Page 4 of Ruthless Reign

“Becca, don’t,” Kaleb warned again.

I shook my head. “He won’t hurt me.”

“You don’t know that. When he gets like this?—”

“He’s hurting, Kale,” I tried again, the next crashing sound punctuating my words. “He’ll hate himself if he wakes up and the whole fucking house is destroyed tomorrow. We have to snap him out of it. We have to stop him. I have to stop him.”

Kaleb’s face reddened and his shoulders rose, eyes shifting between mine as he tried to think of an argument that would sway me and likely saw that he wouldn’t come up with one.

I was right. Someone needed to get him out of his head.

I knew what he was doing. I’d seen it before. With Corvus. And my best friend, Ava Jade. I wouldn’t let him erase the pain with rage. It wouldn’t fix anything. It was only going to make things so, so much worse.

“Fine, but I’m coming with you.”

I nodded.

Kaleb followed close at my heels as I entered the house, my pulse thudding in my ears.

“Me first,” Kaleb said, rushing to get ahead of me, taking a deep breath and rolling his shoulders back as he approached Hardin’s door, looking at it like it might fly off the hinges and splatter him against the wall.

Something hard knocked against it, making him jerk back and shake his head.

He knocked at the door. “Hardin?”

Something knocked into the door again, harder, rattling the hinges. A physical manifestation of the words fuck off in Hardin speak.

I sucked air in through my teeth.

Enough.

Before I could think too much about it, I knocked Kaleb aside and pushed into the room over his protests behind me. Hardin whirled on me in the dark with a sneer on his lips. A monster amid the carnage of what used to be his room but now looked more like a fucking junkyard.

“Out,” he hissed.

“Becca,” Kaleb pleaded behind me. “Come on, leave him?—”

I crossed my arms over my chest.

“You about done?” I asked Hardin with a raised brow, pretending my heart wasn’t about to leap out of my fucking chest.

His nostrils flared and his dilated eyes widened at my tone.

“Oh fuck,” I heard Kaleb curse behind me, but when he went to pull me away, I evaded his reaching hand, stepping closer to the hulking form of Hardin in the middle of the mess he made.

“You’re acting like a child,” I scolded.

“Kale,” Hardin growled. “Get her the fuck out of here.”

That might’ve been the most I’d ever heard him speak, but he wasn’t looking at me, and I wasn’t having it.

“Come on?—”

I turned on my heel, gave Kaleb a shove that took him by surprise and slammed the door, locking it.

“Becca!” he shouted through the wooden pane, banging on the other side.

“I’ll be out in a minute,” I called back.

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