Page 68 of Seizing Control: Part Two

“Go back to sleep, sweet thing.” Trailing my fingers over her bare shoulder, I do my best to keep my voice steady when she flinches away from my touch. “I’ll get the little man sorted if he wakes.”

My woman doesn’t respond. She rolls out of reach, and pulls the covers over her head to block me out. Grinding my teeth to stop myself from pinning her to the mattress and demanding she hear me out, I lace my hands together at my nape and lean back to glare at the ceiling. The scalloped design, illuminated by the blue night light, is a familiar sight. I spend most of my nights staring at it while I breath through cycle after cycle of counting in an attempt to regulate the rage burning within me.

I want to kill Slash.

End of story.

Metukà shelì’s ongoing cold shoulder gnaws at me because I can’t undo the actions that lead to it. My violent explosion when she told me what Slash had done was a lapse in control that I’ve regretted every minute since. The truth is that I wasn’t in possession of my full faculties in that moment. I was wrath and rage. Completely regressed. Every ounce of work I’d put in to better myself was undone in an instant.

I’d been hit with a one-two punch.

Slash brutalised Lily with his actions and his words, then he compounded his sins by serving her with divorce papers and a backhanded version of financial freedom. The egomaniac hurt her, physically and mentally, then threw her to the proverbial wolves. His actions put my sweet thing at risk, and he was too stupid to even realise what he’d done to her.

Cowardly acts from a cowardly man.

I hate him and the effect he’s had on my relationship with Lily.

Restoring the money in the Mayberry siblings trusts was a deliberate shot across the bow. I don’t care how he tries to rationalise it to himself, but his hadn’t done it to help her. He’d done it to show me that he could meddle in my new life—that he was in control. In the meanwhile, just as my plan to use the money to lure Brutus out of hiding was gaining traction, Slash blew everything up.

I’d warned him that I was tracking the money Brutus stole.

My estate, and my father’s was traceable, and so was the funds he’d embezzled from his kids. Brutus’ greed was uncovering conspiracies all over across the country, and into the US. From the Maddison clan to the Du Bois Medical Group, with Layla’s help, my team was growing roots in their digital databases. To have Slash undo my efforts was a stab in the back I didn’t see coming. He alerted Brutus that we were tracking the missing money, and Lily’s father immediately halted his transactions and went to ground.

And then there’s the ramifications for the bigger picture.

The financing for Slash’s plan could only have come from one of two places.

Gabriel Abaddon or the Trinity.

The two institutions in control of my life.

I don’t care how much of a mathematical savant Slash is, it’s impossible to generate that kind of wealth without the tax office paying attention—unless you have someone with the right kind of connections to provide you with untraceable seed money and thwart their investigations. Only the Adjudicator or La Trinitat Nova have the power to pull off that kind of financial wizardry.

Either way it was a fuck you directed at me.

A tightening of the leash around my neck.

Another target placed on Lily’s back to keep me in check.

Thanks to him recklessness, I’ve spent the past six weeks trying to untangle the mess. With Cub and Layla going head-to-head from behind their screens, I’m caught up in chaos and carnage. Schemes and betrayals. My daytime hours are filled with training and killing. The evenings are focussed on working through my list with Layla.

Only the early hours bring me peace.

I get to visit the little man. Marvel at the size of Lily’s stomach. Bask in metukà shelì’s glow as her due date draws nearer. My existence is peripheral right now since Lily refuses to speak to me. I’m being treated like a benign ghost. Allowed to haunt her without acknowledgement. Left to plague her space with my unwanted presence.

Lily could lock me out.

She doesn’t.

My sweet thing could demand I stay away from Garrett.

She hasn’t.

It’s abundantly clear that my woman isn’t in the head space to engage with me. My violent outburst destroyed the tentative connection we’d built since I made her aware that I’m not dead. I reminded her of all the times my unpredictable behaviour scared her. Venom resurfaced at the first sign of danger lurking around Lily. In the process, he reopened her scars. Broke apart the barely healed fissures in her heart.

I fucked up.

And I don’t know how to repair the damage.

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