“You’re lucky,” Gordon said over my struggles. “Most people don’t have such excellent reception when they arrive.” His gaze flickered to my shorts, then up again. “I give you credit for not pissing yourself.”
“Where are you taking me?” I asked—dumbly, automatically, pointlessly.
“I don’t believe in slaughtered lambs,” Gordon said with disinterest. “So you’ll wait out your time with my middle son. Butcher, you know what to do.”
My shoes skidded against wood, but I was a toothpick compared to this man named Butcher. My heartbeats were stronger than my muscles, but I continued the fight, batting against tree-trunk arms and twisting.
I was good at this. Yet all my chances were trickling away the closer Butcher brought me to a door that led to captivity. He restrained me in a way that I couldn’t reach the necklace or press it if I tried. It required an exact touch, a precise click, in order to activate.
There was only one thing left, and I had nothing to lose.
“The police!” I shouted at Gordon. “They know I’m here. The FBI. If anything happens to me—”
“Oh, those men?” Gordon regarded me with a droll expression. “I have no worries about them. Half are in my pocket. Does Peter Chenko mean anything to you?”
I screeched through his arrogance and would’ve clawed him if I could.
“She’s like a fucking street cat,” Butcher said over my head. “Calm down before I knock you the fuck out.”
I believed him.
With his free hand, Butcher threw open a door leading to darkness. And without any further ado, he threw me down the stairs.
26 We Don’t Procrastinate
In self-defense classes, you were taught how to fall.
When thrown down steps, instead of tensing and bunching up muscles—automatic instinct—it was crucial to stay loose, to flop, while protecting the head.
I did what I could to practice what was preached, but nobody promised it would hurt any less.
Once at the bottom of the stairs, I groaned, the sound buried under the slam of the door at the top of the steps. For some reason, coughing followed, as if during the spiral, my lungs fused flat to my spine. Lifting to my forearms, I took stock of the new environment. Weak light allowed me to case the room while squinting through the dust I kicked up, noting the naked walls, the cracked concrete floor, the two wooden support beams near the center, a cluster of wooden barrels in the corner. Carefully, I moved to a sit, rubbing my elbows and knees, which had taken the brunt of the short fall down one … two … eleven steps.
Then, I rubbed at my neck, thankful I seemed to be in one piece.
Scraping caught my attention, broke my focus on the details of the basement. I jerked to the sound coming from a far corner, noted a bent leg moving at the ankle between the barrels, then falling flat to the floor. Another groan, not mine, came from the same area.
“Theo?” I whispered, because that gurgle of pain, the ache of inflicted wounds in that tone, was not Sax the mafia prince. It was my Theo.
When did he stop being Sax in my mind? I supposed it was in Rada’s bathroom, his hands in my hair, guiding me back to my sister.
I wobbled to a stand, fell when my body recoiled, so adopted a crawling slide. “Theo? Can you hear me?”
The leg didn’t move.
“Theo.” A fit of coughs got to me again, but I didn’t stop sliding closer, nearer, to God knows what. “What have they done to you? Answer me, please answer. Don’t be…”
Don’t be dead.
At last, I made it to the tip of his shoe and jiggled it lightly. “I’m here,” I said to him, scooting closer. “You’re not alone.”
He was so far into the darkness, there was no way to gauge his injuries properly when I couldn’t see him. Gently, ever so carefully, I shifted him by the shoulders so his face would come into the light.
“Oh…” I said, thickness trickling into my throat.
Theo was bloody. Too red. One eye was swollen, the other fused closed, by stinging tears, saliva, who knew. His nostrils were black with clotted blood, his dried lips holding the streams that escaped. A quick scan, some light touches to his cheekbones, and my non-medical training told me perhaps nothing was fractured. The pieces of his face still made sense, nothing was crushed. And his skin was warm. Pushing back his hair on his forehead, I noticed a deep cut near the center, probably the reason for all the blood. Head wounds were terrible bleeders.
I prayed he hadn’t lost too much.
It appeared to have clotted closed, all his wounds had, meaning he hadn’t taken any recent hits. He’d been left in this basement for a while, on his own, with nothing to look at except for scarred wooden beams by other victim’s nails. If he’d been conscious at all, that is.
Now, the major worry was concussion and how long he’d been out.
“Theo, wake up.” I patted his cheek, using my other hand to feel for a pulse in his neck. The movement hurt, but I was able to get up on my knees to do it. “It’s me. Scarlet.”
Did I see that? I peered closer. A twitch of eyelashes, perhaps a small brow furrow, usually a sign that he knew I was near.
“Can you hear me? Or”—I gave a light poke near his jaw, hoping he had no loose teeth—“Feel this?”
“Mmf.” He moved his head away from my fingers.
“Thank God,” I breathed, and continued to lightly poke. “You have to wake up. All the way. I know it’s a bitch, but I’ll be even bitchier if you die. Come on, open your eyes.”
“Nuh…”
“Yes, you bastard. Open them before I pry them open with my broken fingernails.”
Adrenaline retreated to the back of my throat, leaving room for fear and anger.
“How dare you leave with him?” I asked through Theo’s grumbles. “What in the hell made you think that was a good idea? You knew what would happen, didn’t you? That instead of you bringing Trace home, it would become the opposite. Trace was always your dad’s favorite. He figured out that to get back in Gordon’s good graces, he needed to predict your moves. And you were going to escape this life, weren’t you, you jerk? After you found Trace, you were going to disappear again. Under the guise of keeping me safe. Speaking of which, why didn’t you inform me that your father wanted me dead?”
Theo frowned. “Too … much…”
“Too much what? Danger? Excuse me, but have I not shown you I laugh in the face of—”
“…talking.”
I sat back on my haunches. “Oh. Sorry.” I glanced around the room. “I was really on a roll there.”
“…nervous.”
Rolling my eyes back to him, I said, “Even half-conscious, you’re obnoxious. I know I talk too much when I’m nervous. You don’t need to throw it at me.”
“Scared…”
I went quiet.
He coughed, and instead of my dusty, dry croaks, his were clogged with blood bubbles and mucous, and shook his entire, weakened form.
“God … here.” I flew to protect his head, hold his neck steady, while the cascade overtook him. “Please be okay,” I whispered, mostly to myself.
“Fine. I’m—fine.”
“Yeah, you’re a real trooper.” But, in a fit of emotion, I laid my forehead against his temple while I still held him closer. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“You do that to me … on a daily basis. Every minute.”
Theo was sticky, but warm. His hand moved to find mine, and I met him halfway. “Then I guess we’re meant for each other,” I said.
“Where are we?”
“Your father’s basement. Maybe one of many, I don’t know.”
“How did you get here?”
“Gordon invited me.”
Theo stiffened, the action causing his cheek to wince under my skin. “And you came? Why?”
“Because he knew where I was, that I’d come back. If I wasn’t going to come willingly, he’d take me. Forcibly. Possibly putting Kai in danger. Or Verily. I�
��d rather do as your father wants than have my friends face the consequences.”
“Interesting. If only you’d thought that way before re-entering poker rooms after getting shot by my brother.”
“I see that the coughing fit helped clear your airways.” I lifted off so I could glare at him better.
Theo’s eyes were open, the clear, opulent blue at a severe contrast to the blood and shadow of this room. The blue moved closer.
“How long have I been down here?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. But it’s taken me a day and a half to get back to New York. And I started the process immediately after I realized what you’d done.”
His upper lip lifted into what maybe was a smile. “It was either you or me, sweetheart.”
“Doesn’t it always come down to that?” I asked. “Why can’t we just be two people who found each other through a dating app?”
“Because you’re you, and I’m me.” He let out a low rumble in an attempt to clear his throat further.
I studied the length of his form, then back up again. “Why did they do this do you?”
“Exactly what you said during your nervous ramble. Father figured that once I located Trace, I’d send him back with Bo and make my own disappearance.”
The mention of Bo had me licking my lips. Theo caught the hesitation.
“What happened to Bo?” he asked, but it was with very little inflection, like he already knew.
“Bo’s the one who told me a lot of efficient men were going to be paid if I died.” I massaged a residual ache at the back of my neck. “He decided to become one of them.”
“Jesus. No.” Theo attempted to lift of the wall, but fell back at the waste of energy. “Why did you go back there?”
“How could you think I wouldn’t? You were gone. And the only place I could think to make sense of what happened was to find Drea. The one who gave us up in the first place.”
“Yeah. I figured that one out, too.”
“Instead it was just Bo there. And he was angry.”
“Are you all right?”
“Aside from being trapped here in a dungeon with you?” I didn’t want to tell him I killed Bo. “Sure. Dandy.”
Theo’s gaze on me didn’t waver. I was conscious of him assessing my every tell. “It’s my fault.”
“No, it isn’t. I have a knack for sticky situations.”
This time when he lifted off his wall support, he was steady. “The contract was put on you because of me.”
“I’d deduced that.”
“What you didn’t figure out was that as soon as Trace was returned, it would be lifted.”
That caught my attention.
“It was what made me do my father’s bidding in the first place,” Theo continued. “If I didn’t find my brother, you would die. And you would continue to be at risk of death until Trace came back.”
“So I was used as a pawn. The entire reason you left me two years ago was to prevent that.”
“He knew,” Theo said. “Father knew what you meant to me well before you took a bullet. I thought I could redirect his attention and he’d forget about you if there was no more mention of you, not a whiff of your presence around our family. But…”
“I continued to play.”
Theo sighed. “Yes.”
I used the resulting silence to wonder if this was the time to tell Theo about the FBI and the deal they’d forced me to make while still lying prone in a hospital bed from said bullet. That I didn’t play for profit, or to piss off the Saxons, as Gordon assumed, or maybe even Theo himself. It would be just like me to revel in the possibility that I was getting to Theo, that talk of me and my hands would reach his ears and piss him off enough to come back.
But for once, I hadn’t been tossing my pride around.
“What are you thinking about?”
I lost my nerve. “How to get out of here.”
Theo rested his elbows on his knees. “We wait.”
“Seriously?”
“They cornered me. Now they have you. I know my family. We’re about to see their final play.”
“And when that happens?”
His eyes glimmered underneath his brows like a cat’s reflecting in the dark. “You and I will be ready.”
I avoided the instinct to scoff. “With what? Our bare hands?”
“Scarlet.” He held me steady in his stare. “You and I don’t get by with fists and weapons.”
“You’re right,” I said, beginning the calculations. “We plan ahead.”
27 Boom
Noises clamored much too soon.
Light cracked through the darkness, then blazed as someone at the top flicked the switch. With the instinctive sense of belonging to a pack, I glanced over at Theo, garishly wounded now that I could pinpoint every gash.
“Oh, my—”
“I’ll be fine.” He refocused his attention on the stairs, and with a grunt, pulled himself up despite my attempts to help.
It came as a surprise when my left thigh screamed as soon as I put weight on it. The fall down the stairs was making itself known in detail, especially when I demanded my battered muscles to move. But what was the alternative? I was hardened now, a woman who’d seen fingers broken and loose teeth on the ground. Being locked in a basement with a wounded Theo beside me and a psychopath father and son above shouldn’t be so unnerving.
Yet … they’d never been my fingers and teeth.
A set of designer shoes clomped down the stairs, groaning beneath his weight. It made me thankful they were wooden steps, not concrete, since I’d been tossed down them like scrap meat.
A form came to a stop in front of us, his chin lowered until the exact right moment, his walk lean and unhurried. Trace. When he raised his head, I was once again appalled at the beauty. A man so lethal shouldn’t look that good. I felt sorry for all the women and men who fell for his outer grace and too late realized the inner demon.
A reflection of Theo, yet he couldn’t come close to the man standing beside me, one shoulder more stooped than the other, the thin lines of his lips containing a grimace. He was their beauty, their grace, personified. He’d done horrible things but was pained by it and repentant.
He was a prince born into the wrong story.
I reached for his hand. If we got out of this alive, perhaps he could become a part of mine.
“Brother,” Theo said.
“Ah, brother mine,” Trace replied. “What a twisted web we’re in.”
“Aren’t we always.”
“Thank you for bringing me back.”
“Yeah,” Theo said, pointing to his face. “I got all the thanks I need.”
“No worse than what we looked like as young children,” Trace said. “Come on, bro, you still got your teeth.”
Trace smiled, and for the first time I noticed how white they were, how perfectly straight. Veneers.
Trace cocked his head in a playful manner. “You know how Father is.”
“So, was it all a ruse, then?” Theo asked. “Having me go overseas, using the family’s funds, to find a son who was already located?”
“Actually, no,” Trace said. “I had no intention of coming back here. I was having lots of fun where I was. Drea says hello, by the way.”
Trace said the last part to me, and for a brief moment—one I wasn’t proud of—I buckled beneath his pointed stare.
“I’m glad she’s okay,” I said dryly.
“Better than. She’s upstairs.”
“Oh good. Give her my regards.”
“I sure will. Letty.”
I looked away when I swallowed, unwilling to show any obvious weakness in front of this man.
“Why are we here, Trace?” Theo asked. “As far as I can see, you’re back, Father has his favorite son at the helm, there’s no need for Scarlet to be beside me right now.”
“Father has his reasons.”
“And is he going to come down here and explain them?” Theo asked.
“Eventually.”
“I see.” Ever so discreetly, Theo had been inching forward, so that most of his left shoulder and half his torso protected me. “To what do we owe the pleasure of your visit, then?”
“Simple. I want to know how you found me. Was it your little mistress?”
Trace’s anger could be felt through Theo’s suit, through his body and into me. Hot pinpricks, sharp needles, it was all directed at my old wound. Trace hadn’t forgiven me for the drug botch years ago, and I hadn’t expected him to. But what I feared was that he’d torture me for it.
Where was Gordon? I needed them both here.
“Don’t do her any favors. You leave quite a trail, if one knows what to look for,” Theo said. “Blood. Trauma. Beaten up females.”
“I’m getting a sense of deja vu here. Aren’t you?” Trace asked us both.
“You’re not touching her.” Theo growled the words, like they’d been etched into his windpipe and he had to grind them out of the tissue.
“I thought Scarlet means nothing to you?” Trace asked.
“She doesn’t. But I don’t enjoy watching women suffer.”
“Yes. Lauren. I remember. I’m so sad I wasn’t a part of that.”
Theo’s muscles bunched under his torn, filthy suit. I laid a subtle, calming hand on his lower back.
Trace’s attention slid over to me. “But I can be a part of this.”
“Where’s Papa Saxon in all of this?” I asked. Having Trace look at me like that … he might as well have knives in his hand and start carving. “Isn’t he overdue?”
As if I’d snapped an elastic at him, Trace blinked. “Do you remember, brother, how we used to play?”
The change of subject didn’t throw Theo. “It’s not easily forgotten.”
“Do you ever watch MMA fighters?” Trace asked me. I shook my head in response.
“But you know what they are, I assume,” he said. “That’s what Father did with us. As children. He had us fight other kids, with he and his buddies placing bets on us. Orphans, street kids. Sometimes abducted ones. Remember all that, brother?”
“What are you getting at, Trace?”
WIN THE GAME Page 21
