Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 77118 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77118 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
“It’s not my fault you weren’t loyal.”
“It wasn’t my fucking fault that Czar got locked up!” I snapped. “What was I supposed to do? Be a loyal girlfriend to a guy for a decade while he did time after he lied to me for years?”
“Yes,” he said, shrugging. “That’s what loyal people do.”
“Maybe, Chet. Maybe if I’d had a ring on my finger. If I had a house and kids. Maybe then, yeah. I wasn’t his wife. I wasn’t the mother of his kids. And when he got locked up, I had fucking nothing. Not even a goddamn home anymore. The fuck was I supposed to be loyal to? A goddamn memory? Get fucking for real.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Chet said, tone hollow. “You’re a liability now. They have to deal with you.”
But not until I gave over the information about the drugs.
Which I couldn’t do. You know, since I’d lost half of them. But also because the second I did, any value I had left was gone. I’d be dead.
I wasn’t stupid, though.
I could easily see that the man I had known for years, that I had considered a sort of friend, was gone.
In his place was the most dangerous thing a woman could ever be near.
A desperate man.
Which meant he wasn’t going to bat a damn eye at the idea of beating the information out of me. Torturing it out of me.
I wasn’t exactly keen on the idea.
And, yeah, a big part of that was purely for vanity’s sake. I was stressed out enough about the scars from the stitches. I really didn’t want a broken nose or busted eye sockets or God-knew-what else to deal with and try to recover from, seeing the face of a stranger in the mirror every day.
I liked my face.
I didn’t want my features rearranged.
The other part of me wasn’t exactly sure how much pain I could tolerate before I gave him what he wanted from me.
Would I be praying for death?
Would I sell out my mom just to get an end to the suffering?
I didn’t know.
None of us did until we were in a situation that showed us.
My stomach twisted, then tensed.
I was just going to need to endure.
And pray that the Murphys figured out my disappearance quickly enough, checked the cameras, saw Chet’s car, put the pieces together, got Slash and the guys, and came to find me somehow.
I knew those men. Each and every one of them would break down every goddamn door in Shady Valley if they needed to.
I just needed to give them time.
Taking a deep breath, I tried to mentally prepare for the inevitable.
“Don’t make me do it, Nyx,” Chet demanded, looking down at me. I saw a hint of the Chet I knew, the one who asked me about my day, who told me I could confide in him, who brought me chocolate when I was being bitchy and he assumed—often rightly—that I was PMSing.
That said, it was just a hint.
The more dominant look on his face was a grim sort of determination.
He needed to go through me to get to his friend, to save him and his reputation, to try to save himself from torture and murder.
He would lay me to waste without a second thought.
“When have you ever known me to make shit easy?” I asked, tone cold. Almost as cold as the blood was turning in my veins as I saw him flex his hands a few times before balling one into a fist.
As he stalked toward me, reaching down to grab a handful of my hair, yanking me up and holding me in place by it as he cocked his arm back, I heard it.
The rumble of a bike to life.
Hope swelled for the briefest of seconds before I realized something.
It was going in the wrong direction.
Toward, if I was right about my location, my apartment building, not town.
Not to save me.
Not yet at least.
The hope snuffed out just as the fist collided with my jaw, making pain shoot out across my face, twinging off nerve endings, and making a slight taste of blood meet my tastebuds—tangy and metallic.
My tongue touched my back tooth, feeling it wiggle slightly.
If there was anything worse than being tortured, it was having to go to the goddamn dentist afterward.
Root canals and soft food diets.
Ugh.
My mind was still on that as Chet’s hand twisted in my hair, making sparks shoot out across my scalp as another punch landed, this time cracking off my cheekbone, the pain making me worry about my eye socket for a moment before I managed to take a few breaths, calmed myself down a bit.
It was bad.
Worse, even, than I had been anticipating.
The entire side of my face felt like a swollen, bruised wound.
And he was just getting started.
“Where are my fucking drugs?” he growled.