Nikki barely had one leg out the window when the door flew off its hinges, sending the door frame splintering into a million little wooden pieces throughout the room. Bear, the man who’d sent me up here, stood in the doorway. We locked eyes for a split-second before he noticed the empty drawer, the loose bills on the floor, and the open window where Nikki was already halfway out.
Bear took one step into the room. Nikki reached into her purse and produced a small handgun I didn’t know she had.
“Stay where you are!” she shouted, aiming the gun at his chest. He stopped, raising an eyebrow at Nikki.
“Are you sure you want to do that?” he asked with no sign of fear in his voice, if anything he sounded like he was taunting her. Teasing her. He made it seem as if it was old hat to him to have a gun pointed directly at him.
The green-eyed shadow man appeared in the doorway and instantly my heart restricted in my chest. When he saw Nikki and the state of the room his lip curled up on one side. He took slow confident steps toward her, passing Bear. “Don’t fucking move, or I’ll fucking shoot!” Her voice wavered as he approached.
“So shoot,” he dared, each step toward her a challenge.
Nikki turned toward me, the gun shaking in her hand, an unreadable emotion flashing in her teary eyes. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
She squeezed the trigger.
There was a loud echoing crack in my left ear, like a pik being hammered into a block of ice, followed by a disorienting ringing sensation.
I don’t know how I ended up on the ground, but I found myself lying on the carpet on my side, holding my knees up to my chest. My eyes closed. My hands covered my ears, and I just laid their willing the ringing to stop. Just as it had started to subside, strong hands flipped me flat onto my back. My head thunked against the ground like a dead weight.
“Redhead’s gone,” Bear said, tapping the screen of his phone with his thumb. “I sent Cash and Tank to find her and put the word out to the locals. Town’s too small for her to get too far without someone noticing. We’ll catch up to her sooner or later.”
The green-eyed man glowered down at me from only inches above my face. A vein pulsed in his neck. “Seems I was wrong. You are a whore. A thieving little whore,” He must have taken my confused look for not being able to hear because he ripped my hands away from my ears. “Listen you little cunt bitch…” He paused mid-sentence and looked down to where his hands held mine, and my gaze followed. Sticky red coated my palms. He grabbed my chin, turning my head one way and then the other. When he touched a spot over my ear, pain sliced down my neck, and I cried out.
“Fuck,” he said, his fingers were now coated in the same red as my hand.
Is that blood?
Bear stood off to the side with his arms folded across his chest. I opened my mouth to ask him what had happened, but nothing came out.
The two men exchanged some words I couldn’t make sense of. A black halo formed around the room and its contents, and as the seconds ticked by everything faded further and further into the expanding dark tunnel. My fear of the dark caused my pulse to race, but a sudden eerie sense of calm took over and I concentrated on the beautiful face of the angry man hovering above me.
“I don’t even know your name,” I whispered.
I managed to stay conscious long enough to hear his answer.
“They call me King.”
Then the blackness surrounded me and swallowed me whole.
King
I’d never been so angry in my entire fucking life. And in the past twenty-seven years I’d been alive more than a few people had felt the wrath of Brantley King.
Few had lived to tell about it.
How old was this girl anyway? Seventeen? Eighteen?
I didn’t know her long enough to hate her, yet I had the overwhelming urge to wrap my hands around her throat and strangle her. Better yet I wanted to unravel one of the belts from my forearm and tighten it around her neck. I wanted her to feel every bit of my fury as I squeezed the life from her bony body.
I wanted to take out all of my frustration on her, but it wasn’t just her I was angry with. I was also pissed-off at myself.
I’ve always been nothing short of meticulous about security, but I’d haphazardly tossed the stack of cash Preppy had given me that day into a drawer.
A fucking drawer.
The old me from three years ago would’ve placed it in my attic safe and changed the combination three times already.