Total pages in book: 84
Estimated words: 80471 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80471 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
Standing to her side was a man with a pleased smirk, his fingers still inside a set of brass knuckles.
Behind her chair was the other woman I’d heard before.
She was older than I’d anticipated. Maybe in her forties with a short crop of blonde hair, icy blue eyes, and a svelte frame in a hideously ill-fitting navy blue pant suit.
And that dark patch by her sleeve?
I suspected that was Cinna’s blood.
My gaze slid back to Cinna, watching as her gaze slipped down twice quickly, begging me to follow.
When I did, I saw that my girl hadn’t been idle.
Her wrists were bound back behind the chair, widening her chest, making her arch back painfully.
But something wasn’t quite right.
Because the hand I could see was holding onto the chair rung, blood slipping down her hands and fingers.
Her sleeve was down, but I was almost sure she had that wrist free, but knew she couldn’t move because her other wrist and her ankles were still bound. Someone would be able to overpower her before she could get herself fully free.
But I did have my knife on me.
I just had to get it to her.
“So,” I said, tone lighter than my mood was feeling. “You’re the bitch who made me drive all the way out to Bumfuck, Nowhere Jersey to get rid of a body.”
I didn’t know who this Chet guy was, but clearly, he meant something to this woman, judging by how her focus fully went to me instead of Cinna.
“And you’re the one who’s been hiding her from me,” the Miller widow said, pinning me with those shark eyes.
“I gotta say, it’s a specific kind of evil for a woman to order men to try to rape another woman,” I said, getting myself a hard kick from the man behind me.
I let it make me fly forward onto all fours, getting me close enough to Cinna to pretend to use her chair to pull myself up while I carefully slipped the knife under her thigh closest to her free hand.
“Get up,” the Miller woman snapped, making the man grab me by the back of my shirt, hauling me back.
I made eye contact with Cinna then, letting her see all the rage, all the bottomless darkness I usually kept so carefully contained.
I saw the appreciation on her battered face as the devilish smile tugged at my lips.
And then I was swinging back and under, grasping the hand with the gun with both of mine, yanking until I heard a crack and a howl of pain, then taking the gun for myself, cocking, and sending a bullet flying through the fucker’s chest.
Turning back, I shot out the knee of the bastard who’d been putting his hands on Cinna, watching the blood spurt, seeing his leg give out as he cried.
“I don’t kill women,” I said, turning on the widow.
“But I do,” Cinna said, popping up out of her chair, catching the gun I threw out at her, and turning on her captor.
Cinna was okay.
She could handle the woman.
Now?
Now it was time for me to have some fun.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Cinna
I didn’t know what was in the needle, or how they were so accurate with their administration of it, but the shit was heavy, making it nearly impossible to keep my eyes open in under a moment.
Then, well, then it was all inky blackness.
Consciousness came back to me in bits and pieces. Snatches of garbled conversation. The feeling of something cold and hard against my face and side. My own erratic heartbeat, speeding up and slowing down, then speeding up again.
My eyes felt too heavy to lift my lids, and I didn’t fight it for a long time, some part of me pulled to the darkness, to the peace in the unconsciousness.
It wasn’t until someone kicked at my foot hard, sending a jolt of shock, but no pain, through my system, that I seemed to start to clear the haze of that abyss.
“It’s no fun to play with her when she’s unconscious,” I heard a voice say. “How much of that shit did you shoot her with?” he grumbled, giving my foot another kick.
“You didn’t see her in that warehouse,” the other voice said, familiar, but my brain was too soupy to place it. “She took down all three of us. Believe me, you want her ass drugged.”
“Not this much,” the other guy grumbled, and I was aware of him moving around me, then bending down to slap my cheeks.
I couldn’t say if it was the lingering effects of the drugs, or my own grim determination that kept me from flinching, but he got no reaction, then moved away from me, bored.
Left alone, my face pressed against something cold and gritty that I decided must be a warehouse or basement floor, I forced my breathing to stay slow and deep even as panic—new, but getting alarmingly familiar—started to build.