CHAPTER 1

Tristen

18 months ago…

What the fuck is wrong with me?

I must be the worst father of all time. Not only did I just make a deal to hand my daughter over to a narcissistic prick who’s actively trying to bleed my business dry, but I’m standing in the middle of my ballroom, nursing a drink and waiting for her best friend to show up like a goddamn pervert.

I’m on edge, my skin crawling with a restlessness I can’t shake, and then I feel her. I feel her the second she walks into the room.

The hair on the back of my neck stands up and every drop of blood in my body rushes south. I adjust my stance so I can see her over Cole’s shoulder, never breaking from the bullshit explanation I’m giving my best friend about what’s going down tonight.

And there she is. Waverly Rochester.

She’s dead center of a group of Fallon’s school friends, telling some story with her hands while they hang on every word. Lucky fuckers. How could they not? She lights up the whole fucking room without even trying, and it makes the darkness staining my soul feel a hundred times heavier.

I’m a fucking masochist for even looking, but I’ve never been able to turn away from her for long, and I’ve stopped pretending I want to.

She throws her head back, laughing, and I feel the pull in my gut so hard my weight shifts forward. It’s only one step, but I manage to catch myself before the second one. I side-eye Cole, but he’s too busy with his own demons to notice mine.

Shit, that was close.

I loosen my tie because the silk feels like a noose. Sweat prickles along my spine. I force a burning sip of liquor down my throat, trying to drown the urge to walk over there and ruin her. Everything—faces, voices, the thudding beat of whatever my daughter's friends are blasting through my sound system—fades out between us. There’s only her. This obsession has festered for… too fucking long. It’s toxic, and it’s mine.

No matter how much it hurts, I’ll never give it up. I’ve almost come to crave the pain of not having her.

But that doesn’t mean I can give in. Not with my wife lurking around, waiting for any weakness she can exploit. Not without knowing how my daughter would react.

I force myself to turn back to Cole. He's standing next to me pretending to listen to whatever’s coming out of my mouth while his eyes keep cutting toward the door. He's waiting for someone, and I've got a decent idea who, but that's a problem I'll deal with another day. Right now, I have my own addiction to manage.

"Have you heard anything I've said in the last five minutes?" I ask him, mostly because I haven't heard anything I’ve said in the last five minutes, either, and I need to know how much damage control I need to do.

"Sorry, I guess I'm preoccupied." He takes a sip of his drink and does that thing where he forces himself to look at me instead of wherever he really wants to look. I know the move because I’ve mastered it so well I could teach a fucking class on it.

"You going out after this?" I ask. He feeds me some lie about business. I nod like I buy it, but my soul is already drifting back to the girl across the room.

She shifts, tucking a loose curl behind her ear, and when she does it she tilts her head to the side, exposing her neck. My fingers tighten on my glass and I swallow down a groan. Her skin would look so pretty with my marks all over it.

I’m so distracted, I don’t hear Beckett approach. One second I’m alone, the next he’s just there at my shoulder, staring at the crowd like a butcher weighing a carcass. He isn't seeing a party; he's sizing up the meat, his eyes as flat as a goddamn headstone. To anyone else, he’s a walking nightmare, but to us, he’s just Beckett. Our brother.

"Just how drunk am I going to need to be for this?" he asks, his voice a low, dry rasp that sounds like it belongs in one of his own horror novels.

"A light buzz never hurts." I clink my glass against his as Romeo, Xander, and Lucas close in around us. The Savage Six. The only men on the planet I trust with my life, though lately there are things I'm keeping from all of them.

Xander’s in his clericals—the black suit and Roman collar—looking like a giant middle finger to the Vatican. Cole nearly chokes on his drink. With those mismatched eyes—one blue, the other brown—Xander looks every bit the demon his parents spent his childhood trying to exorcise out of him. He’s feral and completely unhinged, a wolf wearing the skin of a shepherd just so he can tear the flock apart from the inside.

"It's still weird as fuck seeing you in that, Father," Cole says.

"Yeah, but look how fun it is to fuck with people." Xander pulls a flask from his pocket and stalks off, flinging holy water at guests who probably would catch fire if God actually existed. We watch him cackle his way through the crowd, people shrieking and dodging out of his path, and for a second I almost forget the weight sitting on my chest.

Almost.

Because while the guys bullshit about Xander's ordination and whether or not he'll spontaneously combust the next time he steps into a church, I'm tracking Waverly in my peripheral vision. She's drifted to the drink table now, her little dress riding up just enough at the back of her thigh to make my jaw clench.

Some kid from Fallon's school leans in to talk to her, standing too close, his hand hovering near the small of her back like he's thinking about touching her.

My vision narrows.

I'll break every one of his fingers if he does.

"Tris." Lucas's rough voice breaks me out of my murder plans. When I drag my eyes back to my circle, he's watching me with that flat, all-seeing stare of his. His gaze flicks to where mine just was—Waverly—and back to me.

He doesn't say a word. He doesn't have to. We both know who I was looking at.

"Now that everyone's here, can you tell us what the hell you're up to?" Cole says, and I latch onto the conversation in an effort to distract myself. "I thought Fallon's party was going to be small and intimate."

"Yeah, what gives, Tris? This is a shitshow waiting to happen," Xander adds, rejoining our circle after his holy water rampage. His words might say one thing, but the smirk on his face and the brightness in his eyes means he’s hoping shit goes down.

The bikers scattered around the place don't exactly blend with Emerald Hills' elite, and my friends aren't stupid. Time to throw them a bone before they start digging.

"He's got motorcycle club connections I need if I'm going to grow further into Mulberry County, and expand outside of it," I say. "Plus things have been going sideways with my shipments lately, and I think the little weasel might be behind it."

I lay it out for them—Anton, the Fallen Angels, the missing shipments. Everything I’ve been trying to deal with on my own. Beckett connects the dots about Anton's sabotage while Romeo looks skeptical and Cole looks like he wants to put a bullet in someone, which is his default setting but more intense than usual tonight.

While I talk, out of the corner of my eye, I'm watching Waverly weave between bodies. She stops to hug a girl from school, and when she tips her head back to laugh, the line of her throat is a blank canvas I’d give anything to bruise. I want to put my mouth there. Sink my teeth in until she bleeds and moans my name.

Wrap my fingers around it to show her who she belongs to.

"He's not giving you shit out of the goodness of his non-existent heart, so what's he getting in return?" Cole asks, and all five of them turn their attention back to me.

I feel the guilt swell up, but I swallow it down and lock it away where it has no chance of showing on my face.

"Fallon."

The silence that follows is loud enough to drown out the music. But before any of them can rip into me, my phone buzzes—Anton's here—and the next hour becomes that shitshow Xander was hoping for. There are the introductions, the ring, the toast. Through it all, my daughter's face stays blank the way I taught her to when the world's caving in around her. I'm proud of her composure and sick with myself for being the reason she needs it.

Through all of it—the handshakes, the champagne, Anton's slimy grins aimed at my daughter—I keep finding Waverly.

She's my lifeline. My fucked up anchor in a sea of shit I created.

Once, she catches me staring. Our eyes meet, and the impact is so violent I have to look away before I do something that can’t be undone. She’s my daughter’s best friend. She’s barely legal. And I have a target on my back. If anyone knew what she was to me, she’d be the first person they’d come for.

Waverly—bright, beautiful, sunshine-in-human-form Waverly—can’t be taken from this world. I wouldn’t survive it.

And what is she to me?

Everything. She's every-fucking-thing, but she doesn't know it, and that's the only thing keeping her safe.

But knowing all of this doesn't stop me from shadowing her like I’m hunting. She moves to the kitchen, I drift toward the hallway where I've got a sightline into the kitchen. She steps outside for air, I post up by the window. It's instinct at this point, wired so deep into my bones I'd have to rip out my skeleton to stop.

Somewhere around midnight, Anton finally fucks off to charm the tits off every woman in sight who isn't my daughter—confirming every suspicion I had about him being a worthless piece of shit—and I lose Waverly.

One second she's near the edge of the dance floor, moving her hips and throwing her arms over her head while she dances, and the next she's gone.

I cut through the ballroom, scanning faces as I go, but there are too many bodies and none of them are hers. She's fucking nowhere.

Romeo's talking to me as he keeps pace—I think it's about Anton—and I respond on autopilot because my brain's already gone somewhere dark. Where the fuck did she go? Who's she with? If asshole has his hands on her right now—

I drain my drink and set the glass down on a passing waiter’s tray.

"I need some air," I mutter to Rome, cutting him off mid-sentence. Then I head for the stairs before he can ask questions. Like fuck I need “air.” What I need is to make sure no one’s touching what belongs to me.

The party noise fades as I take the stairs two at a time, the bass turning into a dull thud beneath my feet.

I reach the top of the stairs and pause, my hand instinctively going to my hair, pulling until it hurts.

What the fuck is wrong with me? I have no right to these feelings. I’ve killed more people than I can count, and yet a teenage girl has me falling apart.

The way I want her isn't healthy. It's a fucked up, possessive tangle of feelings I'd do anything to get rid of but know I never will. I close my eyes and breathe through the rage.

If I let myself touch her, I know I’ll destroy her. But no one else can have her, either. Not as long as I’m breathing.

Upstairs it's dark, just moonlight spilling through the window at the end of the hall, and I want to kick every door in until I find her. Because bedrooms are up here. Beds are up here. And if some piece of shit lured her up to one of them, if she’s behind one of these doors with someone’s hands on her body, I will paint the walls of this house with his blood.

I might even let Xander or Beckett have a turn with him before the end.

The worst part of all of this is I know she wants me, too. That doesn’t stop the fucked up intrusive thoughts going through my head right now. Every step down this hallway is another image I can’t stop—Waverly pinned against a wall, underneath someone, saying someone else’s name—and each one turns my stomach so violently I taste bile at the back of my throat.

Until I round the corner.

And there she is, coming out of Fallon’s bedroom. Alone.

Fuck.

The air rushes back into my lungs so fast it burns, and then I'm just… fucked. Because the fury doesn't leave, it just twists into something feral and hungry and I want to grab her, drag her into me, put my hands on every inch of her skin to prove to myself no one else has touched it.

She looks up and our eyes meet, her bright blues widening in surprise before she gives me one of her heart-shredding smiles.

Fuck.

My heart pounds, my dick already to half-mast anticipating something that it’s not going to get as I force myself to keep walking. I don't stop. I can't stop. My hands are shaking as it is and my restraint is holding on by a single, fraying thread.

I bite back a groan when her sweet scent hits me and my mouth waters. Goddamnit.

"Tristen," she calls, her voice soft and husky as it wraps around my cock like a fist. "Wait."

I tense, hands curling into fists at my sides as I turn to face her. She's so fucking beautiful, I get another hit of agony just looking at her. Her eyes are bright and wide, her cheeks flushed pink from the party downstairs.

Or maybe it’s because of me and how close we’re standing.

I swallow hard, trying not to stare at the way her dress hugs her body, but it's impossible. She's fucking perfection, but I don’t think she knows the kind of affect she has.

It's dark, but the moonlight pouring out of Fallon's open door behind her lights up her blonde curls and makes her look like an angel.

The angel of death because before this is over, she might just kill me.

"What’s up?" I ask, my voice flat as I force myself to keep my expression blank, to not reveal how fucking obsessed with her I am. How close I am to losing my shit.

She bites her lip, a nervous habit that makes me want to sink my teeth into her flesh and mark her as mine. "I…” She takes breath so deep, I feel her exhale on my skin. “I was wondering if we could talk."

Fuck no.

I can't let myself get sucked in. I need to keep my distance to keep her safe, but it's impossible when she looks at me like that.

Like she wants me.

Like she needs me.

"About what?" I ask, my voice low and gruff, harsh even, as I try to ignore the way she's looking at me and how it’s making my dick hard and my head dizzy.

Her eyes dart to my bedroom door and then back to mine, her cheeks flushing pinker as she steps closer. "It's... personal."

Fuck.

Fuckinggoddamnitshit.

My heart pounds harder than the bass rattling the floor, my cock throbbing in my pants as I fight the urge to drag her into my room and ruin us both.

But I can't.

I won't.

Not with Erika downstairs, waiting for me to fuck up so she can destroy everything I've worked for.

So I force myself to turn away, ignoring the way Waverly's eyes dim with hurt. The way putting that look there fractures something inside my chest.

"Please."

The quiet word in her pretty voice dismantles me.

It crumbles every defense I’ve got like a castle made of sand.

And I'm fucking drowning in her.

A/N: This is the current version of this chapter as of 4/22/26