Chapter 62 - 0062: Can I Have Elena?

Chapter 62: Chapter 0062: Can I Have Elena?

Graham’s Point Of View

"Hey, big brother."

I froze. My entire body locked up like a steel trap, every muscle seizing as the temperature in the room instantly dropped into sub-zero territory. Some primal part of me had recognized that voice before my mind could even process it, and my body reacted with the kind of visceral dread usually reserved for nightmares.

It was the dread of a man who thought he’d finally outrun something, only to feel its shadow fall across him again.

Everything around me faded into a muffled, distant blur - Lillian’s faint, annoying humming from the VIP changing room, the boutique clerk’s forced, sycophantic laughter, even the soft jazz playing through the hidden ceiling speakers. All I could hear was that single, weaponized voice.

Deep, smooth, dripping with thick mockery and lethal venom. A voice that had haunted the edges of my sleep for three years, always waiting, always patient, like it knew this day would come.

Jaxx.

The goddamn bastard had actually done it. He was standing three feet in front of me, and for one disorienting moment, I wondered if I’d conjured him out of some buried nightmare, if three years of hard-won peace had just been an illusion waiting to shatter. My hands went cold. My mouth went dry. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a younger version of myself was already screaming to run.

That voice hadn’t changed in three years. If anything, it had grown thicker, heavier with an unbearable confidence, edged with pure danger. Like time hadn’t weathered him at all... it had only sharpened the blade he had always been.

And that smirk... Christ, that arrogant, crooked smirk cut right through my soul, dragging up memories I’d spent years trying to bury under work, under routine, under the careful architecture of a life I’d rebuilt from nothing.

I felt my throat constrict into a tight knot as my eyes locked onto his. He stood there in his low-slung black jeans and fitted black tee, dark tattoos crawling up his neck like a shadow, holding his aviator sunglasses by one arm between two fingers. His broad shoulders were loosely squared, looking completely unbothered, as if he hadn’t just set every nerve in my body on fire by simply existing in my atmosphere.

The casualness of his stance was almost more infuriating than anything he could have said... like he owned the room, like he owned me. Like the three years since I’d last seen him meant nothing at all, just a brief intermission before he decided to walk back onstage.

"What the hell are you doing here?" I managed to force out, my voice coming out as a low, gravelly growl, thick with dark suspicion and pure hatred.

Jaxx tilted his head, his dark eyes sparkling with a sickening display of mock innocence. "Aw... that’s no way to greet family, is it, Graham? Don’t tell me you’re still holding a grudge after all this time."

I clenched my fists at my sides so hard my knuckles popped, my short nails digging deep into my palms. The pain grounded me, kept me from doing something I couldn’t take back. Old habits, apparently, died harder than old grudges. "Grudge doesn’t even begin to cover it, Jaxx. You shouldn’t be breathing the same air as me."

He chuckled... a rich, lazy, disrespectfully quiet sound that made my blood boil in my veins.

"Relax, big brother," he said, his eyes casually scanning the pastel walls and plush velvet furniture of the high-end boutique with mild, bored interest. "It’s just a casual visit. I didn’t come back to town to cause trouble. Not yet, anyway."

My jaw ticked, a muscle jumping violently along my cheekline. "So what? You just strolled into the East Quarter for some silk lace and a dose of nostalgia?"

He smiled wider, his straight white teeth flashing like a blade in the dim lighting. "Oh no, brother. I’m strictly a leather kind of man these days. But you know how it is... old memories die hard. This city used to be crawling with them, remember?"

My stomach turned over with a violent wave of nausea, the past rising up like bile in my throat. Memories I refused to touch, refused to even name, clawed at the edges of my composure. "Don’t."

Jaxx raised a dark eyebrow, mocking surprise. "What? I didn’t say anything specific. Yet."

I took a heavy, aggressive step forward, invading his space, lowering my voice so it vibrated with raw lethality. "If you’ve come back to dig up old graves, Jaxx, you better bring your own shovel. Because I buried you years ago for a damn good reason."

He whistled softly, leaning his weight back onto one foot with absolute composure, utterly unfazed by the violence simmering just beneath my skin. "Oof. Poetic, Graham. A bit dramatic, don’t you think?"

"Answer the fucking question," I snarled through my teeth, my breath coming in ragged gasps. "Why are you in my city?"

Jaxx just scoffed lightly, sliding the arm of his aviators into the front collar of his black shirt, exposing his bare, piercing gaze. "You say that like I need your permission to walk down a public street."

My eyes narrowed into slits. "Don’t play stupid with me. You don’t make a move without a motive."

Jaxx shrugged, his eyes drifting over my face, taking in the violent tension radiating off me like heat from a furnace. "I’m not playing anything. You’ve got a serious knot in your neck, though. Are you alright?" He stepped in closer, his smirk deepening into something truly sinister. "You look... exhausted, Graham. You look rattled. Marriage not working out the way you planned?"

My eyes flashed with pure fire. "Do not mention my marriage."

Jaxx tilted his head, fake sympathy oozing from his tone. "Touchy, touchy."

I took another half-step, my chest nearly touching his, my voice dropping into a razor-thin, icy whisper. "I’m warning you, Jaxx. Stay the hell away from me. Stay the hell away from my family, my business, and everything that concerns me."

Jaxx didn’t back down. Instead, his smile slowly vanished, replaced by a dark, deliberate intensity. He crossed his heavily inked arms over his broad chest, and for the first time, something genuinely cold flickered behind his eyes... something that made the hair on the back of my neck rise, some ancient warning system flaring to life.

"I saw your wife last week..." Jaxx said, his voice dropping into a smooth, low register... the terrifyingly calm tone he always used right before he drew blood.

The room went dead quiet in my ears. My pulse hammered against my skull like a sledgehammer. "What did you say?"

Jaxx tilted his head, dragging out his next words with agonizing precision, clearly savoring the way each syllable landed like a blow. "I saw Elena downtown last week. And damn, big brother... I must admit, you’ve got exquisite taste. The woman is breathtaking. Absolute perfection. She walks into a room and every other thing in it turns to dust."

Every drop of air left my lungs. My blood turned into roaring flame. The mention of her name in his mouth felt like a violation, like he’d reached into my chest and closed his fist around something sacred. I wanted to scrub the sound of it from the air, erase it before it could settle into anything real.

Jaxx’s eyes flicked slowly toward the back of the boutique, looking toward the heavy velvet curtains of the private lounge where Lillian was currently trying on designer maternity clothes. A look of profound, disgust-laced disbelief crossed his sharp face.

"I was genuinely surprised, brother," Jaxx sneered, his voice laced with pure, unadulterated contempt as he looked back at me. "I mean... were you fucking blind? Or just plain stupid? How do you have a woman like Elena at home and end up dragging that lower-class downgrade into your life? I mean, look at what you’re doing! You lowered your standards so far down into the gutter they’re practically underground!"

The insult hit like a physical punch. I saw red. Pure, blinding, unadulterated red. Everything inside me coiled violently, fire roaring through my veins, and some distant part of my mind registered that I was seconds away from doing something I couldn’t undo. A decade of restraint, of careful diplomacy, of biting back every violent impulse for the sake of appearances, evaporated in an instant.

My fists clenched so hard I thought my bones would snap. "Shut your fucking mouth!" I growled, my voice trembling with restraint.

Jaxx didn’t flinch. Of course he didn’t. He had always been the kind of psychopath who flirted with death like it was foreplay, who seemed to draw energy from other people’s fury the way normal men drew breath. I’d seen him provoke bigger men than me into throwing the first punch, just so he could watch them destroy themselves in the aftermath.

He stepped even closer, his taller frame looming over me, deliberately invading my personal space. He smirked right into my face, clearly thriving on the way my jaw was popping with suppressed violence.

"I mean it, Graham," Jaxx murmured, leaning in until his lips were inches from my ear, as if we were sharing a bloody secret. "It’s an insult to beauty. A tragedy. Seeing a lioness like Elena married to a man who trades her in for cheap plastic."

He pulled back just enough to look me in the eye, his smirk morphing into a wicked, predatory grin, the kind that promised nothing good would follow.

"Since you clearly don’t appreciate what you have..." Jaxx whispered, his voice smooth as silk and sharp as glass, "...can I have her? Can I have Elena?"

"Don’t you fucking dare go near my wife, you bastard!!" I roared, losing every ounce of my control.

I grabbed him by the front of his black shirt, hauling him forward, my knuckles digging into his chest. The sales clerks screamed in the background, but I didn’t care. I was ready to tear his throat out with my bare teeth right there on the boutique floor, all the years of careful composure I’d built collapsing in an instant, three years of therapy and discipline and hard-earned control burning to ash in the space of a single breath.

"Don’t you dare speak her name!" I thundered, my chest heaving, veins bulging along my forehead. "Don’t you look at her! Don’t you even fucking think about her! Elena is mine! She is my wife, and I will put a bullet through your head before I let you breathe the same air as her!"

Jaxx didn’t struggle. He didn’t even attempt to pry my hands off his shirt. He just stood there in my grip, looking down at my white knuckles, his dark eyes gleaming with a sick, twisted amusement, as though my rage were nothing more than an entertaining show staged for his benefit. That, somehow, was worse than if he’d fought back.

"And what if I don’t stay away, Graham?" he murmured softly, his tone terrifyingly calm. "What if I walk right up to her?"

"I swear to God..." I whispered through grinding teeth, my breath hot against his jaw, "I will murder you with my bare hands."

Jaxx let out a low, disrespectfully calm chuckle. It was maddening. Disrespectful. Far too cool for a man with his life on the line.

"You and I both know," Jaxx said softly, reaching up and casually, effortlessly tapping two fingers against my wrist, "that if I wanted her... if I really, truly wanted Elena... there is not a damn thing you, your security, or your whole bloody empire could do to stop me from taking her."

The sheer arrogance. The mind-numbing, goddamn audacity. It was the kind of statement that should have sounded like empty bravado, and yet some cold, rational part of me knew he believed every word of it... and worse, some buried, traitorous part of me believed it too.

He reached up, casually patting my shoulder with two firm slaps... as if we were two old college buddies catching up over drinks, rather than two predators standing on the razor’s edge of a lethal fight.

Slowly, deliberately, I let go of his shirt, my arms shaking with the effort it took not to swing a hook straight into his jaw. Every instinct in my body screamed at me to finish what I’d started, but some fragile thread of self-control held me back, whispering that whatever came next would cost me far more than my pride.

Jaxx didn’t look at me again. As if I had suddenly become invisible, he turned smoothly toward the front counter. He reached out with one tattooed hand, casually plucking a delicate, deep-red silk lingerie set straight off the display rack... the exact high-end set Lillian had been eyeing on the mannequin earlier.

He tossed it onto the glass counter in front of the terrified cashier, pulled a black metal titanium card from his pocket, and dropped it down.

"Wrap it up," Jaxx said smoothly to the shaking girl.

The cashier rapidly processed the card, her hands trembling as she packed the red silk into a sleek black gift bag and handed it back to him.

Jaxx grabbed the handles of the bag, turning back to face me one last time. His eyes gleamed with an unspoken, lethal intent - something dangerous, something that promised absolute ruin.

He raised two fingers to his temple in a lazy salute, giving me a slow, wicked wink.

"Nice seeing you again, big brother," he said smoothly.

And then, without another word, he turned and strolled casually out the grand glass doors into the afternoon sun. Just like that. Leaving the suffocating scent of leather, tobacco, thick tension, and smug arrogance lingering in his wake, and leaving me standing there wondering exactly how much of my carefully constructed world he intended to burn down next.

I stood completely frozen in the center of the boutique, my fists shaking uncontrollably, my heart hammering like a trapped beast against my ribs, rage pounding relentlessly in my ears.

Somewhere behind me, I could hear the faint murmur of the clerks whispering to each other, too afraid to approach, and I realized distantly that I probably looked like a man on the edge of madness.

And deep beneath all that rage, crawling up from the darkest, most terrifying corner of my mind, was the sickening, cold realization... one that settled into my bones like ice, that the bastard meant every single word.