Lucas She didn’t just sleep with him.She made sure I heard it. The sound of her moaning for someone else—his name echoing through the walls of my own home—wasn’t just a knife to the chest.It was the entire blade, twisted.And I let it happen.I could’ve stopped it. I could’ve had him dragged out, torn apart, erased.But I didn’t.I sat in this goddamn study like a king on a crumbling throne, listening to the only woman I’ve ever craved let another man wreck her between my walls, on my territory, under my command. This is not the first time she has done something like this. She had always done it, and it hurts.I clenched my jaw so hard my teeth ached.The whiskey bottle was almost empty. I hadn’t touched the glass. Just drank straight from the neck, like the burn might somehow cauterize what she’d done.But the worst part—the sickest, most unholy part—was that I got hard.Hearing her voice, hearing him take what should’ve been mine… I wanted to tear the door off its hinges and take
Selina's POVThe cold in Lucas’s house hit different. It seeped, like the echo of an insult, through the double-glazed glass and steel, curling up from the white marble under my bare feet. I sat at the foot of the guest room bed—my bed now, I guessed, since my own apartment had been torched to hell—and watched the city smear itself against the dawn. A dull bruise of orange and gray pressed the skyline, the sun struggling to make it through the exhaust and anxiety that ran this city.I could still smell Jonathan on my skin. The scent was cut through with Lucas’s aftershave—a rich, surgical kind of clean that lingered on sheets and doorknobs and the insides of my elbows. Even the bathroom soap was branded, bespoke, and aggressive. Every corner of this place broadcasts his presence, a silent intercom of power. It would have felt like luxury, if not for the knowledge that I was here on borrowed patience. Lucas was the last thing between me and a shallow grave, or at least unemployment so
Vera’s POVThere’s a difference between watching and waiting.I had done both.Since the moment Selina stepped foot onto Blackwood territory, her son in tow and her past wrapped in secrets too sharp to touch, I had kept my eyes open and my silence tighter than steel. Not because I didn’t trust her.But because I trusted her too much.Selina Carter was brilliant. Brave. Dangerous in the way only a woman who’s been broken and rebuilt can be. But she wasn’t cold. Not really. That was what worried me. Because cold women survive. Warm women burn. And Selina… was starting to melt again.And Lucas? Lucas was flame incarnate.They were playing with fire, both of them, and neither realized the forest they were standing in was bone-dry.That was why I found myself pacing toward Grant’s room that evening. Because I knew what Selina was doing—using Jonathan like a blade, slicing open old wounds she hadn’t let heal. And I knew Lucas. He was already bleeding under all that armor, but he’d never sho
LucasSelina sauntered over, glass shards glittering in her palm, and crouched in front of me, her thighs spreading just enough for me to glimpse the slick wetness between her legs. Her scent hit me like a fist.She put her face close to mine. “You can either hate me for what I did, or you can admit you want me, Lucas. But pick one.”My tongue was thick in my mouth. I could taste her, and I hated how much I craved it. I did this because I thought she was going to be soft on things after moving here, that I would get a chance with her. Fix things, but no, I dug my own fucking grave because Selina hates me.“You think I want you after this?” I spat, gesturing at her, at Jonathan.She shrugged. “You never stopped wanting me. I can smell it.” She pressed her palm to my chest, sticky with her own blood. “But you had your chance, Lucas. And you threw me away.”Jonathan watched, his eyes bright. He didn’t get it. He never would. I mean, he's human, but I don't buy that human shit.“Why him?”
LucasI sat on the torn leather couch, elbows braced against my knees, breathing through clenched teeth. My fists left imprints in the dead animal hide. I watched a fly dance around the mouth of an empty bourbon bottle, my gaze trying to burn the bug out of existence, but I knew it wasn’t the fly I hated. It wasn’t the bottle, or the half-lit, dingy living room, or even the dull ache grinding between my temples.It was me.Maybe that was why Selina did what she did. Or maybe it was payback, but it has always been payback when it comes to her. I deserved it—I’d humiliated her in front of the whole fucking pack, rejected her under the full moon, like she was some whore and not the woman the fates dropped in my lap. But I’d never—never—done what she just did to me or what she has been doing to me lately. Not this. Not bringing another man into my house, fucking him, letting him mark everything with his scent while I sat in the next room, half drunk and pretending I didn’t care.Selina’s
Jonathan's POVBlackwood's place was as predictably sterile as the man himself—high-gloss marble in the foyer, gold accents everywhere, not an ounce of personality in the entire mausoleum. Even the air was cold, like he'd figured out a way to refrigerate the oxygen to chill off his guests before he even had to look at them. I stepped into the atrium with the sort of flourish I knew would make the help anxious, my boots echoing on the stone like gunshots.I didn’t bother to announce myself. If you’re going to insult a man’s hospitality, you may as well let him catch you in the act. I tossed my coat at a startled maid, nearly bowling her over with the force of my disregard, then made a beeline for the grand staircase that split the entrance like the jaws of some ancient beast.The house was full of the usual empty aristocrat chatter, which I cut through with a smile that showed every tooth. I made no detours, didn’t linger to chat with some hollow-eyed diplomat, or exchange thinly veile