Page 61 of Diary from an Inked Throne

He grabbed my finger, pulling me over to him so he could kiss my mouth. “I’m never going to be a cowboy, princess. But if you want to be a cowgirl…maybe a reverse cowgirl, I’m happy to give you something to ride…”

I rolled my eyes. “You’re the worst.” But I felt the blush on my cheeks.

Lynx laughed at him. “Is that seriously your come-on line?”

Luca raised an eyebrow. “Do you have a better one?”

Dax opened his mouth to join in but couldn’t get a word out.

A crack of noise split the air so loud all four of us ducked, covering our ears.

Mine rang with a piercing scream of pain, my entire body rocked by some unseen force from behind us.

It took me a second to realize the screaming wasn’t just in my head.

It was coming from all around us.

And when we turned to look back, the night sky was lit up in an orange ball of flame.

Completely engulfing the car we’d driven here.

The one X had said he would drive home.

19

ENZO GUERRA

Ihated babies.

I hated whores who couldn’t shut them up.

I hated not having any fucking money, and dead-end towns, and wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap everywhere I went because my damn face was plastered all over every social media app and news bulletin.

I hated my motherfucking nephew most of all.

Priscilla fed the baby a bottle in the cracked leather booth, smiling down at him fondly.

Like she’d actually grown to like the little worm. My lip lifted in disgust at the way she cooed at him.

I wanted to go back to when she hated him just as much as I did.

But apparently, anyone with a uterus thought the kid was cute. He attracted attention everywhere we went, either because he was screaming bloody murder or because he was smiling and cooing.

I hated the sound of both.

I was just grateful that all babies looked pretty much the same, so nobody really gave him much of a second glance. At least not in a suspicious way.

Unlike the way they stared at me. We’d sat at this booth for an hour because there was nobody else in the diner besides a bored waitress who was more interested in talking to her boyfriend on the phone. I assumed there was a cook in the back somewhere, who had fried up the cheap, greasy burgers we’d devoured, but he or she hadn’t shown their face once.

If I cooked food that tasted that bad, I wouldn’t have shown my face either.

Fuck, I missed nice food. An expensive steak in a nice restaurant with an Old-Fashioned over ice in a crystal glass. I missed dry-cleaned suits—ones that weren’t handwashed in the bathtub of cheap motels because I was running out of money so fucking fast that food and a roof over our heads had become the only things I could afford to pay for.

My phone buzzed on the chipped tabletop, and I snatched it up when I saw the withheld number.

If this wasn’t the call to say my nephew was dead, I was going to lose my fucking mind.

“What?” I snapped down the line, in no mood for pleasantries.