AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Shoot him already, Thorne.” The shrill voice of my mother is pathetic. She thinks this is going to end with either of them getting out of here alive? Raven is the murderer the Anguis themselves trained to eliminate targets as and when they so please.
Neither of them stand a chance against him.
“I thought Fox might want to know.” My wolf narrows his eyes. “Just how many years her own mother had planned to screw her over for.”
Giana hisses.
Raven’s dark eyes narrow. “I couldn’t work out why you were always stationed outside her rooms. Then it dawned on me…was Thorne Calliano protecting what was his? His child perhaps?”
The urge to be sick races up the back of my throat, blood drains from my face, and I have to bite down on my tongue to stop myself from screaming. Searching Thorne’s stony profile in desperation for the faintest flicker that he might refute the most awful possibility.
It couldn’t be that. Thorne wouldn’t do…that.
Nonono. My face contorts as I look back at Raven, and he carries on speaking in low, measured tones.
“But just when I thought you might have been the foulest asshole I’d ever had the misfortune to meet, I found out something else…you and Hawke were both posted elsewhere by the Anguis for over a year around the time Giana became pregnant. So that led me on even more of a curious path. To figure out why the fuck all those years later, you would choose to be involved with the child of the woman who had been your abuser for too long.”
I don’t know if it's the sickening sense of relief washing through me, or adrenaline, but I’m trembling from head to toe.
“What could possibly have made you her obedient little puppy? The great and mighty Thorne Calliano, all this time, still loyal to the psychotic kiddy fiddler hiding in the shadows.”
“Fuck you.” Thorne spits out and raises his weapon, but barely lifts his arm, before two sharp pops ring out. Bullets rip from the gun aimed at him.
A keening scream slashes through my lungs as I collapse forward. Doubling over with blinding agony as I watch Thorne—my Thorne—crumple to the floor, twisted away from me and with blood pouring from his shoulder. I can’t see the second location he’s been hit, but my gut tells me it’s somewhere fatal.
Raven Flannaghty doesn’t miss.
My haunting noises are nothing more than violent sobs, as my chest heaves. I’m thrashing against my restraints, and I don’t know if the pain slicing my body in two is coming from my broken ribs or the shattered heart exploding inside my rib cage.
I can’t even see through the lashings of hot tears. Sharp nails dig into my skull, and there’s barely a second’s reprieve before I’m being dragged to my feet by my hair.
“Don’t. Or I’ll end her right here, right now.” The mother I thought I knew all those years ago, has a gun pressed beneath my ribs. Driving the metal against the broken and bruised remains of my body.
All I can see through the blur of tears is a dark outline where Thorne’s body lies. He’s unmoving on the concrete. Blood pools below his shoulder.
My wolf has his weapon directed at me now.
And his sights are fixed on the woman using my body as a shield.
His dark gaze consumes me. There’s no remorse there for what he’s done. Only pure vengeance and hatred eating him alive.
“That gets rid of your chosen heir, Giana. You don’t want to go harming the only chance you have left of stealing power now, do you?”
“You don’t know what you’re playing with, boy.” She sharply yanks my head again. My eyes can hardly focus on anything. I just want someone to bury me and end this nightmare.
“Fox is your only chance to steal the Noire lineage, isn’t she? She’s not Andreas’ child.”
I blink, certain I’ve misheard him.
Behind me, there’s an unhinged peal of laughter. “God, you really should have had a bullet put through your skull as a child. Would have saved me a lot of fucking hassle, Flannaghty. No, Andreas and his rotten dick was never the father. Noire House was easy enough to find a no-body who thought they might get a chance at falling in my favor if they got me pregnant. Whoever it was served his purpose and was disposed of a long time ago.”
Oh my god.
There’s every possibility I’m going to collapse. With each hateful moment this insanity drags on, the blood seeping from Thorne’s body continues to pool on the concrete.
“Andreas knew, didn’t he.” Raven keeps the gun pointed straight at us.
Spiders crawl across my skin.
