Page 56 of Beyond Reason

Looking at the man at my feet, the one who I should have had incapacitated and ready to extract information from…

Well, I knew Axel wasn’t the only one ready to light a match.

Chapter 16

Axel

Ineeded Xavier out of the area. I had no idea how far the connections of the people after him went, but I knew that they knew where he was.

Thankfully, taking him elsewhere could serve dual purposes. It was obvious that I couldn’t force his memories on him. I couldn’t just tell him what had happened and hope it would work—the fit he’d had before was enough to scare me off so much as mentioning anything from the past.

It was… odd. I wanted him to remember everything, but I was still terrified of what he was going to do when he did. He’d walked out before. There was nothing to say that he wouldn’t walk out again.

That he wouldn’t blame me.

Then what would I do?

If I could have made sure he was trapped in a room that he couldn’t storm out of, I would have just told him. It might have taken him forever to forgive me, but I was willing to wait for it.

Since I wasn’t prepared for how to handle the situation, leaving town was the best option. There were places we’d been a few hours away from the house that could spark memories for him, and I knew those places had nothing to do with the night he’d died. We could work to see what would trigger memories, and we would be far enough away that I could see exactly how serious the men who were following him were. It was the best solution I could come up with, and Xavier seemed all too happy to play along with my whims.

It meant we ended up in a little house that I owned under a fake name; it sat on the edge of a lake. We’d been here before, and stepping through the doorway made something in my chest feel tight.

It was a cute little vacation home, and one of the multiple properties I had set up all over the country on the off chance that I needed a place to escape. I’d had more than enough money to buy them myself, and a surplus after the death of my father.

No one ever really thought to cut their son out of their will before they were murdered, did they? He certainly hadn’t, and I’d been pleasantly surprised when his lawyer had contacted me and told me he’d left me everything.

Of course, he had. I was his only son, and up until the moment the life left his eyes, he’d always thought he’d be able to control me.

“I…” Xavier cut off my train of thought as he looked around. Maybe it was telling, but I hadn’t changed anything about this place since the last time we’d been here. I’d brought him a few weeks before he’d died, and we’d talked about moving in. He liked that it was isolated, that it was by the water.

I’d liked that he liked it… and honestly, both of us had job descriptions that let us work wherever we wanted, since all it took was a simple phone call and a car or plane ride to get to where we needed to go. Home base could be anywhere. Back then, it had been a secured landline.

Now it was cellphones and computers…

Technology had changed, but I left this place like a capsule, a tribute to everything that I’d never have again. From the look on Xavier’s face, he was very slowly realizing that.

“We’ve been here before, right?” he said. His voice was so soft, and his fingers automatically moved to switch on the lights in the living room as he stepped inside.

We had been here before. It probably felt not that long ago to him, even though I hadn’t stepped foot in this place since the last time we'd come together.

“You used to love it here. We came for the first time in the summer, then you wanted to see the lake in the winter, so we came then, too.” I was careful when I spoke, not revealing too much, wondering exactly what the limit was for how much I could tell him before something happened.

But his eyes were already taking in the room around us, and he was nodding along as I spoke.

“I wanted to live here.” Xavier’s eyes cut to me, and the green was so vibrant against the dark walls and black counters that it made something in my chest ache. He really was beautiful—when he first showed up, I’d thought he looked so different… but he really didn’t. Everything that made up who he was still existed, and on the curve of his lips was the same smile he’d had the last time we were here.

“You did. Do you remember what I said?”

Xavier paused, but his face didn’t screw up in pain, his body didn’t tense. He just turned and ran his fingers along the black marble countertop for a moment before looking at me over his shoulder.

“You told me that you’d give me the world, that you’d buy me a house anywhere I wanted.”

“That’s right.”

“And then I told you that I made more money than you did, so I’d buy you a house anywhere you wanted.” He bit his lip to hide a small smile. “I’m pretty sure we had sex on the countertop after that.”

The memory made my body feel warm, and glancing behind him let a ghost of the moment play in my head—me spread across the black marble with Xavier between my legs, making me squirm and beg until I told him he could do whatever he wanted, he could buy whatever he wanted. We could be whatever he wanted.

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