Alpha Damon (Sienna) novel Chapter 219

Giovanni:

The silence in the office was deafening.

There was a coldness in it that I did not want to think about or explain. There was a sense that told me that danger was just starting, and it was not just me who was dangerous. There was danger roaming around me, lurking about like a ghost.

It was a storm. War. And death. The silence carried more blood in it than I expected it to. Then I would want to admit it was cruel, and I knew that no matter how much I wanted to deny, I couldn’t. I was furious.

The desk in front of me had been reduced to splinters, drawers ripped open, papers strewn like corpses across the floor. The chairs were overturned. The whiskey decanter shattered. And the window, once overlooking the grounds like a throne room view, now cracked at the center, a perfect spiderweb from the fist I had driven through it.

My knuckles were still bloodied.

My heart was racing.

My wolf was raging.

But I didn’t care.

I was not going to care about any of this. This blood, this room, everything that was around me, everything that I saw broken, I was not going to care about it.

They had taken him. He had turned on me. Because of them, the one man that I considered my best friend, the one person that I trusted with everything that I had, turned his back on me.

And it all happened because of them.

Nikolai.

Of all the people in this godforsaken world, he had been the last one I thought would raise a hand against me. He’d been my friend. My brother in all but blood. And now… now he was a corpse being wrapped and prepared for burial. Not by my hands, but by theirs.

The same wolves who dared to take Delilah. Turn her against me. Remind her of a gentle side that I believed she had lost, that she did not harm that she was not supposed to have. The same ones who turned Lysandra against me. The people who made her forget who she was and why she was there, what she was fighting to build. The same ones who thought that by saving one broken girl, they could change the course of this empire.

They were wrong.

They just did not see it.

They had only lit the fire that would burn everything down.

And I was that fire. I was going to be sure to make them all lose their minds, their breaths, and everything that they held dear. I leaned forward, bracing my hands on the broken desk, my breath ragged. My reflection stared back at me from the fractured window. My eyes, once sharp with purpose, were rimmed red. Blood-red. The shadows beneath them deeper than ever. My fists were dark with bruises. The blood still spills from them. My blood on the ground as blood was set on the floor. I had refused to allow anyone to clean it, though they had taken his body. He was not even going to be buried here. He was a traitor. I could not bring myself to lose one last sight of him I had.

I had not felt this kind of pain in years. Not since her.

Tatiana.

Not since she ran from me. Not since she died for that damn Lockwood boy.

Not since she looked me in the eye before turning her back on me, telling me that I was going to ruin everything, that I was going to burn everything.

And now her daughter, our daughter, was standing on the other side of the war I built. Had her mother not left, had she made the choice to come with me, maybe she would have known her. But she made the choice, and now her daughter made the same one. She dared to stand in my face and look me in the eye like I was no one. Like I had not fed her, trained her, molded her into the very shadow she’d become.

I should have ended her.

But I didn’t.

Because some part of me, some pathetic thread of humanity, hesitated.

“Tell them to ready the men,” I said. “We’re not asking questions anymore. Anyone tied to the Lockwoods, any sympathizer, any rogue, any traitor, they die. No exceptions. We’re done playing. They’re all going to die and I’m going to be sure that I have their blood. No matter what the price is.”

The man swallowed thickly and nodded, disappearing in a heartbeat.

I looked around the office again. It wasn’t grief in my chest now.

It was something worse.

It was cold. Hollow.

And whatever sense of humanity that I had in me had left when they walked out of that door, when he turned his back on me, they chose to kill the sense of humanity that I believed myself to have.

Like whatever soul had once lived in me had finally decided to burn out.

And with it, my mercy.

Let them come. Let them think they can win.

This was my kingdom.

And I would tear it down brick by brick before I let it slip from my hands.

Until each one of them took his last breath.