The Monster's Dead First Love

At my own engagement party, a woman I'd never met walked in, pulled my fianc's hand off my waist, and set it on hers.

Honey, she said. To my fianc. In front of three hundred people.

Then she turned to me, smiling like we were old friends, and told the room how my story ended. I was a placeholder. The love story had always been hers. I was just the girl who'd get thrown out before the last page.

She believed every word of it.

My fianc didn't argue. He reached into his jacket, and a second later she felt cold steel press flat against her forehead.

Maddox Thorne, the man I had watched empty a room with one look, smiled.

"It took me years to get her to say yes," he said, soft. "And you walk into my house, put your hand on what's mine, and call her disposable."

He tilted the gun.

"I've burned down bigger things for less. Give me one reason not to."

Chapter 1

By the time I reached the bottom of the basement stairs, the man on the floor had stopped forming words.

Maddox stood over him, sleeves shoved to the elbow, not even out of breath. A young guy by the wall held something he clearly wished he wasn't, dropped it the second he saw me, and snapped upright. "He was already crying when I got here. I barely touched him."

The man on the floor lifted his head. "Miss Sinclair." His voice cracked clean in half. "Please. Tell him to let me go. I'll never go near it again, I swear"

I looked at Maddox.

He held out about three seconds.

"Out."

The man half-crawled past me and up the stairs, and the whole room seemed to breathe again once he was gone.

People in this city traded stories about what Maddox Thorne did to anyone who crossed him. The ones afraid of heights went off a bridge on a bungee line until they passed out.

The ones afraid of the dark pulled a night shift in a funeral home, alone with the bodies.

He'd make them beg, make them swear they'd learned their lesson, and then keep going.

That was the man the city knew.

It was not the one walking me up the stairs, half a step behind me the entire way. Never beside me. Never ahead. He told me once it was so I'd never be anywhere he couldn't see.

"You shouldn't be down here," he said, frowning. "Air's bad. You're not well." A pause. "Don't come down again."

"Couldn't sleep." I kept my eyes ahead. "Your room was empty. I knew where you'd be."

I'd known this man a long time. Longer than he thinks. Longer than should be possible.

"Nervous?" he asked. "About tomorrow."

Tomorrow. The engagement. I gave him a small sound that meant nothing and everything at once.

At the edge of the garden he stopped me with a hand and told me to close my eyes.

"I have something for you."

He took my arm, careful, warning me about every step, and walked me forward slow.

"Okay. Open them."

Roses. A whole field of them in furious, full bloom, more than I could count.

The first time I ever gave this man flowers, I put him in a hospital bed. He's allergic to pollen. He spent that entire week swollen and wretched and snarling at me to get out.

He grew me a garden of them anyway. The backs of his hands were scratched raw.

"I planted all of these myself." For the first time all night, the most feared man in New York sounded unsure. "Do you like them?"

I looked at him.

I smiled, and said nothing at all.

Chapter 2

The day I finally went to see him in the hospital, he pointed at the door without even looking at me. Get out.

So I ran out crying.

And the second the car door shut behind me, the tears were gone. Dry. I caught my own reflection in the window and almost smiled.

Good. That was exactly how it needed to go.

He was ten the year he decided he belonged to no one. He refused the family's plans, refused the party, announced he'd spend his birthday wherever he pleased. I'd dressed up that morning to meet him at the Thorne house. He never came home.

There's a thing kids believe: a birthday present only counts if it gets there before midnight.

So I went out into the rain alone, six years old, hugging his gift to my chest, and I found him.

In front of everyone, he looked at it, said he didn't want it, and dropped it in the trash.

A real six-year-old would have sobbed.

I didn't. I'd come back into this life carrying another one, and I'd had Maddox figured out long before that night. So instead of crying I looked up at him, small and pitiful, and asked, "Maddox. Can you take me home? I'm scared of the dark."

He said no, of course.

What he didn't know, what nobody knew yet, was that the sulk that sent me wandering off alone that night was the reason I'd disappear for the next five years.

When they finally found me, I came home with something cold lodged deep in my chest that never fully thawed. White as paper. Barely able to stand. The kind of fragile that makes people ache just to look at you.

The Sinclairs came for me. So did Maddox.

He was different. There was regret in the way he looked at me now. Guilt. Something soft. Not a trace of the old disgust.

Easing me into the car, the boy this whole city was afraid of leaned close and said it very quietly, just for me.

"Seraphina. From now on, I protect you. I am never losing you again."

I kept my head down.

And where he couldn't see it, I let my mouth curve.

He meant every word.

To the rest of the world he stayed a blade. With me he moved carefully, like I might come apart in his hands.

The illness meant medicine, and I hated the taste, so I'd use it as an excuse and pour the stuff down the sink whenever the adults looked away. He caught me at it once.

His face went sharp. Just for a second. Then he swallowed it whole, crouched down to my level, and gentled his voice.

"How are you supposed to get better if you won't take it? Be good."

I turned my head away and didn't answer.

He didn't get angry. He just shuffled around to my other side and started in again.

He was in the wildest stretch of his life back then. Lawless. Untouchable. Not one person alive could rein him in.

But everyone saw it. After I came home, Maddox changed.

He used to sleep through class or ditch it for ball. Now he video-called the hospital just to watch me, or sat taking careful notes so he could catch me up later.

He used to vanish every weekend. Now nobody could pull him anywhere.

The excuses never changed.

"Can't. I have to make sure Sera takes her medicine."

"Not going. Sera spooks easy. She'll be scared if she sees blood on me."

"Sera doesn't like it when I fight. I listen to her."

You could hear his crew dying inside every time. Sera this, Sera that, it's always your precious Sera. You used to bolt the second anyone got close, and now you're trailing her around like a simp who finally found someone willing to let him stay. We can't watch this.

How the mighty fall, big man.

The summer we turned eighteen, on the day they took graduation photos, a boy in my class picked his moment and told me he liked me.

Maddox caught the end of it on his way to come get me.

I heard him before I saw him. That low, lazy, almost-cheerful menace.

"No. She's mine. Get lost."

The boy was gone in seconds.

I tried to slip off too. He caught me, planted one hand flat on the wall beside my head, and shut me into the corner.

This close he was almost too much to look at. All that sharp, expensive beauty, worn with a bored, world-tired edge.

"Seraphina." His voice dropped low. "We're adults now."

"So can I finally tell you how I feel?"

Chapter 3

"I'm sorry," I told him. "I only think of you as a brother."

He even asked permission first. And I still said no.

The little Thorne heir had been buried in love letters since he was old enough to read them. He had never struck out at anything in his life. One sentence from me made him laugh, cold and disbelieving.

It didn't slow him down for a second.

"That's fine. You're only eighteen. Say we both live to a hundred. That leaves eighty-two years.

"So I'll ask you once a year. Eighty-two times.

"I can wait."

Within a year, the whole city knew the truth. New York's little devil had finally found someone he couldn't have, and he worshipped the ground she walked on.

Every year, like clockwork, he staged another confession. He never once gave up.

Everyone around me melted. Say yes, they kept telling me. Put the poor boy out of his misery.

I just smiled.

No rush. It wasn't time yet.

The day I finally said yes, he grinned like an absolute fool.

His hand shook when he took mine. Actually shook.

The crew we'd grown up with lost their minds.

"Thorne, where's your pride? She just agreed to be your girlfriend. If you don't bawl your eyes out the day she says yes to a ring, I'll eat my own tie."

"Even the great untouchable lord of this city, look at him."

"I don't care, the day those two get married I'm wrecking him. He beat the hell out of me when we were kids."

He didn't react to a word of it. He just watched me.

I asked him what he was looking at.

He smiled, soft as anything. "Once you say yes, Seraphina, there's no taking it back. I'm not letting you leave."

I tilted my head, teasing. "And if some girl shows up one day and says she's the one you're supposed to marry? What then?"

"I marry Seraphina. That's the whole list."

He took my hand and pressed my fingers flat to the center of his chest.

"You remember how I taught you to shoot," he said. "If I ever break my word to you, you put it right here."

He wasn't joking. He held my eyes the entire time.

After that we drifted into wedding talk like it was the most natural thing in the world.

And tomorrow was the engagement.

Maddox was a wreck of nerves all night. I stayed calm. Now and then I let my eyes drift toward the doors.

"Sera." My father, beaming for the room. "You and Maddox are family now. You can't go being difficult the way you are at home."

I looked at him and felt nothing at all. Less than nothing. The sheer falseness of him turned my stomach.

I was never close to the Sinclairs. My mother died the year I was born. My father remarried before the grief was even cold, and that house never had room for me in it. The five years I was missing, my own blood searched less than the Thornes did. They actually sat Maddox down and told him to let it go. Bad luck, they called it. She's gone. You have to move on.

When I turned up alive, there was even less room for me than before. I was Miss Sinclair in name and nothing else. The marriage to the Thornes meant they had to smile at me and choke on it.

People are such cheap, crawling things.

Maddox's hand closed over mine. He cut my father a sideways look.

"My Sera is never difficult," he said pleasantly. "So there's nothing to fix. She does exactly as she likes. She could put a man in the ground and I'd hand her the shovel."

That last part nearly made my father drop his glass. He sat back down without another word.

We had just raised our glasses for the toast when the noise started at the doors.

A woman shoved through them, wild-eyed, breathing hard.

"Maddox. You can't marry her."

Chapter 4

You had to hand it to her. She was the first person with the nerve to blow up one of Maddox's events.

I didn't say a word. I just shrank in behind him and let myself look frightened.

Who is she? You could read the question on three hundred faces.

The woman came straight at us, caught Maddox's hand, and gazed up at him like a bride.

"Honey."

The collective thought in that ballroom could have lit the chandeliers: this woman is out of her mind.

Maddox shook her off like something stuck to his shoe. "Get her out of my house."

He'd mellowed over the years. The old Maddox, she'd have left without the hand.

Two of his men got hold of her, and she fought them with a strength that made no sense, glaring at me the entire time.

"Seraphina. It's you." Her voice climbed. "You took everything from me. You're supposed to be dead by now."

I let my face go pale.

Maddox drew me into his side and told her, calm as anything, that one more word out of her and she'd be leaving without her tongue.

"Maddox!" She was crying now, performing it for the whole room. "We're meant to be. I'm the heroine. You're the lead." She threw a finger at me.

"And her? She's the placeholder. The girl the story throws out the second the real love story starts.

"She was never supposed to get to keep you."

Where do they grow them this unwell.

And then her voice simply stopped.

Three hundred people went still at once. She had started to shake, because there was a gun against her forehead.

My fianc was smiling. It was not a kind smile.

"You walk into my house," he said softly, "and call her something you throw away. After what it cost me to get her."

A beat.

"Say goodbye."

I laid my hand over his.

"Maddox. Don't."

He went quiet. And he lowered the gun.

I watched the understanding move across every face in the room. He listens to her. The monster has a leash now, and she's the one holding it. Thank God.

I stepped forward and looked the woman over.

"I don't know what brought you here," I said gently, "or why you'd want to curse me on my own engagement night. But I won't hold it against you. Honestly, your condition just makes me sad. I hope you get the help you need."

Her name was Selene. Selene Mercer. Or to be exact, that was the name that came with the life she had clawed her way into.

She wasn't wrong, for what it's worth. In the story the way it was always meant to go, she really was the heroine.

It just stopped being her story the day I came back into mine.

When I first opened my eyes in this world, something spoke to me. Once.

Make him yours. Make him love you past the point of ever letting go. And when the other one comes claiming he was always meant to be hers, put her in her place.

Finish it, and you go home. Out of this world. Away from him. For good.

Fail, and you simply end. No second life. No next time.

Selene's eyes swung to Maddox, pleading now. "Maddox, you have to believe me. I can tell you everything. Things you know, things you don't. I even know how your mother died."

Something moved behind his eyes.

I didn't react. I lowered my gaze.

She wrenched free of the guards and crossed to him, and her voice dropped soft and coaxing, almost hypnotic. "Let me tell you a secret. I came back to save you. I know every terrible thing that's ever happened to you. Don't be afraid. I'm here now."

His voice came out low. He hadn't looked away from her once.

"Is that true."

"Of course it is, Maddox. I'm your real heroine."

I watched the certainty settle into her smile, and I let the corner of my own mouth lift.

I hope you don't live to regret that one.

Almost everything Maddox is traces straight back to the way his mother died.

I have never once said it to his face. It is the single wound I leave untouched.

Chapter 5

Sure enough, a second later the gun was at her lips instead, and one of his eyebrows went up.

"You want to know what I can't stand?" he said.

She didn't dare make a sound. She just trembled.

"Women with main-character syndrome. Redeem me? I need redeeming, from you?" His voice was almost pleasant. "What story are you telling yourself, exactly?"

It was a happy occasion. Maddox didn't want blood on the floor.

Selene should thank whatever she believed in for that. On any other day she'd have left horizontal.

His men hauled her off to a police station.

Afterward, he stood at the sink and washed his hands. Over and over. Until all ten fingers were raw and red.

I hadn't said anything yet.

He pressed his lips flat. "She grabbed me. I didn't think she'd have the nerve. I didn't get clear in time." A muscle ticked in his jaw. "I didn't want her hands on me."

Then, low and vicious, mostly to himself, "I should've taken them off her for it."

The man who'd had the whole room on its knees a minute ago now looked like a stray nobody had ever wanted.

I bit down on a smile. "Maddox. Don't be a child."

He backed me into the corner, one hand flat on the wall, and started in. A long, low, muttering stream of it, the entire purpose of which was to find out whether I was sick of him.

"I'm not," I said, patient. "You're overthinking it."

A cough cut us off.

One of his men, head down, not daring to look up. "Mr. Thorne. That woman. She's making noise about wanting to see you."

Maddox snapped back into himself in under a second, the fire banked low behind his eyes, every inch of him spoiling for something to ruin.

"Half this city wants to see me. She asks and she gets? You're going to bother me with this? Useless, all of you. Out."

He sent the man scrambling.

Then he turned to me and dropped his head like a kid who'd been scolded. "Sorry. The psycho wrecked a good night, that's all. I didn't mean to raise my voice."

The man who hadn't quite cleared the door yet:

Raise it. Right. That voice could take ten years off a person.

Late that night, at the very edge of sleep, the voice found me again. Faint. Far off. Frayed at the seams.

I'm sorry. I couldn't stop her from coming.

I opened my eyes in the dark and told it that it was all right.

She can't take him from me.

The cell only held her a couple of days. She still hadn't let it go. But this time she came to me quiet, instead of loud.

She got straight to it. "You came back too. Didn't you. With everything you remember."

I gave her a small, empty smile. "Miss Mercer, I honestly have no idea what you're talking about."

"Miss Sinclair. Let me do you one kindness. You and him were never going to make it to the end."

"We're engaged," I reminded her, gently.

She laughed it off. "So? People divorce every day. In this world, the two of you don't get the ending. I do. He chooses me. He ends up mine. Devoted, down on his knees for me."

Simp was not a word that fit Maddox.

Wolf, maybe.

The marks he'd left on my throat the night before, the ones the high collar was working hard to hide, were not the doing of anything tame.

She looked at me the way you'd look at something on the bottom of your shoe.

"As for you." Her voice went silky. "Here's how your story ends. You get eaten alive with jealousy over me. Every person close to you turns their back on you. And then you die overseas, alone, and not one soul comes to claim the body."

She leaned in.

"I don't know why you're still standing here in one piece. But endings don't change. So enjoy whatever days you've got left."

Chapter 6

I curved my mouth and propped my chin on one hand. "Oh, no. How frightening. I'll be sure to treasure every minute."

She wore the face of a woman holding a winning hand. It was all I could do not to laugh.

I held it in.

"Miss Mercer, I do understand the fixation. Wanting a man you can't have will eat you alive. Has it crossed your mind that the one you're actually meant for might be somebody else entirely?"

Her eyes flickered. She glanced away, caught out.

"Fine. I said my piece. Believe it or don't."

I watched her hurry off, and I smiled.

From the back seat, I told the driver to follow her.

Selene's family had money. Just not the kind that means anything in this city.

She showed up head to toe in designer labels, standing wildly out of place outside a roadside garage, and called inside in a small, timid voice.

A man came out. Tall, long through the limbs, in black coveralls, a smear of motor oil across one cheekbone, his eyes flat and bored.

The voice came again, low, just a thread.

That's him. Soren.

I know, I said.

I'd known for a long time. He was the entire reason I'd come.

Here's the part Selene only had half right. She really was cast as the heroine of this story. And there really was a man fated to rise and take this whole city in his fist. She'd just bet on the wrong one. She'd put the crown on Maddox, when it was always going to land on the man standing in front of me in oil-stained coveralls, wiping his hands on a rag, looking for all the world like he fixed transmissions for a living.

Soren Cole. The heir the Caldwell dynasty lost years ago, currently passing as a man who repairs cars.

The task I'd been handed never explained any of it. It only warned me: if I hadn't won Maddox completely by the time she arrived, my chance would slip through my fingers for good. So for the first twenty years, I sent the guidance away and gave it one job: slow her down, keep her from coming too soon. The rest I did alone, feeling my way forward with nothing but what I remembered.

Twenty years. That's how long it took to make Maddox unable to live without me.

Twenty years building the one thing I would eventually have to walk away from. The better I did it, the closer I came to losing him for good.

"Miss Mercer, you don't have to roll your ankle every time you want an excuse to come find me. I'm busy." Soren was holding his temper, but the patience was thinning between his brows.

Selene's face stiffened. Whatever line she'd rehearsed died on her tongue.

He waved her off and moved to go.

"I said I like you." She was getting frantic now. "Stay with me and I'll lay this whole city at your feet. I'll have you grinding that Maddox Thorne under your heel."

I cracked the window an inch and watched.

Ambitious. I'll give her that.

Soren looked at her like she'd started speaking a dead language. "I don't know any Maddox Thorne. You turned up yesterday talking a lot of nonsense, and honestly I should have called someone to come collect you. Don't let me keep you."

She lunged and caught his arm.

"Soren, it's the truth. You're going to be the most powerful man in this city. I know everything that's coming. I can hand you every shortcut. You won't have to break your back for any of it." A breath. "And I'm your future wife. Believe me."

He shook her loose and she went down on the pavement. His expression never changed.

"If you're going to lie, at least make it land. Do I look three years old? I don't like cursing at women, so do us both a favor and see yourself out."

He left.

The second he was gone, the real Selene surfaced. She picked herself up and scraped at the grease he'd left on her sleeve like it might be catching.

"Disgusting."

Her lip peeled back.

"If you weren't the lead, you think I'd waste a breath on a grease monkey? Dream on."

She had no idea she'd just wiped her hand clean of the man who'd own this entire city inside three years. The one I'd come all this way for.

She'd spent her one good card on the wrong table, and she didn't even know she'd played it.

Chapter 7

Soren Cole. Let me think.

The lost son of one of this city's oldest dynasties. They'd find him at twenty, right as the family started eating itself alive, and he'd be the one who walked through all that blood and held the whole thing upright with his bare hands.

There was a version of events where he and Maddox ended up at each other's throats. Something to do with Selene, something to do with the company one of them tried to swallow whole. They tore each other apart over it. In that version, Maddox lost. Quietly. The story didn't even bother to record how he ended.

I had no intention of letting us anywhere near that version.

As for Selene.

I almost laughed. I was starting to see the shape of her game. She wasn't betting on one man. She was casting a net and throwing it wide, hoping something rich swam into it.

I was still turning the task over when a pair of arms came around me from behind. He pressed his face into my hair.

"Baby. You've been somewhere else in your head since you got home. What's wrong?"

Something occurred to me. "Caldwell Group's been bleeding scandals lately. Word is half the executives are already packing their offices. That you?"

His mind was clearly nowhere near corporate sabotage, but he answered me seriously anyway. "The Caldwells propped that thing up for years. It was always going to fall. Why would I waste my hands on it? And anyway, since you told me to stop doing the dangerous things, my hands have stayed very clean."

I let that sit.

He turned me around to face him. "Did somebody upset you?"

"No," I said, smiling. "Don't read into it."

"Can't help it. I read into everything." His eyes dropped, and then he smiled, slow. "But if you really want to cure me of that, there's a method."

I didn't know what he was angling at. "Which is?"

He looked up at me through his lashes. "You kiss me."

The desk became a battlefield.

We were in his office. People were moving around outside the door. I bit down hard on my lip and didn't make a sound.

The door swung open without warning.

"Mr. Thorne."

Maddox lifted his head, breathing rough. "Out."

The assistant fled so fast he pulled the door shut behind him on instinct.

He'd gotten good at this. Embarrassingly good. I couldn't tease him about it the way I used to.

When was our first kiss, anyway.

I think it was the first time he ever truly frightened me.

He'd taken some idiot bet and raced through half the city and nearly killed himself doing it. Everyone agreed to keep it from me. I found out anyway.

I didn't go to the hospital.

Nobody had the nerve to call me cold for it. Only the Sinclairs murmured that I shouldn't take it too far.

I shut myself in my villa and didn't leave. Piano in the mornings, dance in the afternoons. The next day I picked up an invitation to an auction and went out.

Just before they let me in, my phone rang. Maddox.

"Sera. You're not home?"

He'd be at the villa by now. I made a small sound.

"Where are you."

"Out. Clearing my head."

He had the voice of a man with a great deal he needed to explain. I let him get as far as I'm sorry, then told him I was running late and hung up before he could get the rest out.

I got home very late that night.

He'd nearly lost his mind waiting. Not because he couldn't find me, but because he was terrified of setting me off again. He didn't dare break anything; he knew I hated it. He didn't even dare smoke in front of me.

It was near freezing out. He had on nothing but a thin shirt, crouched on the front step, waiting for me to come home.

When he saw me, all he did was complain, very quietly. "Why would you go out dressed like that? Do you even want to keep this body of yours?"

He'd come out in such a hurry he hadn't wiped the blood off the backs of his hands.

Chapter 8

He shoved his hands behind his back, flustered. "I didn't do anything to him, I swear, I just"

I went up on my toes. The coat slid off my shoulders. On the ground, our two shadows folded into one.

I kissed him.

It was my first kiss. It was also his. Which was why he was somehow more nervous than I was.

"Maddox. I only worry about you. Stop doing the dangerous things. Please."

His face went scarlet. "Okay."

People were scared of his face. The hard set of it, the violence he always kept banked behind his eyes. They had their reasons.

But when we were small, I'd caught him more than once crouched in a corner, half-heartedly digging at a mouse hole, talking to himself through tears.

I'm not a monster.

Is it my fault I came out looking mean.

Why does everybody hate me.

Why does everybody run from me.

A little knot of a boy, folded up small in the dark.

That was the first time I ever set foot in the Thorne house. I found him there completely by accident. And somewhere in that moment, the first faint shape of a plan started to take root in me.

After the kiss he was so embarrassed he buried his face in both hands and bolted for the bathroom, where I could hear him crowing to his friends.

Yeah. Yeah, she kissed me. No, she did it herself. My Sera is the best, what would you know. You sad single bastard, you even got a wife?

Maddox is such a child.

Before bed that night, he ran the footbath to exactly the right temperature, rolled up his sleeves, and waited for me to put my feet in.

The most feared man in New York, the one people crossed the street to avoid, down on one knee to wash someone's feet because he wanted to.

I teased him on purpose. "If your people out there ever found out, where would you put your face?"

He just hummed, perfectly happy with the job. "Taking care of my girl is the natural order of things. So I wash your feet. So what? If you'd let me, I'd run your bath too."

My face went hot. I couldn't look at him.

"Wash or repair?"

The man didn't even look up from his computer.

I slid a business card across to him. "I'm here for a person."

"Who?"

"Soren."

He lifted his eyes to me, slow, and gave me a once-over that wasn't quite rude. "You."

I let myself look mildly surprised. "You know me?"

He shook his head. "No. But I've seen you. Maddox Thorne's fiance. Seraphina, right?"

I nodded.

His face stayed tired and far away. He let out a short laugh. "Thanks to that lunatic and the way she would not stop saying his name, I got curious enough to look him up. He's somebody, all right." A beat. "You didn't come all this way about your fianc, did you?"

I tugged at the corner of my mouth. "No. About you