Chapter 125 - 0125: There Was No Us, Nora

Chapter 125: Chapter 0125: There Was No Us, Nora

Jaxx’s Point Of View

"Jaxx... what the hell is going on?" she whispered.

Her voice was soft, but it carried through the thick air of the club like a blade sliding out of its sheath. Even over the low, seductive pulse of the jazz band on stage, even over the hum of corrupt money changing hands at the high-stakes tables and the quiet, vigilant rustle of my armed soldiers stationed nearby, it reached me.

The question hung suspended between us... too soft for the heavy noise of the bar, yet somehow louder than everything else in the room. It burrowed under my skin the way only truth does, unwelcome and impossible to ignore.

I had spent a decade perfecting the art of not feeling things, and yet here I was, undone by four whispered words from a woman I’d already discarded in every way that mattered.

My jaw tightened until my molars ground together like stone. I shifted my dark gaze from hers, a deliberate, icy cut of distance that would have driven any sane person backward.

Part of me wanted to look at her, to offer some scrap of explanation that might soften the blow. But softness had never been my currency, and I wasn’t about to start minting it now, least of all for a woman who had never been more than a temporary distraction from the emptiness I carried.

"Nothing’s going on, Nora." My voice came out flat, cold, and sharp... the exact kind of voice that usually made people stop breathing.

I turned on my heel, already moving, putting distance between her cloying French perfume and my lungs. Her scent was too sweet, too loud, too fake. It wasn’t her. It wasn’t the woman whose soft, battered memory was currently tearing my chest to shreds.

I hadn’t realized until that very moment how thoroughly Elena had rewritten every sense in my body, how even a stranger’s perfume could feel like an insult now. Every inhale reminded me of what I didn’t have, and every step away from Nora felt like a step closer to a woman I had no right to want.

"Jaxx! Don’t turn your back on me!" Nora’s voice sliced through the heavy room again, dropping the coy act completely and surfacing a sharp, possessive desperation she didn’t even bother trying to hide.

I stopped mid-step. My hands curled into tight, heavy fists at my sides, knuckles turning chalk-white, before I loosened them and let them rest against my thighs. The heavy click of my leather boots on the polished floor went dead quiet.

Slowly, deliberately, I turned my head just enough for her to see the sharp, lethal edge of my profile. My eyes were pitch-black, frozen, the way they got right before I tore a man’s throat out. I let her see it. Let her understand, in that single glance, precisely what she was provoking.

"There was no us, Nora," I said, every syllable dropping like lead onto the floorboards. "There never was. I told you weeks ago, I don’t do attachment. You accepted those terms when you walked into my penthouse."

Nora’s face faltered, her painted, perfect mask cracking wide open. Her chest heaved under the skin-tight silk of her emerald dress, her manicured nails digging into her own forearm as if she needed to anchor herself against the cold wall of my indifference.

For a fleeting second, something almost human flickered across her features... grief, maybe, or the dawning horror of a woman realizing the fantasy she’d built had never had a foundation. Then her chin went up. Defiance flared in her eyes, hot and sharp, mixed with a toxic, unyielding possessiveness.

I almost pitied her in that moment, watching years of careful self-deception collapse in real time under the weight of a truth she should have accepted long ago.

"No, Jaxx!" Nora snapped, stepping straight toward me, her high heels clicking loudly against the floorboards like warning shots in an enclosed hallway. "Don’t you dare give me that bullshit cold act! I won’t let you do this to me! I won’t let you just toss me aside like I’m some random girl you picked up off the street!"

"Nora..."

"No, listen to me!" She cut me off, her voice rising, drawing the silent attention of every soldier and high-roller in the VIP lounge. She stepped right into my personal space, her breath hot against my collarbone, her dark eyes flashing with a dangerous, unhinged fever. "You think I don’t know you? I know you better than anyone in this entire city! I’ve been around longer than any of those other pathetic women! You let me stay! You allowed me into your bed more than once!"

"You’re delusional," I growled, my voice dropping an octave into a low, terrifying register.

"I’m the only one who understands the dark shit inside your head!" Nora hissed, leaning closer, her hand twitching as if she wanted to grab my lapels and physically shake me. "I know what you are, Jaxx! I know the monster you hide from the rest of the world, and I loved it! I love this! I love the danger, I love the money, I love you! Do you have another woman? Is that what this is?!"

A dark, dangerous silence settled over the lounge. Even the jazz band seemed to falter, the notes stretching thin and uncertain in the charged air. Roman took a half-step forward from the shadows, his hand resting casually near his holster, but I raised a single finger to hold him back.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I registered the dozens of eyes now fixed on us, the whispers already forming behind cupped hands, but none of it mattered enough to break my focus.

My lips curved into a slow, ruthless sneer. "And if I do?"

"You don’t!" Nora spat instantly, a manic laugh bubbling up her throat. "You don’t need to lie to me! I know you! There is no other person! There can’t be! No one understands you like I do! No one can handle you the way I handle you!"

I tilted my head, my eyes narrowing into razor-thin slits as I looked down at her with pure, unvarnished pity. "How the fuck are you so sure about that, Nora?"

"Because I know you, Jaxx!" she yelled, her voice trembling with a terrifying blend of rage and devotion. "You allowed only me into your inner circle! You allowed only me to linger in your suite after dawn! You can’t have another woman! I won’t let you! You’re mine, Jaxx! You hear me?! You belong to this world, and you belong to me!"

I stared at her for three long, agonizing seconds. I had seen women like this a hundred times before in my line of work.

Women who mistook my generosity for affection. Women who thought that because they lasted longer than the rest, because I didn’t throw them out of my bed the second the sun came up, they were somehow special.

They thought they had cracked the code to a man who had no soul left to give. It was almost tragic, watching her cling to an illusion I had never once encouraged, watching her mistake my silence for consent and my patience for promise.

I wondered, briefly, whether I had ever truly seen her at all, or whether she had simply been a convenient shadow I let linger because getting rid of her required more effort than keeping her around.

I had never promised her a damn thing. I had never spoken a single word of love, never held her hand in public, never asked her about her life. I had laid out the ground rules from the very first night... cold, precise, and absolute.

She had known exactly what she was getting into. I had never hidden the monster behind a mask. She had willingly walked into the fire, thinking she could tame the blaze.

And now, she was burning.

"Leave, Nora," I said flatly.

It wasn’t a request. It wasn’t an argument. It was a cold, final decree handed down from a man who had already moved on. There was no cruelty left in me for her, only a hollow, tired finality, the kind that comes from closing a door you should have shut years ago.

If anything, I felt a distant, detached relief, the same relief a man feels when he finally sets down a weight he’d carried so long he’d forgotten it was there.

I turned my back on her completely and began walking toward the heavy brass doors of the club exit.

"Jaxx! Please, don’t walk away from me!" Nora screamed behind me, her voice screeching into a raw, ragged wail that echoed off the stone pillars. "Jaxx! Look at me! You can’t leave me! I gave you everything! You’ll never find anyone who loves your sickness the way I do! Jaxx!"

Her desperate, hysterical shrieks tore through the red-lit haze of the club, but I didn’t slow my stride by a fraction of an inch. My heavy leather boots slammed against the floor in a steady, unyielding rhythm. She wasn’t worth the breath in my lungs. She wasn’t worth a single backward glance.

Whatever ghost of affection I might once have offered her had long since been buried beneath the memory of a different woman entirely... one who had never once asked to own me, yet somehow already did. That thought alone unsettled me more than Nora’s screaming ever could.

I pushed through the heavy oak double doors of the bar, my shoulders square, my jaw locked like iron.

The cold night air slapped my face instantly, sharp and clean compared to the suffocating stench of cheap perfume, stale whiskey, and frantic desperation inside.

The small squad of armed guards stationed around the blacked-out perimeter straightened up instantly the second my boots hit the concrete, their sharp eyes darting to the cold fury carved into every line of my face.

None of them dared to speak. None of them dared to make eye contact. They had learned long ago that silence was the safest offering a man could give me on nights like this.

Behind me, the heavy doors swung shut, cutting off the faint sound of Nora’s lingering screams. For a moment, I let the silence settle over me like a second skin, grateful for the absence of her voice, even as another voice... Elena’s, filled the space it left behind.

Roman’s heavy, measured footsteps trailed closely behind mine as we walked down the stone steps toward the private alleyway. His boots sounded weighted down, steady, like a man who had been rehearsing an intervention for three days straight and had finally run out of patience.

The armored sedan pulled around the corner the second the driver spotted me stepping out of the shadows. Matte black, bulletproof glass, low-slung chassis... a sleek, lethal extension of my own nature. The heavy V8 engine purred softly in the dark, waiting for its master.

"Boss," Roman’s voice cut through the quiet night air as my hand reached out to grasp the cold chrome door handle.

His tone wasn’t his usual mocking, flirtatious self. It was careful. Too careful. That alone made my fingers freeze on the metal.

I turned my head slowly, raising a single dark eyebrow. "What, Roman?"

Roman shifted his broad weight, his long black trench coat swaying slightly in the cold autumn wind. His sharp, dark eyes searched my face in the dim glow of the streetlights, trying frantically to peel back the thick steel mask I wore.

I had known this man for over a decade, had bled beside him more times than I could count, and even he looked uncertain about how to approach whatever was clawing its way out of me tonight.

In all our years together, I had rarely seen him hesitate like this, and the sight of it planted a small, unfamiliar seed of unease in my chest.

"Think this through, Jaxx," Roman said quietly.

My jaw clenched, a muscle pulsing in my cheek. "I’ve already thought it through."

"No, you haven’t." Roman shook his head, taking two heavy steps closer until he was standing right in my space, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly whisper that wouldn’t carry to the guards.

"You’re acting on pure, unadulterated impulse right now. That isn’t you, Jaxx. You calculate every single breath. You tear an enemy’s life apart piece by piece, analyzing every variable before you ever lay a finger on them. But this? This thing with Elena?"

He exhaled a long cloud of white mist through his nose, dragging a hand down his tired face in pure frustration.

"Do you really want her?" Roman demanded, his eyes burning into mine. "Or do you just want her because she’s the one thing in this city you can’t legally own? Are you going to rip her life apart, burn her marriage to the ground, steal her away from Graham... only to get tired of her in six months when the high wears off?"

The brutal words landed between us sharper than a double-edged blade. I felt them lodge somewhere beneath my ribs, refusing to dislodge no matter how many times I told myself Roman didn’t understand what he was talking about.

I didn’t answer him right away. The heavy silence stretched out, thick, suffocating, echoing loudly in the narrow alleyway. I knew what he was doing.

He wanted me to snap. He wanted me to bite back, to snarl at him, to give him a cold, calculated reason so he could rest easy knowing his Don hadn’t completely lost his mind over a woman.

But I stayed dead quiet.

Because for the first time in ten blood-soaked years, I didn’t have a fucking answer.

Images of Elena flooded my mind in an uncontrollable rush... the way her raw, beautiful voice cracked when she dared to snap back at me, the unyielding, defiant fire in her bruised eyes, the sheer gravity of her presence that dragged me under no matter how hard I pretended to resist. I had had hundreds of women cling to my chest, scream my name in the dark, beg for my attention... all of them completely forgettable. Disposable.

I could recall none of their faces with any clarity, yet I could summon Elena’s expression from memory with terrifying precision, down to the exact shade her eyes turned when she was furious with me.

I remembered the way she smelled after rain, the particular stubbornness in her chin when she refused to back down from me, details I hadn’t even realized I’d catalogued until this very moment.

But Elena wasn’t disposable. She was already burned into the marrow of my bones like an open scar that refused to stop bleeding.

Was I obsessed? Beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Was I chasing her because I wanted to possess her? To control her? To tear her away from the man who was hurting her? Or was it something deeper... something so dark, so terrifying, so profoundly ancient that I didn’t even have the courage to name it to myself?

Roman’s sharp stare cut deeper into my silence. "Well, Jaxx? Answer me."

I finally let out a short, dry, hollow bark of laughter... low, bitter, and entirely devoid of humor.

"Well, Roman..." I murmured, my voice dropping into a dark, unhinged register as I met his gaze head-on. "We’ll just have to wait and see about that, won’t we?"

Roman’s eyes narrowed into dangerous, frustrated slits. "That’s not an answer, boss."

"It’s the only fucking answer you’re getting tonight," I shot back, my voice clipping short like a gunshot. My fingers tightened on the car door handle until the metal groaned under the force of my grip.

Roman stood there in the freezing air, studying the iron resolve on my face, his jaw working as if he were fighting back ten different warnings he knew I would execute him for speaking aloud. His absolute loyalty to me made him reckless sometimes, but he was far too smart to push a starving predator over the edge.

I could see the calculation behind his eyes, the careful weighing of how far he could push before I shut him out entirely, and for a moment I almost admired him for daring to try at all.

Inside the front seat of the sedan, the driver’s hands tightened on the leather steering wheel, his eyes locked dead ahead on the dark alley, pretending with every fiber of his being to be completely deaf.

The soldiers around the perimeter lingered in the shadows, keeping their distance from the volatile static crackling between the two most dangerous men in the city.

Roman finally took a deliberate step back, the harsh yellow beam of the overhead streetlight carving deep, shadowy lines across his tired face. He pulled his heavy coat tighter around his broad chest, his sharp eyes never leaving mine for a single fraction of a second.

There was something almost mournful in the way he looked at me then, as though he were already grieving a version of me he suspected he was about to lose.

When he spoke again, his voice was deathly calm, but edged with a heavy, ominous warning that settled deep into my gut.

"I just hope to God you don’t live to regret this, Jaxx."