“Baron let me out,” he says. “We checked the restaurant, and then he went back to report to King.”
“Why didn’t you go?” I ask, narrowing my eyes.
“I figured you wouldn’t believe us,” he says with a shrug. “So let’s check it out and then get back to the others.”
He pushes open the door of the restaurant, and we step inside. The place still smells like spaghetti and barf from all the kids who ate too much at the pasta buffet, but the tables and chairs are gone, leaving only the booths along the edges.
“See?” Duke says. “Empty. Let’s go back. I need another beer.”
My heart sinks. He’s right. They aren’t here. There’s nothing here. I do a loop around the tiny restaurant and then sigh. “Okay.”
He holds open the glass door, and I step in front of him, casting my flashlight beam back one more time. It hits a shape under one of the booth tables, and I stop in my tracks, my pulse racing.
“What’s that?” I ask, backtracking.
“What?” Duke asks.
I hurry back to the booth and reach under, pulling out a black duffle bag. There’s a briefcase behind it.
“That’s Dad’s,” he says, sounding puzzled.
“Why would he leave it here?” I ask, a chill running down my spine.
“Don’t open it,” Duke says sharply.
“You think it’s a bomb? He’s going to… Blow up the mall?”
“I don’t know,” he admits.
“We have to find Royal,” I say, standing. My eyes fall on a brown plastic swinging door on the far side of the room, near the bathroom. “Shit.”
“What?”
“We didn’t check the kitchen.”
I take a step, and the next second, I’m yanked to a stop by the hair. His arm wraps around my throat this time, lifting me off my feet.
“You just don’t know when to quit, do you?” he growls into my ear, so close I can smell aftershave and cough drops as he breathes on my neck. Something snags at my mind, but he tightens his grip, fisting his fingers in my hair and cutting off my airway with his forearm, and then I’m too focused on trying to stay conscious to think of anything else. I grab his arm, turning my head a bit and digging my chin into the inside of his elbow to keep a little air flowing into my lungs. God, his muscles feel like iron. He crushes the side of my neck, and blackness splotches my vision.
“This is Dolce business,” he snaps, dragging me backwards toward the door. “Why the fuck are you still working with the Darlings when you’re not one of them? And this isn’t even Darling business—it’s between us and the Delacroixs. The rest of you need to see yourselves the fuck out. Especially you. You just can’t stop fucking shit up, can you?”
This asshole had me fooled, if not into thinking he was a nice guy, at least into thinking he was harmless. But he’s as bad as Baron—worse, really. At least with Baron, you know what you’re getting. He doesn’t pretend to be a drunken clown and then turn around and cheer his brother on as he tortures me. He makes no apologies for who he is and no attempts to hide his psychotic tendencies.
I grind my heels into the floor, scrambling to push myself upwards, desperate to get the pressure off my neck before I black out completely.
“Royal doesn’t want you here,” he says, jerking me off my feet just as I almost get my boots planted hard enough to relieve the pressure on my neck. “That’s why you haven’t found him. He’s working with Dad, and it’s none of your fucking business, because you’re not a Dolce and you never will be. Why do you think he wouldn’t introduce you to our mother? As soon as he gets bored of fucking you, he’ll realize what a mistake you are.”
He drags me out through the restaurant doors into the corridor. I manage to twist around and throw my elbow into his groin—hard. He curses savagely, but he doesn’t let me go. He grips me tighter, cutting off all my air this time. His hot breath comes quicker in my ear, as if to emphasize how much oxygen he’s still getting.
“You bitch,” he snarls. “I should have killed you in the swamp that night. We shouldn’t have stopped at succeeding where the Darlings failed. I should have seen it through. Ever since the first time, I’ve wanted to see someone die again—up close and personal this time.”
My fingers start going numb, and I know I’m about to pass out. I pull my foot up, yank my knife out of my boot, and use all the strength left in me to slash across his thigh. Hot blood gushes over my hand, and this time, he lets me go, throwing me to the floor. My hands and knees hit the linoleum tiles, and I want to stay there, breathing until my eyes see more than black, but if I take the time to recover, he might recover, too. I don’t know how badly I cut him. So I force myself to roll away, though I’m blind in the dark. I grip my knife and come up onto my feet, staggering as my brain replenishes with oxygen. I take a few deep breaths to get the feeling back in my fingers and my brain thinking straight.
I can see him kneeling, gripping his thigh where I cut him. He peels off his hoodie and wraps it around his leg, cursing and gasping with pain. A shock of horror grips me. Did I kill him?
Then he lurches to his feet. Guess I didn’t hit a major artery. I should be relieved, but now that he’s lumbering toward me out of the dark like some Frankenstein monster, I’m sorry I didn’t finish him off.
“You fucking whore,” he rages. “You’re going to pay for that. We told you that you’d never get away with releasing that video of me, that you’d pay for it. It’s time to pay up, bitch.”