The Finisher (Dark Verse, #4)

by RuNyx

To everyone who ever made a cocoon of their blanket, and never wanted to leave the bed. This is for you. There is a rainbow beyond the gray. Just wait for the clouds to part.

They called him the Fortis Finisher. He preferred ‘Lord of Death’, but nobody really called him that. They would someday though, when all the murders got connected to him and the corrupt cops stopped sleeping.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind." -William Shakespeare

Zephyr jumped down from the bed, her side hurting a bit, and wobbled over to the older woman, extending her pinkie out. “I can be there for him. I promise. What’s his name?” The woman laughed again, a tear trailing down her face, and hooked her rough pinkie with Zephyr’s. “You’re a sweet child.” Zephyr nodded. She liked being sweet. “His name?” she asked, stuck on the boy who didn't have a family. “Alessandro. Alessandro Villanova. Alpha.”

Word vomit was a common affliction where she was concerned, especially when her nerves were taut.

She wanted to feel adequate. She wanted to feel beautiful. She wanted to feel desirable. The last man who’d made her feel all those things— Don’t think about him.

The fact that this veritable giant wore an eye patch to a fight with an opponent of seemingly good vision... damn.

Alpha, that's what the crowd had called him, and she could see why. The more she watched him, the more fascinated she became, the more the urge to confirm his identity seeped into her pores.

A bead of sweat rolled down her neck into her cleavage, and dear lord, she remembered what it had been like being looked at by him with both his eyes. It felt like him. Tears burned her eyes. So fucking long.

And none of it mattered, because if this was him, if she’d found him after ten years… She had to know. She needed to know. Fuck everyone else.

She was almost three feet from the beast and the guy he was speaking with when she saw the muscles in his back stiffen, his neck turning to sear her with one golden eye. Liquid, molten gold. Gold that had once seared her veins. Him.

"What's a little rainbow like you doing in a shithole like this?" he murmured as he inhaled the side of her neck, so softly she felt his words more than heard them.

She knew she had a colorful personality, but she'd never been called a rainbow before, and the way he said it was nice, really nice. But it also told her something—he didn’t recognize her. Nothing.

Alpha had always smelled like he looked. Raw.

Coffee. Mint. Him. His taste exploded on her tongue, his mouth moving over hers expertly, tongue gliding along with hers in a way that made her thighs tighten around his torso in memory.

A romantic at heart, she’d always believed in love at the first meeting. Her parents had been a love-at-first-meeting couple. One of her colleagues was a love-at-first-meeting couple. Even her grandparents on her dad’s side had been a couple like that. And she’d found that with him a long time ago, and kissing him kindled it back to life—the emotions, the attraction, the longing, and the pain. Oh, the sweet, bitter pain.

He was her love at first meeting. And she didn’t know who he was now, but he was hers. He’d always been hers.

"You kiss good, rainbow."

Something in the cavity of her chest shriveled at his lack of recognition, while something else bloomed with the sheer joy of finding him again.

Her first love, the one she never recovered from. Love, the kind she could give everything and replenish yet again to give more, the kind that snuck in under the radar, and one day, it was there, mixed into the cement of her foundations. Love that went so deep into the bones it changed the course of being. He had been that love. He was back. And he remembered nothing. She was screwed.

But now that she’d found him, she was already itching to go see him again, to find out who he had become, understand his in-between, get his excuses. She wanted the stories of his scars, the workings of his mind, the intensity of his eye. She wanted him, even if he was the underworld man.

And if he didn’t remember her, she needed to offer him something valuable, something that would make him give them the time to fall in love again.

If she pursued it, she could change the course of their lives. It would be better if she let it go. She shut the laptop. Yeah, she’d let it go. *** She didn’t let it go.

He was dangerous. And she wanted him more for it, like the sucker she was.

Just standing in that foyer made her feel like she didn't belong. But she had to do this, for them and the future she knew they deserved.

She was there for him. Her mama always said her stubbornness would bite her in the ass, and she was probably right. But destiny had brought him back to her, and she'd be damned if she let that go. They deserved this chance, and he couldn’t fight for them, so she would.

Before she could take it, a large palm slid around her waist in a move so proprietary, Zephyr was taken aback. She looked up to see her beast at her side, his eye steady on the other guy. "She's with me," he declared in a voice that had her thighs clenching slightly.

First things first, she needed to ogle him properly in the sunlight, see everything she had missed that night.

"So, how can I help you, Zephyr?" She loved the way he said her name. Zey-furr. She’d purr if she were a cat at the way he said it. Probably go into heat too and rub all over him. Not the time.

She wasn’t telling him his secrets—that she’d known so much about him since before she’d seen him for the first time. She wasn’t telling him that he’d been her first kiss, that she still remembered the way the metal from the fence he’d pushed her into had dug into her back where she’d had grooves for a week. She wasn’t telling him that she’d loved him as a young man and she wanted to love him again as a grown one.

“You’re a twisted beast. I’m a twisted beauty. We’re totally meant to be, handsome. It's written in the fairytales.”

“You’re playing with the beast, little rainbow.” His grip on her chin tightened. “I bite.”

His gaze lingered on her for a moment, puzzled as though he was trying to figure her out, before he murmured, his words brushing her lips, "I will scar you." "I might want it," she replied, puzzling him even more, passing whatever tests he kept throwing her way.

After so many years of seeing the ugliness, nothing really moved him anymore. But listening that his little rainbow had changed this woman's life without possibly even realizing, earning herself an ally who would bat for her with a man like him, he was a bit moved.

And then the rainbow had come barreling into him, like a burst of color after endless gray, kissing him like he wasn’t a mangled man, looking at him with genuine desire in her eyes like she appreciated all that he was.

The fights had no rules, just two guys in a cage, both knowing only one of them could make it out, and every fight Alpha was in, he was the one who got out. And for that reason, they began calling him The Finisher.

He gave them quick deaths unless they pissed him off. And now he was pissed because the media was calling the killer Fortis Finisher. Oh, he'd not give that butcher a quick death, that was for sure.

He didn’t know what it was, maybe her tiny stature, maybe her ferocity, maybe her utter disregard for predictability. But she broke the ennui, and that was the main reason Alpha was at a loss about what to do with her proposition—accept and see where it led, or refuse and let life go on as it was.

She’d wanted the romantic tale that she could tell her kids and make them believe in love, the story of two lovers who loved so deep they couldn’t be without another, flaws and all. Perhaps that was why as a little girl, she’d subconsciously seen that capacity of love in the pained, violent outburst of a boy, and claimed him for herself from that day forward.

“He say yes?” he asked her as she pressed the button. Zephyr laughed. “Not yet.” “I have my suit ready whenever.” Hector winked at her, before sobering. “Don’t give up. I haven’t seen him this interested by something in a while.” God, her beautiful beast. There was no way she was giving up, and hearing those words from someone who was clearly a friend of Alpha's buoyed her heart. “I won’t.”

“I don’t know how, rainbow,” he murmured softly, “and I don’t know what secrets of mine you have, but I want them all. You’ve sealed your fate now. Welcome to my hell.”

“I can’t believe you’re marrying Alpha,” Zen whispered, her voice reflecting the disbelief of her words. “Your Alpha.” Her Alpha. She couldn’t believe it either.

Zephyr knew she was stepping into a world she knew nothing about, a world she'd only seen from the fringes from her time spent volunteering. The more she'd dug, the more she'd realized he was lethal. But he was also the boy who'd walked her five miles to her home in the middle of winter just so she'd get there safely.

She remembered the first time she’d talked to him. It hadn’t been planned. She’d been stuck one night in the bad part of town after her friend had ditched her. She'd gone there because she liked to check up on him, and he’d been there when she'd been walking the street alone, the young man with golden eyes and the deep voice, speaking to her for the first time—

He was hers. Finally.

Hugs were her thing. People loved her hugs. If hugging was a contest, she'd surely be a runner-up. So she’d hug him. Every day, she’d hug him until he returned it, until he accepted that it was normal, until he began to crave it from her.

She’d break down his defenses, one hug at a time. All in good time. Happy birthday, Zephyr Villanova.

A man who had forgotten what it felt like to feel had been undone by a tiny blip of a woman. And though he’d had every intention of protecting her from his world, it was too late. She had sealed her fate, and fuck if he would let her get away without knowing everything she knew now. He didn’t know what her motive was for wanting to marry him, but he would find out.

Zephyr tilted her head back to keep her gaze locked with his, and he hated to admit it, but she was adorable.

Her entire face lit up and that made something very odd happen in his chest. Maybe it was acidity.