Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 79253 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 396(@200wpm)___ 317(@250wpm)___ 264(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79253 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 396(@200wpm)___ 317(@250wpm)___ 264(@300wpm)
“Very original,” Jack retorts.
“We were kids.”
“Yeah, and we were friends,” Ray adds. “Until Harry here got all pussy-footed after things got a little too real for him.”
“I never agreed to castrate a grown man, Ray. That was an awful thing you did.”
Ray chuckles. “I didn’t do a thing. You did it.”
I blink. “But you made me do it.”
“I don’t recall holding a gun to your fucking head.”
I swallow. He’s right. My actions are my own. I was pressured into them, but I could have refused. I didn’t feel like I had a choice at the time, but deep down, I’ve always known that I did. That I actively chose to harm an innocent man to impress my friend.
I never did it again. I devoted my life to healing people from that point on.
But now isn’t the time to dwell on the past.
“How’d you get mixed up with Rouge?”
Ray exhales sharply. “The same way anyone does. Right place at the right time. Or, as is the case with some of us, the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“What the fuck does that means?”
He shakes his wrists under my grip. “Let me go and maybe I’ll tell you.”
I roll my eyes. “Tell me, and maybe I’ll let you go.”
He chuckles. “There’s that Brother Harry fire I liked. Where the hell did it go that night? Why’d you have to go all noble out of nowhere?”
“What we did that night was wrong, Ray. You know it, and I know it.”
“We were correcting an injustice.”
“Is that what you’re doing now? Correcting injustices by killing these innocent people?”
Ray scoffs. “Who said anything about killing?”
Jack grabs the plate with the cherry tart on it. “You weren’t going to kill me? Then prove it. Take a bite of the tart.”
“Not hungry.”
“I don’t give a shit.” Jack nudges the plate against Ray’s cheek. “Take a bite of the tart or admit you’re killing people.”
Ray darts his eyes around the room, but a tiny grin soon cracks his face. “Fine. You got me. The tart is drugged. Stuff that’ll knock you out like that.”
“And then, what?” I demand. “You take the body back to Aces and dismember it?”
“Dismember?”
“Don’t play dumb with me. I’ve seen the cooler of organs, Ray. Behind the hidden passageway out of the ladies’ restroom at Aces.”
Ray’s grin widens. “Wow, you two really are little sleuths, aren’t you?”
“Not me,” Jack says. “Harrison figured it out.”
“My girlfriend and I,” I say.
Ray raises an eyebrow. “A girlfriend? Finally got over my sister, did you?”
“I got over her the night we stopped hanging,” I say. “Any person who shared their DNA with you was sure to be just as fucked up in the head.”
Ray shrugs. “You’re not wrong. She ended up offing herself in college. Blew her pretty little brains out right in her dorm room. I heard her roommate got the rest of her tuition comped. Some people have all the luck.”
“Fuck. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. She was a stuck-up little bitch.”
I blink. How can this man talk about his dead sister—clearly a girl who was going through something awful—in such a callous way?
“And then you met Rouge?”
“At Reg’s funeral, yeah.” He looks up at me, a trace of pain in his eyes. “Really could have used a friend when that happened.”
“You had Corey and Max, didn’t you?”
Ray rolls his eyes. “If fucking only. I guess they learned that, after you left, they didn’t need me either. Within a year of the Dimpsey house, they ditched me. Left me all alone. The last living member of the Club.” He glances toward my left palm, at the pink X scarred into my flesh. “But you still bear our mark. You’ll never be able to erase what you did to the Dimpseys. What you did to me.”
He lurches forward, taking me by surprise, rips his hands out of my grip, and bites down onto my left shoulder, sending white-hot pain through my body.
Blood trickles down my arm. “What the fuck, Ray?”
His eyes have an almost reptilian glow to them. Like he’s a rabid dog about to rip me to shreds. He opens his jaw and is about to clamp down on my neck when I roll out of his way and land an elbow to the back of his skull.
Jack lands a roundhouse kick to Ray’s gut and then a right hook to his jaw, spinning him around to face me again. Ray lands a few punches to my belly before I grab him by his hair and punch him in the nose. Blood gushes out of his nostrils, but he ignores it, pressing forward with inevitable resolve. He grips the wound in my shoulder, pressing his fingernails into it, forcing a cry of pain out of me as I fall to my knees.
The door to the hotel room bursts open, and I look up just in time to see Bianca gasp. “Harrison!” she calls out. “Are you—?”