He broke me once. This time, I’d be doing the breaking.

Devon: I respect that you loathe him, Kill, but we were young lads. Throw him a fat donation, make him feel pretty, and move on with your life. You could lose your CEO title, millions of dollars, and face jail time if you tamper with this trial.

Me: He was a monster who shaped me into becoming a better monster. Now we are both carnivorous beasts. It is time to see who can shed more blood.

I tossed my phone onto the leather seat, frowning out the Escalade’s window.

Andrew Arrowsmith wasn’t going to rest until he saw me filing for bankruptcy.

It wasn’t about the money. Never was for me.

It was becoming better than my father at being a CEO because he was better than his father.

Back when my great-great-great-great-grandfather incorporated Royal Pipelines, you could shoot a bullet in the ground and oil would spill. By the time my father inherited the company, he had to do some serious fracking and squeeze the natural resources available to him to continue the monstrous growth of our company.

Me? I didn’t want to simply increase our capital. I wanted to triple it. To go down in history as the best CEO the company had ever known.

I had Sam digging up dirt on Andrew as I decided which angle I wanted to attack him from. In the meantime, I made sure Green Living threw a lot of money into the lawsuit, losing their pants and their funds quickly.

For all I cared, by the time I was finished, Andrew wouldn’t have a job, a company, or a roof over his head.

The Escalade came to a halt in front of my wife’s apartment building. I fired her a text to come downstairs, scrolling over the unanswered message from earlier, supplemented with a picture of the sky.

Flower Girl: Look outside. Auntie Tilda came out to say hello this morning. ☺

Auntie Tilda was a pain in the ass and was responsible for my wife’s unfortunate name. Persephone was only marginally better than Tree and Tinder.

I continued ignoring my wife’s daily texts. It was bad enough I’d spent the last week haunted by the memory of the poker night on my ranch. The game was a bore, punctuated by mind-numbing commentary from Sailor and Emmabelle, who became two of my least favorite things about Boston. My wife, however, was another story. No matter how much I tried to deny it, she pleased me.

In the way she looked at me.

In the way she smiled at me.

In the way she called me hubs as though this was real and not a life sentence born from the crappy cards she’d been dealt by her previous husband.

She’d already gotten her debt paid, her divorce granted, and the means to live like a Kardashian. She didn’t have to pretend to tolerate me but still had the courtesy to do so.

My eyelids dropped as I tried to bleach out the memory of her clinging to my hand under the table, riding my fist, her thighs clutched around my knuckles in a vise grip. She burned like a blood-red rose, her petals curling and twisting around the flame, and I was glad I couldn’t watch her openly while we were in company because I had no doubt I’d have come in my pants.

I wanted to purge my wife out of my system. To relocate her somewhere far away—maybe to her parents’ new house in the suburbs. To pluck her from obscurity only when the mood struck me on special occasions.

She was dazzling, kinetic. Too loud, too much. Marrying her was the worst and best decision I’d ever made.

“Power-napping, huh?” Persephone’s throaty voice filled the Escalade. “I read somewhere that catnaps are more effective than eight hours of sleep. Did you know that?”

She scooted next to me, wrapped in a gown that clung to her curves like I would if I wasn’t a hundred and one shades of messed up.

I produced a cigar from a box next to me, lighting it up. “Nice number.”

“Is that a compliment I’m hearing?” She pressed the back of her hand to my forehead, teasingly checking my temperature. “Nope. No fever.”

“Your beauty was never in question,” I puffed.

“What is, then?”

“Its ability to disarm me.”

She shot me a look that said she wasn’t happy with me. A look that, for reasons unbeknownst to me, I couldn’t stand. She produced something from her Valentino clutch. A piece of paper. She unfolded it. A ten-dollar note rolled out of it. Also a pen. She handed me all three.

“This is for you, by the way.”

“What am I looking at?” I scanned the paper in her hand without taking it.

“I saw this on a TV show. Billions. It’s a contract in which you sell your soul to me.”

I really should’ve made her take a drug test before I put a ring on her finger.

The amount of nonsense spewing out of that pretty mouth could keep the entire Senate busy for a century.

Then again, deep down, I knew even if the results came back saying she was hooked on meth, cocaine, heroin, and every homeless dick downtown, I still would have married her, and that was a problem.

A huge problem.

“Sign it.” She released the ten-dollar bill in my lap like I was a B-grade pole dancer. I didn’t make a move to pick it up.

“What’s the problem?” She frowned. “You already told me I can never have your heart and mentioned you don’t believe in souls. That means selling yours to me shouldn’t be too hard, right?”

The fact she was trying to philosophically challenge me made her cute enough to eat. Then again, I didn’t need much incentive to want to eat her out. Wondering how my wife’s pussy tasted was something I did often.

I’d licked my fingers after the card game on the ranch. Her scent hitting my system alone had made me painfully hard.

“It’s okay if you don’t want to take any chances.” She withdrew the contract, about to tuck it back into her purse.

“There’s no such thing as a soul,” I repeated dully.

“In that case, I’d like to buy yours.”

“How’d it end on that TV show?” I sat back, twirling the cigar between my fingers.

“Billions?” She frowned. “The girl—who has a similar set of beliefs and views on the world as you—signed the contract, proving she truly didn’t believe in her soul’s existence.”

“Amateur mistake.” I clutched my cigar between my teeth to free my hands, adjusting the necklace on my wife’s neck so the clasp wouldn’t show. “First rule in business is supply and demand. You put a price on something in accordance to how other people value it. My set of beliefs is irrelevant. You think souls exist, and therefore I will sign mine over to you for the highest price.”

“What would that price be?”

“Your full submission to our arrangement.” I plucked the pen and paper from her hand, tucking them into my breast pocket. “More on that when I figure out what that exactly entails. Subject closed.”

The need to own, conquer, banish, and discard her made me lose sleep.

It didn’t even make sense, and sense was the compass I could always count on.

Persephone made me swear, and nothing made me swear. Yet when we were on that trail, I said the word fuck. Not because I cracked two ribs—which, by the way, happened—or because I was bloodied and wounded, but because she looked scared, and I never wanted to see that emotion on her face again.

She smoothed her dress, examining me under a thick curtain of lashes.