Page 69 of Dreadful

Her warning tries to burrow between my ribs, but I shrug it off. “We told you to leave.”

“Ah, are we back to this now?” She takes a slow sip.

I watch her swallow.

Same trick, different night. Let the question slide past, make me the problem for asking it, then wait until I get tired enough to move on.

Usually, it works.

I stretch my neck from one side to the other. “Is that all?”

She tsks, tilting her glass. Ice clinks against crystal. “Take this seriously, honey.”

My attention drops briefly to her nearly empty drink before returning to her face. Annoyance pulls tight across my shoulders. “There’s no way he’d find our friends.” Gage and I were careful when we sent them on their way.

“I know you boys are good at what you do,” she trails off with a little smirk. “But are you willing to bet your life on it?”

“Yes.”

She purses her lips at my automatic response. She should be proud instead. Isn’t this what she instilled in us day after day for fucking decades?

Family. Blood. Loyalty.

“What about your brothers’ lives?”

“Yes.”

“Bellamy’s?” Her voice shifts on her name, like she’s pressing against the tender spot on my ribs.

Coco swirls her drink. Ten seconds pass. Fifteen, then twenty. She never pulls her gaze from mine.

The air between us changes morphs into something with substance.

My mother doesn’t move, but her expression shifts—the corners of her mouth lifting just enough to pretend at sympathy while her eyes stay flat and unblinking.

Corrine Calloway might’ve been a mother in another life, but Coco is a fucking predator.

And right now, I can feel the phantom press of her teeth against my windpipe.

And I fucking hate her for it.

I push off the wall, standing to my full height and staring into eyes so similar to my own. “This blood’s on your hands.”

Coco’s lips curve as she lifts a shoulder in a careless shrug. “I can live with that.”

Of course she fucking can.

I clench my teeth hard enough that my molars ache. “And this one’s not for free.”

“Oh, you’re charging me for your services now?” Her eyebrows lift as she drags the pad of her finger around the top of her glass. The smile doesn’t leave her mouth, but it thins, tightening at the edges like drying glue.

I match her expression, all teeth and no warmth. “Isn’t that how you taught us to do business?”

A short, sharp sound escapes her—not quite a laugh, more like air forced through a closed throat. “Ah. So it’s business now.”

“Isn’t it?”

The fluorescents hum above us, a low electric drone. Outside this sealed room, the house is silent, distant.