19
Mercy
I froze.There wasn’t any question in Wylder’s statement. It was an accusation.
Anthea folded her arms in front of her chest. “Don’t try to deny it. Gia told us everything.”
Of course she had. I reined in my anger, holding myself cautiously. “What exactly did she tell you?”
“That you were out in Steel Knights territory and met with your ‘fiancé,’” Wylder said. “Seems like a funny thing for her to make up.”
My hands clenched. “She didn’t make it up—but it wasn’t like—”
“Don’t go making excuses,” Kaige snarled, shoving past Wylder. “This whole time you’ve been double-crossing us? After all the— I ought to—” Fury reddened his face, and veins popped from his neck and down his brawny arms. He lunged at me, only brought up short by Wylder grabbing his shoulder.
A chill rippled through me. Who the hellwasthis guy? Kaige’s easy demeanor had been replaced by something I didn’t even recognize, something feral and wild. If he’d gotten this enraged in his argument with Titus, I could see why Axel and the others thought he could have killed the guy.
How were Wylder and the others so sure hehadn’t?
But despite my fear, a flicker of heat shot through the chill right down to my pussy. My God, what was wrong with me? He looked savage enough to tear me to pieces, and something about that was turning me on even as I flinched inwardly at having his hostility directed at me. An image flashed through my head of him taking me with all that brutal intensity, hate-fucking against his car in a fiercer version of this afternoon’s hook-up.
I shook my head as if I could dispel my reaction. Kaige seemed to take the motion as a denial. “Don’t lie to us now,” he yelled, loud enough that Anthea winced. “You fucking betrayed us!”
“No, I didn’t,” I shouted back. “Maybe if you’d let me finish my goddamn sentence—”
“I don’t want to hear anything from your stupid mouth.” He jerked forward again, and it took both of Wylder’s hands to haul him back. The Noble heir watched me coldly.
“We should let her talk,” Rowan said quietly. “We have to know exactly what went down, what she told Colt—all of it.”
Gideon nodded, his eyes sharply intense and even icier than Wylder’s. “Yes. All the details, quickly.” He snapped his fingers.
I drew in a breath, my skin prickling with nervous anticipation. This could go so very badly if they didn’t believe me. My muscles in my calves flexed with the impulse to just make a run for it.
But now I wanted Colt and his lackeys destroyed more than ever, and I’d seen incredibly clearly that there was no way I was accomplishing that on my own.
“IfGiahadn’t been lying, she’d have told you Colt ambushed me. She was right there—she must have been able to tell that I wasn’t expecting to see him and that I wasn’t happy about it. And then she took off, because all she cared about was saving her own skin.”
Wylder scowled at me. “She said he’s calling you his fiancée still. That’s how we figured out who it was.”
I barely restrained myself from rolling my eyes. “Fun fact: I don’t have any control over what words that asshole uses. I’m sure as hell not callinghimmy fiancé anymore.”
“Still, it’s a rather friendly term,” Gideon put in evenly. “And Gia got back here almost two hours ago. Where have you been all that time?”
“Colt had a bunch of his men with him. I didn’t have the chance to get out of there. He took me to one of his buildings, insisted on talking to me. It took me a while to get away.”
Anthea snorted. “And you just waltzed out of what I assume was a heavily guarded building with no problem at all? Sounds too convenient to be true.”
Yeah, it probably did. I balked at admitting this skill to them—I preferred to keep as much as I could in my back pocket—but I had to explain my escape somehow.
“I did gymnastics as a kid,” I said. “Until my dad decided it was a waste of time. But I wanted to keep practicing on my own, and while I was looking up training videos, I stumbled on parkour. It was even better—leaping and bounding all over the city, scaling buildings most people couldn’t… I broke a few bones in the first couple of years, but I kept at it, and I’m pretty fucking good now, if I do say so myself.”
Wylder cocked his head. “A very nice story, Kitty Cat, but it doesn’t answer the question.”
I glared at him. “It does if you have half a brain. I never talked to Colt about that recreational activity. So it didn’t occur to him that it wasn’t a good idea to let me get close to an open window. I took a flying leap and rebounded between the building and the one next door all the way to the ground. Ran off before his guys could make it down the stairs coming after me. I know the streets in the Bend pretty well, and we were close to Claws territory still.”
Or what’d used to be Claws territory before the Steel Knights had pissed all over it to mark it their own.
“Bullshit,” Kaige spat out, but he wasn’t pulling against Wylder’s grasp anymore. Maybe he’d gotten a glimpse of me using some of those techniques to get in and out of my house the other night.