Page 68 of Brutal
I won’t give him that much.
He steps closer. “You went to her after the search. You put your hands on her. You kissed her instead of shutting her down.”
My middle brother notices everything. He clocked the swollen lower lip. Maybe something else about me. No problem. A beast doesn’t try to hide.
“You’re not protecting the family,” he continues. “You’re not even protecting yourself.”
I curl my hands into fists. “Say it again,” I tell him.
His merciless green eyes hold mine. “She’s a weakness.”
I am twenty-two again for half a second, standing in a training room with blood on my knuckles and my father telling me the first man to name your soft spot is the first man to use it against you.
I learned that lesson.
I learned it well.
Which is why it takes everything in me not to drive Nathaniel backward into the mantel and teach him a different one.
Instead I smile. “Be very sure of your next move.”
He folds his hands behind his back. “That sounds almost protective.”
“It is.”
“Of her?”
I close the distance, chest to chest now, the fire snapping behind him. He doesn’t flinch. I didn’t think he would. We’re Vexley men. Flinching was trained out of us before we were old enough to shave.
But he knows exactly how dangerous I am.
“She keeps digging,” Nate says quietly, “and she won’t get another warning.”
I hear what my brother isn’t saying.
She keeps digging and the people who only searched this time will return with a different purpose.
She keeps digging and I may be ordered to be the hand that ends it.
When I was young, my father told me the story of Samson in the Bible, my namesake. He loved that story. Loved to remind me how the strong fall. Not because the world defeats them, but because they mistake desire for devotion. Because they let themselves be made foolish by a woman.
It was a warning.
I look at Nate.
In another life, in another family, maybe he and I could have been allies. But Arthur Vexley didn’t raise allies. He raised tools. Different edges of the same blade.
Nate is the hand that signs.
I am the hand that breaks.
And Cain?—
Cain is the son our father watched in silence, because even he knew some monsters are born, not made.
For one second, I think of my youngest brother, the silent genius who learns more by looking than by doing. If he were here, Cain would laugh at this. He’d call it inevitable. He always did enjoy watching men walk willingly toward the one thing that could ruin them.
I take a breath through my nose. Let it out slow. “She is not to be touched,” I say through a clenched jaw.
