“Where the fuck are you?” he growled.
Reaper laughed again. “The scene of her fuckin’ crime.”
Zeus hung up, an animal noise of frustration in his throat, but I was already moving back to the ’Stang.
“Take it you know where that cryptic asshole meant,” he called out, stalking to his bike.
“Yeah,” I said. “Port of Vancouver.”
Harleigh Rose
I was tied up and gagged.
Farrah had been displeased about it, but then changed her tune when Reaper agreed to use two of her pretty silky scarves to bind my hands and feet, one pressed over a sock stuffed in my mouth. She had me sitting up at the desk, chattering at me as she painted her nails a pink she called “Crushed Hearts.”
Wrath lay in the corner of the room, and I didn’t know if he was breathing. Only that it looked like he’d been there for a while and the carpet all around him was stained with blood.
“Reaper’s gonna kill your daddy,” she went on, pausing in her manicure duties to snort another line of coke off the table beside her nail kit. “And I know you’ll get all righteous about it, but you’ll realize he deserved it. He abandoned you to go to prison for his little slut, and now he’s left you again. Reaper’ll do what he needs to do and then we’ll go somewhere new.”
She paused, saw the drool dripping out of my mouth because the gag was stretching my lips too wide, and leaned forward to dab at it with the ends of the scarf.
When she sat back, she beamed a wide, happy, high off her fucking face smile at me. “I’m thinkin’ Colombia. You know it’s the coke capital of the world?”
She laughed that giggling, raspy laugh that I’d hated since I could remember and then, over that, a hoarse shout.
My heart kicked up dust in my chest, stirring old hopes.
Renner had been on the phone while I was taken.
Maybe the police were there.
Instead, there was a creaking groan as someone joined Reaper on the metal platform outside and then the door was opening, and he was stepping through with a wild grin.
Not the police then.
But I still gasped, nearly choking on my gag, when I saw Dad bend slightly to step through the door, his huge presence making the trailer seem unbearably small.
“Hey baby girl,” he muttered softly, his heathen face creased into a slight smile.
God, Daddy.
I regressed to a little girl so instantaneously, I didn’t even try to hold back the tears.
It had been weeks since I’d seen his handsome face smiling at me. And now it was happening in a trailer in a cargo yard with fucking psychos present.
If I hadn’t been so tired, so sick to my gut with fright and grief, I might have laughed because our reunion was so Garro.
But I didn’t.
Reaper lifted a gun, his arm high above his head to aim it properly at Dad’s temple.
“You piece of shit. Thought you always deserved all the good, never thinkin’ anyone else was better ’an you. But now look, I got your woman,” Farrah laughed as she popped up from doing another line, rubbing her fingers across her gums to get the dregs of powder. “And your fuckin’ rat of a kid.”
Dad’s fists clenched slowly opened then closed to control the rage emanating from him like radioactive waves.
“You don’t deserve shit,” Reaper yelled at him. “Get on your fuckin’ knees.”
I yelled behind my gag as my dad locked eyes with me and dropped slowly to his knees.
No, Daddy, no, no.
Reaper pressed the gun to his temple and smiled at me. “This is for you, Farrah baby. For you and me.”
“He’s gonna kill ’er,” Dad rumbled. “Farrah, he’s gonna kill H.R. for rattin’ on ’im.”
“No,” Farrah laughed uproariously. “We’re gonna move to Colombia.”
Her eyes searched Reaper’s and slowly, her smile slipped, “Reaper baby?”
“We’ll talk about it,” Reaper hesitated then pressed the gun harder to Dad’s temple. “After I kill ’im.”
For the first time in my life, I was happy my mother was such an idiot. The scarves against my wrists were silky enough to work myself out of and I’d been twisting my wrists for the last forty minutes.
I broke free just as a gun fired and Dad dropped to his side.
I screamed behind the gag, tore off the scarf, ripped at the one around my ankles and was pulling off my gag when I noticed Dad roll and come up into a crouch against the wall, gun in his hands aimed at Reaper who was staring like he’d seen a ghost at the suddenly open door.
Dad shot him in the head.
I watched as Reaper’s head snapped back on his neck and then his entire body crumpled forward. Done.
I moved forward only to feel cool hands grabbing me from behind and the press of something small and sharp at my jugular.