Once upon a time, Hades nearly killed Lukas Brandt.
It would've been a hell of a cleanup job to disappear the scion of a beer dynasty worth millions, if not billions. Jail time would have been guaranteed.
But that night at the Tessier Ball—with the neck of that man he privately dubbed beer bitch underneath his forearm—Hades more than considered it. He wanted to make Lukas Brandt pay for what he’d done. For talking to his girl at the ball, for insulting her, for ever entertaining the possibility of claiming Persy as his.
Persy belonged to Hades. Not anyone else, no matter what she’d unknowingly led that beer bitch heir to believe. And for that reason, Hades had enjoyed watching the life seep out of Lukas’s formerly smug red face as the guy choked on air he couldn’t gasp.
“Hades, stop! Please don't do this!”
Only Persy pleading for him to stop kept Hades from ending the life of the guy she was with before he ripped her out of her gilded world.
Actually, her pleas hadn't quite been enough. He made her beg—beg and renounce the boy she'd dated before him in the most humiliating way possible while her ex choked and cried.
Only then did Hades decide to let him live.
Hades deeply regrets that decision as he watches the freshly minted CEO enter his abode.
Whistling. Lukas Brandt is actually whistling.
Red floods Hades’s vision.
But he can’t kill him yet. First, he has to know, “Where is she?”
Lukas visibly jolts. Probably because he wasn’t expecting to find Galen “Hades” Fairgood in the front room of his penthouse apartment overlooking Forest Park.
This is the problem with letting people live. Memories fade, and your enemies begin to underestimate you. Until they find you standing in their elegantly appointed living room along with all your museum-level statuary and sleek leather furniture. Like a guest they’d forgotten was coming to visit tonight.
But Lukas hadn't invited Hades here.
In fact, instead of saying hello to his unexpected guest, the beer bitch throws his hands up and squats into some kind of kung fu stance.
Hades rolls his eyes. So many of these silver spoons learned martial arts as opposed to simply agreeing to live under 24/7 guard. It was like they were in denial about gun violence being the number-one problem in America.
Or maybe—like poverty, taxes, and meritocracy—they simply believed such problems didn't apply to them.
In any case, Hades quickly disabuses him of the notion that his hands will help him out of the situation by drawing out his gun before repeating, “Where is she?”
To his credit, Lukas comes out of his useless martial arts stance.
But then he has the temerity to point out, “She’s your wife. Shouldn't you know the answer to that question? Oh yeah…”
Lukas taps the side of his head, as if just now remembering. “She’s not really your wife. That was a lie you made up, along with God knows what else.”
So she knows they aren't really married. A helpless feeling sinks Hades’s stomach. But he presses it down to demand, “What else did you tell her?”
“Just the truth,” Lukas answers with a superior smirk. “That we dated for over a year, and I treated her like gold, only to have her dump me for some motorcycle gang criminal who tattooed his name across her back as if she were a piece of property. And to think, I was so scared about saying the wrong thing when we were dating. She was my first interracial relationship, and I didn’t want to slip up and say something to offend her. Obviously, the optics on that tattoo didn't overly concern you, though.”
Lukas makes a tutting sound. “But you grew up in the South, where they barely bother with historically accurate textbooks. I suppose you'd have to have some kind of education beyond high school to actually consider that.”
His godmother Cherise would always get so upset at the Perreaults for the perceived crime of thinking they were better than everybody else. Hades never got why.
But Lukas Brandt finally brings her point home over a decade after her death.
Hades isn’t sure what’s worse. That the beer bitch is speaking to him like he’s a piece of swamp trash that washed up in his living room. Or that Lukas Brandt’s social commentary about his treatment of Persy is probably right. Another piece of wood added to his pile of regrets.
Either way, that still doesn’t address the Hades’s original question.
The phone in his breast pocket chooses that moment to go off. Hades pulls it out, just to make sure it isn’t Persy. But it’s Waylon. Calling him for the first time since he hung up in a huff when Hades announced he would be going full-time on the construction side of their business.
Hell of a time for his cousin to decide he is ready for them to make up. He sends the call straight to voicemail.
Then turns back to Lukas to repeat the one question he needs the answer to above anything else.
“Where is she?” Hades asks again. And this time, he pulls back the gun slide.
“How do you think this is going to work, exactly?” Lukas asks, crooking his head to the side, as if he’s genuinely curious about the answer to his question. “She already knows you've taken advantage of her at her lowest point, that you’ve been lying to her since she woke up in that hospital bed.”
Lukas waves a dismissive hand at the gun. “You truly think shooting her ex-boyfriend is going to endear her to you? Make her feel better about choosing a piece of scum like you over me in the first place?”
His words worm their way into some nether region of Hades’s conscience. The hidden part of his brain, where he keeps things like morality, his conscience, and the ability to reason when it comes to Persy.
“Probably not,” Hades admits, his Cajun accent coming in thick and cold. “But shooting you straight in the face would make me feel a lot less aggravated right now.”
“I would've married her, you know.” Lukas goes over to a bar set, sitting on top of a side table, and pours himself a glass of Glendaver bourbon. “If she had chosen me, I would've given her a foundation to run, and unlike you, I would’ve kept her life completely drama-free. I never would've lied to her. Under any circumstances. Yet here you are, pretending you have any right to her.”
Lukas turns his mouth down, derision written plainly across his face. “Acting as if it’s completely within your right to break into my home and threaten to kill me because I dared to help her.”
Hades bristles under Lukas’s judgment. This fonchock….
The phone rings again. Waylon’s always been a persistent bastard. Hades sends it straight to voicemail, then lowers the gun to ask Lukas, “When you saw her at the ball, did you ever wonder why she looked so happy to see you? You, somebody she supposedly led on and dumped without a second thought?”
Lukas falters, and his face becomes a little less judgmental.
“She was happy to see you because she thought you would be the one person who would help her get what she wanted most at the ball,” Hades answers for him. “To escape me. She was happy to see you because she never chose me over you. I chose her. I captured her, and I kept her, and then I forced her to lie in order to spare your worthless life.”
“No, no, that can’t be true.” Lukas's voice lowers to a rasp with denial.
And Hades lets his own voice drop a few octaves to inform him, “She didn’t want to be with me. I hadn’t even touched her at that point. She was still a virgin when she ran into you at that ball. And you were her best chance of escaping me back then. But you were so busy judging her, you didn't even give her the chance to ask you for help.”
Strangely, Hades hates Lukas for what he did to Persy. Almost as much as he hates himself. And that hate rings clear in his voice as he tells her unworthy ex, “You're right. You could have been the one she married. Truly married. But when the moment came for you to be a man, a real man, not a snide little beer bitch, you blew it.”
The denial fades from Lukas’s expression, and the smug CEO’s face collapses with horror.
Kill shot.
“You’re right. Shooting you point-blank in the face would only add to my long list of fuck ups where my woman is concerned.” Hades makes a big action of putting away his gun before he says, hitting Lukas with a feral grin, “I'm not going to kill you, Brandt. I'm just going to let you live with that knowledge.”
Lukas doesn’t answer. Hades suspects he’s all out of words. But he barely gets a few seconds to revel in his enemy’s misery before his phone goes off again.
This time Hades decides to answer it. Brandt’s a judgmental contraieuse, and maybe he did help Persy escape somewhere else beyond that five-hundred dollars she took out of her account. But if so, he’s not going to share the details with the fake husband who just admitted to kidnapping her in the first place.
Without bothering to say anything else to the beer bitch, Hades rips the vibrating phone out of his pocket and heads toward the door.
“What?” he growls at Waylon.
“Hey, cuz, how you doing?” Waylon answers. His Tennessee accent is a lazy drawl, as if he was just calling to shoot the shit. After over a year of silence.
“I can't talk right now,” Hades answers.
“Oh, that's too bad,” Waylon answers. “I was just calling to ask why Persy just walked into my wife's clinic, big as day.”
Hades stops dead in his tracks.
Waylon’s wife. The one who had helped her escape in the first place. Amira. Amira Fairgood.
Persy had wanted answers, and she found the one person who could give them to her.