Page 64 of I am Dressed in Sin (Death by Daybreak MC 2)
“This son of a bitch,” Cat growls from beside me. I can somehow sense all four of his officers, like each one is a highlight in my brain, a flicker of lightning in a storm.
“What do you want, Grey?” I ask, almost breathless. Can anyone tell? Is Gaz watching me? I don’t dare look at him. Instead, I pause as Beast steps forward. A subtle warning. A claiming. I never break eye contact with Grey.
“Your loyalty never wavered, never faltered,” he says as I do my best to follow the unspoken things creeping around beneath his words. I’m telling the club you were loyal to them, but I’m reminding you that you were loyal to me instead. “That’s something I—we—admired about you.” He glances to one side as if for confirmation, and then turns back to me. “That’s how I knew you’d be the perfect person for this job.”
“Job?” I question as Gaz snarls something ignorant like I fucking knew it under his breath. What an asshole. Not the lovable kind like Grainger either. “What job, Grey? Were you absent in that church when the club mowed down your extended family?”
He keeps that disturbingly blank smile of his in place.
“Your club slaughtered forty-six people, not including hired help.” He snaps this last word off the tip of his tongue like a proper young crime lord, like a threat. What have I done? I think as I look at him, as I watch him shift into the specter of his father. Were all those months we spent together total bullshit? Who is this man anyway? “In return, we want forty-six of your people. Men, women, children, it doesn’t matter. You can pick. Drop them off at the designated location, issue a public apology for Kian’s murder, and let go of the casino. We’re willing to consider a tentative … well, I won’t say peace because submission would be in order, but we’ll let the majority of you live.”
I’m shaking now, my fingernails digging into the edge of the table. I can’t believe Cat made me put the ring back on. Grey sees it, his eyes shifting to the diamond on my finger with an impassiveness that scares me. What was the point of wearing it in the first place?
“You can tell him to go fuck himself,” Cat says with a gruff, angry sort of laugh. He clamps a huge hand over my shoulder, leashing me. “Ain’t none of that shit is ever going to happen, son.”
Here. Here is where it would be prudent for Grey to tell the truth, that I saved him and stole a bike, that I’m a snake in the grass.
Only … he doesn’t. And that tells me something about this whole situation.
“That’s unfortunate,” Grey says, and then he’s reaching down and grabbing a handful of something red. With a vicious yank, he drags a girl into view of the camera, and I realize that … that …
My mind empties, and my heart goes completely numb.
No.
Nopleasenodeargodnopleasepleaseplease.
Reba.
That’s Reba that Grey’s jerking around like a puppet, dragging her up to her knees as she gasps and chokes, blood running down the front of her face. She’s barely recognizable, as swollen and bruised as she is. Grey looks right at me as he holds out his hand and someone places a revolver in it.
He puts the barrel to Reba’s head.
I’m the only person in that room that cares, and I think that’s part of the point.
“We’ve already gotten started for you,” he tells me, holding his finger over the trigger. “We’ll count this as one. Forty-five more people. For every day that you delay, we destroy something. Every day, we add another person to the tally.” He pauses again, and an explosion sounds, echoing across the compound like a bomb going off. “Don’t make us polish off all those pretty families of yours.”
And then the video call cuts out, and men are scrambling for the door as Cat shouts orders.
“Come with me,” a voice whispers in my ear, and then Sin is dragging me from the room and heading for a side door that used to lead to a gazebo. I mean, it still leads to a gazebo, but this isn’t the same one that was here before. The Daybreakers dismantled the old, rotting one, buried some men who did ‘em wrong, and poured a new patio. Then, they built the new gazebo, the one that stands here now.
Sin drags me underneath it, vines tickling my face, the scent of jasmine so overpowering that I almost choke.
He takes me around the back of the house, to where the basement entrance is, and we crawl in together. Hunkered down. Protected. But what about Reba? Reba is not protected. It occurs to me that she might already be dead, that Grey might’ve shot her in the head after ending the video call.
