Page 2 of From the Ashes

The cold air whips around me as I run down the porch steps and straight up the street, and I don’t stop running until my lungs can’t take it anymore.

I duck into an alley and drop down against the brick wall, ignoring the pain in my ribs as I slide to the ground.

Not for the first time, I wonder if death would be an easier option. If it would be an appropriate end to a life full of pain and suffering.

CHAPTER ONE

KOVU

PRESENT DAY

The panic beating through the warehouse is nothing compared to what has taken root in my chest. I shut this part of me off so many years ago I forgot what it felt like to care about something.

About health. About safety. About another human being.

But my little lamb brought that back. The cold, fearless monster I was two months ago has been replaced with something worse, something more terrifying. Because a monster that has something to lose will stop at nothing to keep that thing safe. There’s no line he won’t cross, no one he won’t hurt, nothing he won’t do, and as my eyes dart around the smoky warehouse, I realize just how far I’ll go for Camilla De Marco.

I can hear Crew and Bishop behind me, but I’m too far gone. The itching beneath my scarred skin is becoming unbearable, and the only thing that will soothe it is the woman who took my cold, dead heart in her hands and made it beat again.

“Kovu, slow the fuck down.” Bishop grabs my shoulders from behind, but I twist out of his hold and keep moving down the hall.

I throw the office door open and find it empty, but through the smoke, I can smell sex lingering in the air. No one outside the four of us has a key to this room, so it must have been Kaos and Camilla.

When I notice the door at the end of the hall wide open and the cool evening air wafting toward us, I don’t bother checking any other rooms.

As we step outside, I force a deep breath of fresh air into my lungs, but it does nothing to settle my raging heartbeat.

“Over there!”

Bishop pushes me forward, and before I realize what I’m doing, I’m sprinting toward the two figures with their backs to us.

Camilla’s silver dress is rumpled, and even from behind she looks freshly fucked, but then I notice the tension in her shoulders, and it makes me pause for long enough to take in Kaos’s huge form. He’s holding onto her like his life depends on it.

There’s someone standing in front of them but I can’t quite make them out. Is that why Kaos is holding her like that? Is someone threatening her?

An explosion vibrates across the ground, and I turn back to the warehouse, to the fight club I built from the ground up, as the flames climb higher and smoke billows from the roof.

By the time I turn around again, the man who was with Camilla and Kaos has turned his back on us, and he’s lost in the sea of bodies escaping the warehouse.

Who was that? And why do my girl and my brother both look like they’ve seen a ghost?

CHAPTER TWO

KAOS

There are few things that have ever had the power to shock me.

The car Crew bought me on my sixteenth birthday. It was a piece of shit that should have been wrecked years before it was gifted to me.

My ability to fall in love with Camilla after being betrayed by Bianca.

And staring my dead father in the eye.

Honestly, that last one probably takes the cake. It would be weird if it didn’t.

I open my mouth to say something, anything, but quickly find myself snapping it shut again. There are no words that seem like enough right now, even if there are a million and one questions I should be asking him, not least of which is where the fuck he’s been.

His dark eyes, so like my own, flick from me to Camilla with amusement toying at the corners of his lips before they flick behind us.

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