Page 41 of The Broken Wolf's Redemption

“You’re an asshole!” she yelped, nerves frayed beyond the point of being childish. “A ball sack of an asshole. You can take your black soul and damn yourself straight to hell for all I care.”

“Already accomplished, darling,” he chuckled, using that term of un-endearment so easily. “See you in a few.”

He walked out her door like he owned her home. Like he owned her body and her heart and her soul. Like he had every right to enter and exit her life and to consume all the hours in between.

She watched him get into his stupid black sedan and drive away. She stood at the window, her own heartbeat drowning out the sounds of her breaths, of Waverly’s even, sleeping, childish snores on the couch, of the night and the city and the entire world around her.

Seren didn’t doubt Rome’s ability to survive. The worst kind of people had an uncanny knack for it. The fear that licked through her veins had everything to do with his breaking point. Where was the line, the brink, the final moment where he surrendered the tattered remains of his soul? She’d kept asking herself what happened to make him the way he was, but that was the wrong question.

It wasn’t what’s turned him into a monster,but what kind of monster can he yet become?

Chapter 14

Rome

Well, shit.

He should have seen that coming. He’d been warned. Now he was driving back to Seren’s condo, leaking blood from two badly bandaged bullet wounds.

It was just before eight, and with any luck, Waverly might still be asleep.

With any luck,he would have been removed from the picture and as he’d stated, Seren, Waverly, and the rest of the people in his life who suffered for knowing him would be free.

It’s only the evil who prosper. I should leave before I ruin anyone else’s life. Fuck that will and fuck what Lila thought was best. Her judgement was shit. She was irrational and unstable. She should never have left her child to me. I’m not better than she was.

As he turned off the freeway, the last turn that would take him through the city and straight to Seren’s warm, cozy little home, he thought about yanking the wheel and going straight. Heading somewhere, anywhere else, changing his name, losing himself, and never looking back.

It would be the right thing.

He didn’t have a great track record for making honorable, decent decisions.

He might have saved a man who was like a brother to him, a guy who’d made a few wrong turns and needed that saving, but he’d unleashed his wolf as a killing machine to do it. He could still taste the metallic tang on the back of his tongue. There was blood caked under his fingernails.

Unbidden, he gagged. He nearly vomited right there while he was driving, but choked it back.

The first killings had been born from a grief-induced madness. He’d barely known himself. Alexander Phaethon needed to die in order to protect his family and his pack. All of that started with him drawing the man’s attention by killing his son who had run with those Rangers. It was his job to be the end as well as the beginning. But this? The men he’d torn through tonight were the worst kind, but they’d been men, and at one time, they’d had souls. Despite their evil, they had families. They were sons and brothers and husbands and maybe fathers. They were also murderers, men who trafficked women and sold tainted product, men who dealt drugs that ruined other people who had families. Chances were good they would have been eliminated by some rival gang or left to rot in prison eventually, but he was still sick at what he’d done.

Honestly, after he’d come to, he’d never been able to make peace with the death of those wolves he’d slaughtered. Nor Alexander Phaethon. He still felt the grief and the wretched, unrelenting guilt.

He was a strong man physically, and everyone believed in every other way. The key to that belief was to paint an unrelenting depiction of that strength. If the world believed he was nothing but cold brutality, then he was nothing but cold brutality, and that was his power. He made himself out as the worst sort of monster so other monsters wouldn’t be tempted to fuck with him.

Where were they, these monsters?

And where was Lila? Buried in the Nightfall Pack’s graveyard.

She was there, under the ground, and he was here, alive, tortured and tormented by grief he couldn’t set aside, forever changed.

The only luck he’d ever had was the wrong sort altogether, and clearly, it wasn’t about to change. Waverly pulled open the door as he edged up to it, trying to hide the limp in his left leg.

“Papa, I was watching for you!”

She knew better than to throw herself at him. She’d only ever calmly held out her arms and let him decide if he was asshole enough to deny a child. He was, but he’d never let her know that. It still felt strange hearing that word from her mouth. Papa. She couldn’t very well call him Rome or Guardian, and he wasn’t her dad, but Papa was more acceptable. He’d picked it out from one of the countless stories he’d read to her.

“I see that you were.”

“I liked the surprise!”

“Oh? That’s good.” Never give oneself away, especially to a child. He’d shoot himself for a third time before he did anything to jeopardize Waverly’s innocence.

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