Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 125243 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 626(@200wpm)___ 501(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 125243 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 626(@200wpm)___ 501(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
I know it’s about more than that. She’s hurting. Badly.
My chin quivers when she stands at the edge of the roof.
Then the camera zooms, and my heart shatters.
With her arms fanned out wide, she falls to her death.
I scream into the gag; the sound is strangled and useless. I want to kill. I want to hurt. I want the men who hurt my friend to never stop suffering, and I know the perfect one to start with when he rips my headphones off and smiles like the footage we just watched was a masterpiece.
Antonio says softly, tone mocking, “There’s the proof you wanted. I didn’t touch her. She flew off that fucking roof like she had wings. It’s not my fault.”
I yell through the gag, my words raw and furious. “You did this. You killed her! You took the footage while ignoring the screams of your wife! And for what? Because you’re fucking sick? I hate you. I fucking hate you! You killed my best friend.”
He angles his head and furrows his brows. “How did I kill your best friend?” He wipes at my tears, his mouth popping when he licks them off his thumb. “If you’re talking about that little bit of fun we had before her suicide, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Hattie was all for it. She had the time of her life. She had been fucked before, so it’s not like that was new to her.”
My eyes bounce between his, lost. Hattie was also a virgin before her wedding. Her father may have been dead, but that didn’t change the rules. We either wed in white or die in it.
“Oh…” Antonio murmurs as if he can read minds. “You thought she was a virgin, too? I thought the same, but then she didn’t pass the bloody-sheets ritual.” He snickers like there’s no chance his corn kernel dick isn’t to blame for that. “Since she broke the rules, I had every right to dissolve the marriage. I could have gotten an annulment. But that”—he gestures to the projector screen—“was much more fun.”
I launch at him. I don’t care if I have to break my limbs to get to him, but I will get to him, and I will kill him. Mark my word.
Antonio chuckles when my fight wriggles the bolts in the chair but doesn’t get me close to wiping his arrogant, pompous smirk off his face.
A voice from the doorway slices his mocking taunt in half. “We need to move. They have already raided half of Carlisle. They’re coming, and they’re coming fucking fast.”
Antonio doesn’t look away from me. His gaze is demoralizing, and it makes my skin crawl, but since it will keep him at my side until I can kill him, I accept every sickening shiver.
“I’ll catch up. I’m not done here.”
He runs the back of his fingers down my cheek.
Even bound, I jerk away.
He laughs softly. “See? Still far too feisty to have her walking in Hattie’s footsteps. I need to break her heart, soul…”—he licks his lips—“and perhaps even her body.”
“Anton…” the voice says, worry hiking his tone. “You can’t touch her. If you do, it won’t matter where we go, we’ll be fucking done.”
“I know.” His response sounds honest, but his expression says the opposite. “Just go. I’ll meet you at the first checkpoint.”
Not waiting for the voice to respond, he sinks the headphones over my ears again.
I shake my head violently, sending tears streaming down my face, while pleading through the gag. “No, please, no.” I won’t survive seeing my friend tormented like that again. It’ll kill me more than if I faced the same horrors myself. It will break my heart. “Please—”
The death metal music slams back into my skull as the footage restarts with Hattie being pinned to the ground by six men.
Her terror and tears and her only way to end the pain replay over and over and over again, for hours on end, until they scoop out my soul and dissolve it in a grief so thick I’ll never be able to swim to the surface.
Chapter 48
Matteo
The compound my brothers follow me out of is nothing but a ruin of smoke, ash, bodies, and silence. We tore through another Adami-friendly zone, the twelfth tonight, and there is still no sign of Azra.
Dante butts shoulders with me. His chest is heaving, and his face is pale beneath the soot. He’s killed dozens of men tonight, yet he eyeballs me like he’s bracing for me to break. Or worse. For me to slit his throat.
Silent apologies have been pouring out of him all night, but I’m not ready to listen to them.
“Not yet,” I tell him before he can utter a single apology blistering through his remorseful eyes. “Don’t apologize for something that hasn’t happened. Just help me get my wife back.”