“Garrett, stop!” Kian looks gray, looks sick, but I’m too far gone to give a shit. Way too far gone to listen. Everything I’ve shoved down for the last weeks and months is bubbling up inside of me until I feel like I’m choking on it. Until I feel like I’m going to explode if I hold it in one second longer.

Blindly, I reach for a tumbler and let that fly too. Then another and another, the sound of breaking glass the only thing keeping me sane as the rage becomes a furor and the furor becomes a frenzy that I can’t hold in. That I can’t shove down, not for one more goddamn second.

I upend the coffee table, then pick u

p a chair, sending it crashing into the French doors that lead to the balcony. The glass shudders under the onslaught, but it doesn’t break.

I want it to break just like me.

I grab a second chair and this time I don’t throw it. Instead, I slam it against the doors with every ounce of strength I’ve got inside of me.

The glass cracks with a satisfying crunch, shards falling out of the individual panes and raining down on my hands, my feet. I’m bleeding now, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but the madness inside me, the need to wreak as much destruction in the world around me as those three months in captivity wrought inside of me.

When the doors are completely destroyed, I turn on the chair itself, beating it against the wall until it breaks to pieces. As I do, I’m aware of what’s going on around me in only the vaguest of terms. I can smell the copper tang of my blood dripping on the carpet, can see Kian circling me, can hear him yelling to the security detail to stay out even as he tries to talk me down.

But there’s a roaring in my ears, an off-rail train careening through my head. And suddenly I’m yelling too, a low, guttural scream that comes from deep inside me.

I’ve lost control now, not just of myself but of the memories I worked so hard to keep at bay.

They flash through me, one after the other, in a rush of sensations that has my head throbbing and my knees knocking together.

Memories of lying, bleeding, on a stone-cold floor for hours—days—darkness pressing in from all sides as time inches forward one excruciating second at a time.

Of pain—overwhelming, all-consuming pain—sliding along my every nerve ending as my body jerks and twitches.

Of terror and then, eventually, relief when the kidnappers held a gun to my head, asking questions and pulling the trigger again and again in their own fucked-up version of Russian roulette.

There are more, so many, many more, and they hit me all at once.

Michael wanted them out and now they’re out. But as I stumble under the weight—under the power—of them all, I throw back my head and howl against the onslaught.

“Jesus, Garrett, I’m sorry.” Kian circles me, arms outstretched like he wants to grab me. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

He’s my baby brother and I want to tell him it’s okay, want to tell him that it doesn’t matter, that I’ll be fine. But I can’t stop thinking of how easy it was for him to talk about the abduction. How easy it was for him to suggest I supplicate myself in front of the King when I’ve done nothing wrong.

He wants me to grovel to my father, wants me to beg him to make me heir again when the throne should have been mine all along? Even knowing that if I do grovel, it will just give the King more power over me. Just give him the ammunition he needs to hold the throne over my head for the rest of his life, threatening to take it away whenever the fuck he wants, and to hell with what I’ve sacrificed for it.

I won’t do it. Not for him, not for me, not even for Wildemar.

The suite door bursts open and I whirl around, the small part of my brain that is still rational expecting to see paramedics or a doctor. Can’t have me doing any more damage to the Presidential Suite, after all. Can’t let anybody know that Gorgeous Garrett is actually human.

The optics would suck.

But it’s not a doctor standing there at the entrance to the suite. It’s Lola, eyes wide and mouth open.

“You’re not here,” I tell her, suddenly afraid that I’m hallucinating. “You’re on a plane back to America.”

“I didn’t go,” she answers, walking slowly, steadily, toward me.

“Get back.” I’m not in control yet and I’m terrified that I’ll somehow hurt her by mistake. “Get out.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

And then she’s charging straight for me. “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay, Garrett.”

I shake my head. “It’s not okay. It’s not.”

Her face crumples, her gorgeous blue eyes filling with tears as she nods. “You’re right. It’s not. But it will be.”

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