His fucking bribe.
He left me in here to suffer.
This man doesn’t give a damn about me at all.
That’s all this is. A pantomime meant to make me trust him and the family. He’s playing with my emotions, with my desire to feel like I’m a part of something. He’s manipulating me the way Cillian’s trying to manipulate the Bruno family, and I’m falling for it because I’m so desperate and afraid. All this bastard thinks he needs to do is apologize, smile, seem like he’s remorseful, like he’s got a heart, and give me some fucking good.
And I’ll come crawling over to their side.
Anger hardens me and I only stare at him.
Slowly, he pulls his hand back with a sigh.
“I think you should go,” I say, turning to look at the window again.
He makes a show of cleaning up the meal. Once it’s all back on the tray, he stands and places the last chunk of bread on the nightstand. “In case you get hungry again. Who knows when they’ll be back to feed you.”
I grimace, but don’t turn. He clambers to the door and pauses there, staring back at me.
“You can always change your mind. Nobody should ever be punished for changing their mind.”
I say nothing. What’s there to say?
The door closes, the lock slams shut, and I’m alone again.
I hear someone in the kitchen, moving around, running water. It must be Ronan or a soldier cleaning up after the meal. I curl into a ball and pull the blankets over my head and try to pretend like I’m somewhere else—maybe in Fynn’s bed, warm and comfortable and waiting for him to get out of the shower so he can touch me, kiss me, make me feel good for once—
I manage to sleep. My dreams are horrible, but vague. I don’t remember them when I wake up the next morning, and I’m left with a sticky feeling, like mud on the bottom of my brain.
I use the small bathroom, clean myself in the sink the best I can, and chew on the stale dark bread Ronan left the night before. I hear people shuffling around in the main room and catch some snippets of muffled, vague conversation, but I can’t decipher any of it.
I crawl back into bed because there’s nothing else to do. I’m exhausted from a fitful night. Sunrise breaks through my windows as the morning deepens. I test the bars again but they remain solid. How convenient would it be if they swung open and I could climb out a window? But Cillian’s not that lazy. He’s too smart to let me run away.
Time passes. It’s hard to judge how much. I’m busy picturing all the ways they might torture me or my mother, and the daydreams of them cutting my mother to pieces are so much worse than the visions of Cillian holding me down while his men have their way with me. I’m sweating, trembling. I feel sick. When a knock finally comes, I’m so desperate for any human interaction that I sit at the end of the bed, back straight, hands in my lap, trying to look both obedient and harmless.
Cillian appears. He looks tired, sweaty, his face red. There’s rock dust on his clothes and his boots are dirty. But he’s smiling like he just won a victory. “Good morning, little sister. Someone’s here to see you.”
Chapter 28
Fynn
The desert’s stifling even early in the morning. The night’s dew steams from the rocks as the sun treks upward. I stand in a rocky clearing surrounded by low bluffs on all sides. Gavino’s with me, nervously chewing on a toothpick, and Mirella’s father, Genaro, stands with one foot up on a rock surveying the landscape sourly. In the rocks above, Nico and several of his best men are hidden and armed with high-powered sniper rifles.
I watch Genaro wander off a few paces, kicking rocks. Gavino catches me and gives me a sharp look. I pushed for the Capo to stay behind, but Gavino and Casso both spoke up for him. Genaro heard about the meeting and insisted on coming along—he said his daughter’s life hung in the balance and he couldn’t stay behind.
As noble as that might’ve been, I don’t trust the fucking guy.
But he’s here, and there’s no changing it. I wipe my forehead with my sleeve and lean on my cane. I wish I could leave the damn thing back in the vehicles, but we had to hike out to this spot from a dirt road about a mile back, and there’s no way I’d make it both ways on my own power.
Cillian chose this ground. We scouted it out late last night and left a couple men behind to keep an eye on everything. They reported back early that Cillian’s men set up across the clearing, on the far side of the ring. Their own snipers, three of them. We brought three to match.