We were almost there.
“Listen,” Lucas finally said, almost the first word he had spoken to me since the incident. “I don’t know what’s waiting for me here. If the shit hits the fan, you run to the diner and you don’t come back.”
I wanted to respond, but he was already pulling up the winding drive to his home, and when we got there, there wasn’t an army waiting for us, only a handful of guards. A man approached the car the moment Lucas cut the engine. “Don,” he said, relief written all over his face. “You’re alive.”
Lucas climbed out, and I did the same, wrapping my arms around my waist. I had lived here for weeks, and the number of men present was only a tenth of what I had seen.
“How many?” I heard Lucas ask, his voice rough.
“Twenty,” the other man stated. “It was all I could find.”
Lucas cut him off, his eyes finding me. “Take Leda up to her room. We will discuss this in my study. Torch the car.”
So, he wasn’t going to do it himself? I watched as the man looked at me almost apologetically as Lucas stalked toward the house.
“Who are you?” I asked, curious.
“I’m Emil,” he replied. “I can have some food sent up, don’t expect too much.”
My stomach growled, and he gave some instructions to one of the other men as we climbed the stairs to the second floor.
“Where’s Rocco?” he asked.
“Gone,” I said flatly as we made it to the second landing. “I saw him myself.”
Emil swore. “I should get downstairs then. You know where to go.”
I nodded and walked into my old room, not Lucas’s, and closed the door behind me. I didn’t care that I felt like a prisoner again. I just wanted five minutes to myself, to breathe and try to figure out where everything had gone wrong in my entire life. Lucas’s army had been decimated, given the numbers on the grounds. His second-in-command was dead. He was out of options.
And here I was, the woman who was worried about her future.
A startled laugh escaped me before tears followed, and I sank to the floor, wincing at the pull in my abdomen. The next time I saw Adrian, I was going to kill him.
The thought horrified me for a moment, and I gasped. The thought came to me so easily. For a moment, I couldpictureit. Was I truly thinking about murdering a man?
A man who tried to hurt you, to rape you, and murder you. Just to send a message.I reminded myself.
I had every right to want him dead. Maybe it was time I started to become ruthless. After all, the current Leda hadn’t been working out so well for me.
First, though, I needed to speak to Lucas. We needed to talk about the events of the past twenty-four hours. I knew he had other things to worry about, but I did too.
I didn’t want to sit around and wait for when he wanted to use me next.
I didn’t want to be a victim in his story.
Chapter 5
Lucas
Twelve Hours Later
I watched as the rain dripped off the roof outside the study. The weather matched my mood. I was running on very little sleep and a shitload of whiskey. My sandwich sat untouched on my desk. I didn’t have an appetite, worrying about where the next blow would be and how the hell I was supposed to defend what was mine with such a little force.
Emil had stepped up into his new role as second-in-command with the professionalism I expected. So far, he has become far more capable than I ever gave him credit for. He was no Rocco. No one would ever be. But Emil was loyal, and he didn’t leave any stone unturned.
As soon as he’d heard about Adrian and the Battery boys turning on us, he mobilized what he could. Eyes and ears were instructed to be at their posts in the town below. If anything so much as twitches suspiciously, we’d hear about it and be able to do something about it.
But I didn’t have a hell of a lot of resources. Emil did his best, but Adrian had done his own share of convincing men that I wasn’t fit to follow. Twenty men were all that Emil could muster. Hardly enough to tip the balance in our favor.