Devlin UnLeashed(22)

“I don’t want to be like him. I won’t be like him.” He furrowed his brows, the lost look on his face made my heart tighten. I slid in closer, rubbed my hand over the tense muscles in his shoulders.

Though we sat there and didn’t say anything else, the small glimpse into his fears opened my eyes to who he really was. And because he’d let me in, even minutely, I’d fallen for him that much harder.





Chapter Fourteen

Devlin

I sat at my desk, absentmindedly rolling a set of Baoding balls in my hand. It was late, and the city lights shone in through the large windows. The office was dark, and I’d sat there for hours pretending the stress balls could ease the tension pulsing in my head. If anything, the longer I sat there, the deeper I sank into the memories.

It was six years ago to the day. The moment that both ruined and saved me. The day I’d first met Juliana and changed in the course of her life. I had to believe our paths crossed for a reason. We wouldn’t be together this way if not for that day all those years ago. But then again, if she realized who I was, she’d run indefinitely.

There was a soft knock on the door, and then it quietly swung open behind me. I cast a glance over my shoulder and nodded.

“It was him.” The confirmation I’d been waiting for. Without waiting for a response, Brody backed out of the room and left me in the shadows.

Damien Ward had been spotted. Four years of searching—hunting the man like the savage beast he was, and once we got him in our sights, he disappeared. I’d done a lot of deplorable things to make it this far. Corrupted my soul, stained my hands with the kind of moral ruination that couldn’t be washed away. I’d long since veered off course. It was a road that didn’t increase my illness, but it shaped it into something far more dangerous. I’d promised my brother I was done. It was the only way I’d be capable of living with the possibility of schizophrenia, but now, with the surfacing of Damien...

Nothing was off the table.

Damien had left me to deal with his fallout, and everything wouldn't be settled until I'd dealt with him.

“Where’s your father?” Tommy Moretti pulled my head back by my hair, causing pain to jolt from my wrists, which were strung up by a rope hanging from the ceiling.

I refused to answer and received a heavy slam of a fist to my ribs. I groaned, my body sagging, yet I fought to straighten as my wrist threatened to separate from my arm.

“A Ward through and through. No snitching and no man left alive. That last part is starting to sound like something I should adopt.”

“I told you I don’t know,” I grumbled. Damien had run off after concocting an elaborate plan to steal over a million dollars from the Morettis. If I had the information they wanted, I wasn’t sure I’d give it to him. I’d like to think I’d sell Damien out and watch him finally eliminated from my life. But I knew how these things worked—the only reason I was still alive was because they needed to use me to bait Damien into coming out of hiding. And he would. Or at least, I thought he would. There was no love lost between us, but I’d thought he’d do what it took to preserve someone he spent his life raising to succeed him—his reputed carbon copy.

I’d been wrong. Damien was too much of a self-absorbed asshole to risk himself for his son, even though I knew it wouldn’t take much effort for him to eliminate everyone in the room to rescue me.

Throughout all the torture and the gruesome messages from Tommy that I knew Damien’s henchmen would get to him, he never came. For two months, I was barely given enough food to survive. I’d lost weight, became frail, and was spoon fed the kind of bullshit that fucked my mind up worse than it had been.

Those months in that tiny, cold cell had triggered the onset of my illness. I’d hallucinate, spent hours arguing with my dad, saw my mom throughout the night, and fought to figure out what was really happening and what was a figment of my imagination. I dreamt of an angel who had disrupted my life years ago. I wondered if I’d ruined her worse than Damien had done me. I’d given up in that cell. I stopped caring about the real and the imagined. I was ready for it all to end. Then I was leant a hand from an unexpected opponent.

I never was one to believe in miracles and God, but when Trevor Prescott came in that compound, guns blazing, backed up by his military boys, I was sure there’d been some kind of divine intervention.

I heard staccato blasts of gunshots nearing the cell. I braced myself as keys clanked on the other side of the door. Shouts and more pops echoed down the hall. As the door swung open, I stood. If I learned one thing from Damien, it was never die a coward. I wasn’t willing to curl up in the corner and await my death. If I was going out, I’d leave a lasting memory—even if all I really wanted was for it to end.