one last shove, I turn on my heels and stalk past a stunned Christabelle. Past Stovic, whose eyes are wide like saucers. Past Mary, the one and only maternal figure we’ve ever known, who has watched us grow from boys into the men we are today.

In all those years, I’m not sure she’s ever seen us turn on each other.

Until today.

“Fuck!” I charge into the hall and up the stairs, my feet pounding each step, though my heart thuds so loud, I hear nothing except the sound of my own anguish. I steamroll up four flights and stop myself from destroying everything I pass. The paintings on the walls—procured from an art house not all that different from the shop Agent Hale posed in as an employee. The side tables—antiques. The tapestries—older than me. This entire fucking house comprises of furnishings selected over a lifetime by a man with endless supplies of money and taste more expensive than most could afford.

I pass soldiers who wait nervously in inconspicuous places. Their hands twitching. Their guns ready. I storm past bedrooms that belong to my brothers, and I touch nothing.

I wreck nothing.

I clamp down on my bubbling temper and hold it inside my body, like I’ve done for a lifetime already. Swallowing the poison and protecting those I was bred to kill.

But once I reach my room and push the door open, revealing a space bursting with greenery and filled with air that simply tastes cleaner than anywhere else in the house, I cross the room and head straight for the ivy perched atop a two-hundred-thousand-dollar desk that once belonged to pirates. And a queen. And maybe a president, too.

“Micah!” Felix follows me in, his temper bubbling for a fight. “We’re not done discussing this.”

I set my hands beneath the desk and spy the ivy one last time. Its recovering stems. The new shoots, the uncurling leaves. I see the drying soil and the ugly pot.

But then I toss it all. The two hundred pounds of solid walnut, flipping in the air as a dying vine goes with it. “I would have killed her.” I fill my lungs with oxygen. Heaving. Noisily inhaling through my nose so the whistle is audible and the smell of moist dirt penetrates my senses. Then I drop my head and bite down on the emotion clawing along my throat.

Timothy Malone never broke me. In all the years of torture, pain, triangulation, and competition he set between me and my brothers, he never fucking cracked me.

I’ll be damned if Tiia Hale steps in and achieves—finishes—what that prick attempted.

“I was gonna kill her, Lix. I wanted to make her feel what she made me feel.” I claw for air and turn to my brother. “I wanted her to hurt like I’m hurting. I couldn’t do it.”

“I’ll do it for you. You don’t ever have to see her or the body again.”

“Oh god.” I drop into a crouch and hold my face in my hands. “I raped her.” I scrub at my face and know, today, I became the man I abhor more than any other. “That was rape.”

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