Chapter 123 - 0123: It Is Her

Chapter 123: Chapter 0123: It Is Her

Jaxx’s Point Of View

The weight of Roman’s words sat in the space between us like a loaded gun lying open on the marble table, polished, deadly, and ready to tear everything apart.

"It’s about your grandfather," he had said, and even now, the brutal, metallic echo of those four words rippled violently through my skull, refusing to fade no matter how many times I tried to shake them loose.

I clenched my jaw until the muscles in my cheeks jumped, fighting down the burning urge to roll my eyes so hard they might stick.

The old man. He never stopped. Not even after all these years, not even after all the blood I’d spilled, the bones I’d broken, and the empire I’d carved out with my own hands.

Every brick of what I’d built existed because of him, in spite of him, to spite him... and still, somehow, he found ways to crawl back into the foundation.

I turned slowly, picking up the heavy glass again. The amber whiskey burned down my raw throat... a bitter, searing fire I almost welcomed because it meant I was still alive to feel it.

Then I set the glass aside on the counter with a loud, deliberate, echoing clink, the sound sharper than I intended, betraying more of my temper than I wanted Roman to see.

"What about the old man, Roman?" I asked, my voice terrifyingly flat, but edged with lethal, cold steel. "He’s supposed to be rotting in his villa in Rome, breathing through a plastic tube."

Roman exhaled sharply through his nose, pacing a little across the dark hardwood floor like a wolf trapped in an iron cage. His custom-made leather shoes clicked heavily against the polished floorboards, his hand raking violently through his dark hair before he stopped abruptly, turning his sharp, dark eyes to face me directly.

I’d known Roman long enough to read the tension in his shoulders before he even opened his mouth again, he only paced like that when the news was bad enough to cost men their lives.

"He was on his deathbed, Jaxx," Roman said, his voice dropping into a tense, hushed pitch. "Until three hours ago. Our contact in Rome confirmed it... He’s fully conscious, and he’s back on his same topic. Taking over the North American clans. Reclaiming the territory you took. Coming back from Italy to clear house. He doesn’t quit, Jaxx. He’s a relentless old monster."

Roman’s dark eyes narrowed into razor-thin slits as he studied my tense frame.

"Between you and him, I swear to God I don’t know who’s scarier. The only fucking difference is, at least you know when to shut your mouth and execute people quietly."

A dangerous, razor-thin smile pulled slowly at the corners of my lips. "That’s because I don’t waste words on dead men walking, Roman."

Roman smirked faintly, a brief, crooked flicker across his jaw, but it didn’t last long. His expression shifted instantly back to something heavier, darker, and infinitely more cautious, as though he’d remembered halfway through the joke exactly how little either of us had to laugh about.

"He wants you back in line, Jaxx. He’s already making chess moves behind your back. He knows you’ve been distracted lately. If you don’t go to Rome soon... if you don’t play his game or put a bullet through his heart yourself, he’s going to find a way to drag you back into the mud. And you know how he plays."

I felt my chest tighten, but it wasn’t from fear. It was pure, unadulterated, blinding fury. It was the heavy, rusted chain around my neck that never quite broke, no matter how many miles or bodies I put between us.

My grandfather actually thought he could still control me. He thought he could pull my strings like I was some desperate, sixteen-year-old soldier in his army, still small enough to be molded, still frightened enough to obey.

I reached out, grabbed the bottle, poured another three fingers of raw whiskey, and downed the rest of the glass in one violent gulp. The liquid scorched all the way down into my stomach.

I slammed the crystal down onto the stone table with enough brutal force to make the heavy base crack down the middle, the sound sharp and final, like something inside me settling into place.

Then I reached for my brass car keys again. The cold, sharp metal bit into my palm, grounding me in the reality of the room, pulling me back from the edge of the memories threatening to swallow me whole.

"Tell the old man," I said slowly, my voice dropping so low it vibrated through the dark marble counter, each word deliberate, heavy, and dripping with venom, "that I’ll come to Italy when I’m fucking ready. And not a second before."

I shoved back from the bar and stood up to my full height, towering over the dark room, the sheer, oppressive weight of my presence filling every shadow.

Roman didn’t flinch... he knew me too well for that, had weathered worse storms standing at my side, but his dark eyes flickered with a wary, dangerous instinct, the kind that came from years of reading me better than I read myself.

"Right now," I continued, sliding the brass keys into my fist like a makeshift knuckle-duster, "I have much more important things to take care of. Things bigger than any dying empire he thinks he still runs from a hospital bed."

Roman tilted his head, his sharp eyes searching my face, studying the tension in my jaw and the hollow, dark shadows under my eyes. His expression remained completely unreadable for a long, suffocating beat, and for a moment I wondered exactly how much he already suspected, how much he’d already pieced together in the silence I’d been keeping.

Then, he smirked. A sharp, knowing, infuriating edge cut across his face.

"And that includes her, doesn’t it?" Roman asked quietly.

The silence that slammed into the penthouse after his question was razor-sharp. My pulse hammered violently in my ears, heavy and loud like an iron drum.

For a long, dangerous moment, I said nothing. I just let the words hang there in the cold air, letting the tension stretch so tight between us that it felt like it might snap and sever our throats.

Then I smirked back... a slow, terrifying, unhinged curve of my lips. My eyes narrowed, gleaming with something far darker than a simple confession, far deeper and more terrifying than pure obsession.

"It doesn’t just include her, Roman," I said, my voice dropping into a guttural growl that sounded barely human.

I stepped closer to him, closing the distance until I was standing right in his space, every single syllable dripping with unvarnished menace.

"It is her."

Roman’s eyes darted between my pitch-black gaze and the private elevator doors like he wanted to reach out, grab me by my leather jacket collar, and violently shake some sanity back into my skull. But he didn’t move an inch.

He knew he couldn’t. He knew better than anyone that when I got like this... wired, restless, completely unhinged, burning from the inside out with a lethal focus, trying to stop me was like standing in front of a runaway freight train.

"You really don’t know when to fucking stop, do you, Jaxx?" Roman’s voice came out sharp, tight, but as he fell into step behind me, his heavy boots sounded weighted down with deep dread. "Is it going to take a nine-millimeter bullet rammed straight into your chest? Is that what it’s going to take for you to wake the fuck up? Is that how this ends?"

I stopped dead in my tracks right at the edge of the private hallway.

The suddenness of my halt made Roman’s boots scrape sharply against the floor as he stopped short behind me. I didn’t turn around right away. I let the heavy, suffocating silence stretch between us, thick as smoke in a burning room.

Then, slowly, deliberately, I pivoted on my heel, turning around to look him straight in the eye.

My voice came out low, measured, and horrifyingly quiet. Not loud. Not sharp. Just a flat, dead calm that cut infinitely deeper than a scream ever could.

"As long as that bullet is fired from her hands," I said, each word carved directly into the cold air between us, "then I’ll gladly lie down in the dirt and die."

Roman’s mouth parted slightly, but no sound came out of his throat. His sharp face shifted through a dozen different emotions in a fraction of a second... shock, absolute disbelief, horror, and finally, a deep, sickening trace of pity.

He stood there in the dim light of the hallway, looking at me like I had just openly confessed to setting my own flesh and blood on fire.

"Who the fuck are you, Jaxx?" he finally breathed out, his voice actually trembling at the edges. "Because you sure as hell aren’t the man I’ve been backing for ten years."

I didn’t answer him. What the fuck was I supposed to say? That he was right? That I didn’t recognize the crazy bastard staring back at me in the mirror anymore either?

The cold, ruthless, unfeeling monster I had been before Elena walked back into my world... that man was already dead.

He’d been buried, burned, and rendered completely irrelevant the moment her eyes met mine again in that rain-slicked alleyway.

What walked in his place now was someone else entirely. Someone dangerous. Someone unpredictable. Someone I wasn’t even sure I could control anymore, and some nights that uncertainty frightened me more than anything my grandfather could ever threaten to do.