Page 88 of My Unhinged Alphas
Knox
I pacethe length of the room and turn back again.
Too many things have gone wrong.
Havoc is chaos. Always has been. Quick to act, quicker to pull the trigger, and never once interested in what comes after. I’m the opposite. I hold. I measure. I wait until I know exactly where something lands before I move.
That’s how things stay controlled.
Tonight, nothing was controlled. The kill went bad. The timeline is off. Questions will come, and when they do, they’ll come hard. And on top of all of that?—
Her.
Lena never should have been brought in. She was drugged, disoriented, caught in something she didn’t understand, and I still made the call.
At the time, it made sense. Contain the variable. Keep her where we could see her. Keep Havoc from doing something irreversible.
That’s what I told myself.
It’s not the whole truth.
The truth is, I didn’t want her dead. And I don’t fully understand why.
There’s something about her that doesn’t fit. Something that sticks. She looks like she should disappear into the background, but she doesn’t. She holds. She pushes. Even when she’s scared, she doesn’t fold the way she should.
That bothers me.
I stop pacing and look across the room.
Vale is still there. He hasn’t moved much since I came in. Just stands near the far wall like he belongs to the shadows more than the room itself. From a distance, he looks composed. Put together. Controlled in that quiet, deliberate way people mistake for calm.
It isn’t calm.
Up close, you see it. The stillness is too tight. Too deliberate. Like every part of him is held in place by force. His shoulders are set hard, his posture straight to the point of strain. His shirt hangs loose, dark against pale skin, hair slightly out of place like he’s run his hand through it one too many times.
Vale always looks like restraint carved into a person. Tall. Lean. Sharp lines and no softness to speak of. The kind of face people would call beautiful if they didn’t look too long. Because if you do look too long, you start to see what sits under it.
Guilt.
Control.
Something close to punishment.
His eyes are the worst part. Too quiet. Too distant. Like whatever he’s thinking never fully makes it to the surface. Like everything gets buried before it can be seen.
He’s a man who doesn’t allow himself anything.
That’s what makes what I saw worse. I lean back against the wall and watch him, and my head keeps replaying it whether I want it to or not.
Vale doesn’t lose control. He doesn’t indulge. He doesn’t touch anything unless he has a reason to. But in that room?—
His hands on her, his mouth on hers, like he’d forgotten himself for a second. Like he’d stopped holding the line he’s built his whole life around.
And she responded. She leaned into it. Let it happen. Wanted it.
He was pushing into her hard enough to make her gasp. He kept kissing her while he fucked her, like he couldn’t decide what he wanted more, her mouth or her cunt.
I watched too long. Heard too much. I left before I did something stupid, not because I was bothered, but because I was hard enough to hurt.
