Chapter 176

KYRIE.

My back hit the fucking wall so hard the window rattled in its frame, and I laughed, because there was nothing else left in me to do.

"Stop it!" Eve screamed before I'd even peeled myself off the plaster. "Saint, stop! Please, stop it!"

I could still taste her on my mouth. That was the tragedy and the comedy of it — I had her for ten seconds, and I was going to spend the rest of my life inside those ten seconds, however long that turned out to be, which judging by the look on Saint Rollins' face, was going to be a very short lease.

His eyes were red.

This wasn't the flicker I'd seen in Africa. This was full red, wall to wall, blood-cursed red. The whites of his eyes were drowned, and Valor was so close to the surface that the air in that little room had gone cold and thick like the seconds before lightning.

"Perfect timing as always," I rasped. "Always arriving right at the end of everything."

He hit me.

I didn't see it come. That's how I knew he'd stopped being entirely a man — I've fought Saint Rollins a hundred times, sparred with him, bled with him, learned the specific mechanics of his shoulders, and yet, I did not see this one come.

My head snapped sideways, and something in my cheekbone gave with a wet crunch. The taste in my mouth stopped being Eve and started being copper.

Fucking good.

"Saint!" Eve screamed again, coming closer, her voice already fraying at the edges. "You'll kill him! Stop!"

"That is the general idea," Saint said, and his voice had gone so low. "Go and sit down, Eve. This will take a while."

He wasn't lying. We were both past reasoning now. All we wanted was blood.

I came off the wall swinging.

I caught him across the jaw with everything I had, and his head barely moved, which was insulting, so I drove a knee toward his ribs, and he absorbed it like a door taking a knock. His hand closed around my throat and lifted me until my feet came off the floor. I looked down into the face of the man who had been my brother for all these years and saw absolutely nothing left in it that I recognized.

"You put your hands on her." He said through gritted teeth. "While she begged you to leave. You've got some fucking nerves, Kyrie Graves."

I grinned at him with my teeth full of blood.

"She kissed me back. Did you know that?"

She didn't. She fought me. She screamed into my mouth, but I did it anyway, and I would carry that for whatever I had left — but I said it because I wanted him to do it. To kill me. That's the truth. I wanted him to finish it.

Because what exactly was I going back to?

My entire secret about Riley was out now. Eve had looked me in the face and called me a monster. My mate — my mate, the one thing in this world the goddess ever handed me — could not stand the sight of me and had the bond to prove it.

'So yes. Finish it, brother. You'd be doing us both a service.'

"Fifteen fucking years," he said, ignoring my taunt and holding me there like I was a piece of paper, studying my face with that detached curiosity he used when reading a menu. "I gave you my back for fifteen solid years. I grieved in front of you. I hunted the men you sent to rape her, one by one, and you said nothing." His grip tightened by a precise, unhurried degree. "You let me mourn her to your face, Kyrie. And then you had the nerve to put your teeth in my mate while she screamed for me."

"Your mate?" I choked it out around his fist and grinned with my teeth full of blood, because mockery has always been cheaper than honesty and guilt, and I was running low on funds. "Check her neck, brother. Read the signature."

He threw me across the room.

I went through Eve's dresser. The items on the table went everywhere as I landed in the wreckage of it with a shard of a sharp object buried in my forearm. My shoulder screamed from the socket.

Eve shrieked, covering her ears with her palms. "Both of you, just stop!"

I got up.

Of fucking course, I got up. Vyre was howling while I was laughing like a fucking maniac.

"That's all you got for me, Saint fucking Rollins?" I cracked my neck. "Fifteen years and that's all you've got? No wonder you couldn't save her."

He came at me again, and this time I met him head-on.

Eve was sobbing as she reached us, her fists landed on his back, on my chest, on whatever piece of us she could reach.

"Kyrie, please." Her hands rested on my arm. They were shaking and had no grip in them at all, and she was pulling with the strength of wet paper. "Please, I'm begging you, stop, I can't— please—"

She said my name. Not his. Mine.

She begged me, and the plea went through my chest like the shard in my forearm, because begging me to stop hurting people was the only kind of faith she had left in me, and I couldn't even honor that.

Saint shoved her gently backward out of the reach of our violence — gently, even mid-fight, with murder in his eyes.

Jealousy bit through me at the tenderness of all of it, as he hauled me up by the collar and hit me twice more. The second one took the hearing out of my left ear and replaced it with a high whine.

We hit the floor together. It slowly stopped being a fight, and became something uglier with years of pent-up anger and unresolved issues... My thumb going for his eye, his forearm crushing down across my windpipe, both of us grunting like animals.

He was stronger. He has always been stronger.

I got a fistful of his hair and slammed his head into the floorboards. I felt the impact travel up my arm while he didn't even blink. He just kept pressing down on my throat with that terrible patient weight of his, and my vision started going grey at the edges.

"Stop it! Saint! You'll kill him!"

I clawed at his wrist, not to break the hold, but to feel it.

My life came flashing before my eyes as memories resurfaced. I let him take my job because he needed the win. He put himself between me and a bullet in Kraków. We buried great men together. He was the only person alive who ever looked at me and didn't ask me to be someone I wasn't. He took me as a brother and accepted my darkness instead of trying to change it.

And what did I do in return? I watched him grieve a girl I sent to her death.

I betrayed him and watched him languish for years.

And the fucking twist of it all? I would do it all over again, exactly the same way.

That is the thing nobody will ever understand about me. That is the whole disease.

I was a selfish bastard. And I wasn't sorry for it, even in my last breath.

I love the people I destroy. And I destroy the people I love. Both things all the way down. There's no bottom to either.

He let go of my throat, dragged me off the floor again, and hit me once more.

"—look at me." He bit out.

Blood gushed out of my nose and mouth.

I welcomed the fucking pain. That was the only thing I felt that wasn't my obsession for Eve.

I looked at him.

"Do you know the truly funny part?" I laughed into his face, my words tumbling their usual way when the last of my control burns off. "You're going to kill me, and it still won't make her yours. You'll bury me and stand at my grave the way I stood at all of yours, and every night for the rest of your life you'll feel my mark on her neck like a joke with no fucking punchline. Till death do us part, Saint fucking Rollins. I made sure of it."

In his eyes, I saw red. All red. And behind the red, way down under the curse and the rage, I saw the thing I'd been waiting fifteen years to finally see and had somehow never braced for. Saint Rollins was going to kill me.

I smiled at him.

"Do it," I said.

His fist drew back.

And then Vyre went silent.

He didn't just go quiet. No. He went absolutely silent, like a hand closing over a mouth. He'd been snarling in my skull for the whole fight, and then he simply stopped, all at once, and every hair on my body stood up because I have never in my life felt my wolf do that.

Suddenly, the bond went taut.

Then slack.

I don't know how to describe what slack means in a mate bond. There's no word for it. It's the feeling of reaching for a wall in the dark and finding open air where the wall should be.

That was when I understood what was wrong.

Saint felt it in the same half-second. I watched it hit him — his fist remained cocked, his whole body went rigid, and the red drained out of his eyes so fast it was like watching a lamp die.

We both turned our heads at the same time.

And, fuck me to death, Eve was on the floor, while the mark on her neck — my mark, mine, the one I put there — was black at the edges.

Fuck.