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“Man, I didn’t—” He cut off with a scream as I clamped the pliers onto his fingernail, the sound echoing off the walls.
“Wrong answer,” I said, emotionless, and pulled.
The nail came off with a sickening pop, blood welling up instantly. Santos thrashed against his restraints, his cries slicing through the sterile room. I dropped the bloody prize onto the plastic sheeting covering the floor.
“Who?” I demanded again.
“It was Borovsky!” he choked out, tears mixing with sweat on his pallid face.
“Go on,” I prompted, absently fidgeting with the pliers.
“Kennedy...she’s just a distraction,” Santos gasped between sobs. “They want you off-balance.”
“Who wants me off-balance?” My grip tightened, ready to escalate the lesson.
He said something unintelligible, his voice garbled by pain. “Borovsky’s work…”
I nodded, a grim sense of satisfaction settling in my gut. As much as I loathed this part of our world, it was necessary. Necessary to protect what was ours, what was mine—especially Kennedy.
“I have more questions,” I warned him, and because he had been part of hurting what was mine, I took another finger. He screamed.
Santos’s eyes, wild with pain and desperation, found Kennedy across the room, and I felt her flinch from across the space.
“Kennedy,” Santos’s voice cracked, a beggar’s plea. “Help me, please.”
She jumped at the sound of her name. I hated that he fucking dared to use it, and I picked up a knife from the tray.
He only knew her name because they had targeted her. Because she mattered to me.
Her gaze flickered to mine as she caught her lower lip with her teeth. I wasn’t sure she realized what his pleas meant. He should never have known her name.
“Greyson will hurt you too,” Santos spat, his voice laced with bitterness. “You think you’re special? They’ll turn on you just like this.”
The words struck a nerve. She snapped upright, her eyes widening. “You don’t know anything about them!” she fired back. “There’s almost no one in the world I trust like I trust them—and there’s nothing I trust in the world like their love.”
Her words hung in the air. Our love was twisted, knit from darkness, but it was ours. I could feel the heat of her emotion radiating across the room, the fierce protectiveness that matched my own.
Maybe she didn’t remember all of our past. But she trusted us, believed in the love that had grown between us despite—or perhaps because of—the shadows that clung to our lives, then and now.
Santos’s mouth worked soundlessly for a moment, his gambit crumbling before the conviction in Kennedy’s stance. She believed in us, in me, with a ferocity that belied her gentle appearance, and her faith fortified my resolve.
“Quiet now, Santos,” I murmured, my voice deceptively soft. “You’ve lost the game.”
With a tremor in her hands that she fought to control, she stepped forward, her eyes never leaving Santos’s terrified gaze.
“Greyson,” she whispered.
“Kennedy, you don’t have to—” I started, but she cut me off with a shake of her head.
“I do,” she stated simply, her voice void of any doubt. “You wanted to make sure we all had bloody hands, didn’t you?”
Not her. I’d never intended for her to have bloody hands. But she reached and took the knife from me.
The air crackled with tension as she approached Santos. He began to beg, but it was clear that it didn’t matter to her now.
“How do I do it, Greyson?” she asked. “What would you do?”
“I’d stab him and leave the knife in,” I admitted. That was why there were a dozen small blades gleaming on the tray. “That way he doesn’t lose blood too quickly.”
