Page 99 of Cold Bastard
For a long moment, he just stared at me. Then he turned and walked to the window, his hands braced against the frame, his shoulders tense.
“You’re going to get yourself killed,” he said finally.
“Maybe,” I admitted. “But at least I’ll die on my own terms.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Nano
I locked my door behind me.
The click of the deadbolt slid into place and echoed through the hallway, final and absolute. Alex was on the other side, trapped in my room, and I could still feel the phantom heat of her wrist in my grip, still see the way she had looked at me when she’d said, “I’m not as broken as you thought I was.”
Fuck.
She was wrong. She was so goddamn wrong it hurt. She was exactly as broken as I thought, maybe more. But she was also stronger than I had given her credit for. Strong enough to refuse Morpheus. Strong enough to bet her life on being more valuable alive than dead.
Strong enough to make me question everything I thought I knew about control.
I turned away from the door and walked back down the hallway, my boots heavy against the wood floor. The gathering room was still alive with noise, brothers drinking, fucking, celebrating like the world wasn’t about to explode around us. They didn’t know what had just happened in church. Didn’t know that Alex had just drawn a line that could get us all killed.
The church doors loomed ahead of me, heavy wood reinforced with iron brackets, the Brotherhood insignia carveddeep into the surface. I could hear voices on the other side. Raised. Angry.
Here we go.
I pushed the doors open and stepped inside.
The effect was immediate. Every officer in the room turned to look at me, and the temperature dropped twenty degrees. Cerberus was on his feet, his scarred face twisted with fury. Scythe’s hands were flat on the table, his knuckles white. Wanderer was pacing near the wall, his movements sharp and agitated. Heretic sat with his arms crossed, his expression dark.
And Morpheus... Morpheus was leaning back in his chair at the head of the table, watching me with those cold, calculating eyes that missed nothing. “She locked up?” he asked, his voice deceptively calm.
“Yeah.” I nodded, moving to my seat. “She’s in my room. Door’s locked.”
“Good,” Morpheus said. Then he gestured to the empty chair. “Sit down, Nano. We need to talk.”
I sat. My hands rested on the table, fingers spread wide against the scarred wood. I could feel the tension radiating off every man in this room, the barely contained rage that was threatening to boil over.
“What thefuckwas that?” Cerberus exploded before I was even fully seated. “She just refused a direct order from you, Prez. In front of all of us. And you let her walk out of here?”
“She didn’t walk,” Morpheus stated mildly. “Nano dragged her out. There’s a difference.”
“Bullshit difference,” Scythe snapped. “She disrespected you. Disrespected this club. And now she’s sitting upstairs like she’s got leverage?”
“Shedoeshave leverage,” I said quietly.
The room went silent as every eye turned to me, and I felt the weight of their stares like a physical pressure against myskin. I took a breath, forcing myself to stay calm. To think like the tech specialist I was supposed to be instead of the man who had just spent three days fucking the woman who held all the cards. “She knows who this Michael is,” I said. “She knows his real name. Where he operates. What he looks like. She’s the only connection we have to the man who orchestrated the hit on FIRE.”
“So we make her talk,” Wanderer said from his position near the wall. “We’ve got a basement full of tools that’ll loosen her tongue real quick.”
“And if she dies before she talks?” I countered. “If we push too hard and she breaks? Then what? We’re back to square one with nothing but a name and no way to track him.”
“She won’t die,” Cerberus said coldly. “Carver knows how to keep someone alive while they’re screaming.”
“She’s not some random cunt off the street,” I snapped, my voice harder than I intended. “She’s smart. She’s calculating. And she just proved she’s willing to die before she gives us what we want.”
“Then we let her die,” Scythe said flatly. “We’ll find another way.”
“Thereisno other way!” My words came out louder than I meant them to, echoing off the walls. “This Michael, whoever the fuck he is... he’s a ghost. No digital footprint. No credit cards. No social media. No fuckingnothing. Alex is the only person who can identify him. The only person who knows where he operates. Without her, we’ve got jack shit.”
