He isn’t one of India’s soldiers.
He’s one of her victims.
My theory is proven without a doubt when his zombie-like steps to the other side of the room expose who he’s endeavoring to protect. A woman and child are huddled beneath a soiled mattress. The faintest rise and fall of their chests reveal they’re breathing, but no amount of sugarcoating will alter the facts. They are on death’s door.
“Get the SUVs!” Justine demands like a real-life monarch before she joins Rico on his side of the room. “We need to get them medical treatment ASAP.”
As Rico lifts the unconscious woman into his arms, I assist Justine with the little boy.
“It’s okay,” Justine assures Rico when his massively dilated eyes flicker in response to me touching his son. “We’ve got him.”
It takes Rico a couple of seconds to gauge the authenticity of Justine’s pledge, and even then, he not once takes his eyes off his son during our slow trek to the SUVs.
His panic is understandable. Gender or age wouldn’t have mattered if my child had survived. I would have protected him or her until my very last breath.
Once we have Rico and his family loaded into the lead SUV, I lock my eyes with a pair peering at me in the rearview mirror. “If you see an ambulance, keep driving. I don’t see any good ones coming out this far.”
I wait for Rico to have his wife and son buckled in the safety of his arms before tapping my hand on the SUV’s roof, signaling for the driver to go. I watch its dusty retreat for barely a second when a husky female voice whispers in my ear, “You did good, Maddox. I’m proud of you.”
I assume the praise is from Justine, but my assumption changes when my glance over my shoulder awards me with nothing but bloody carnage. Justine is nowhere to be seen, and I’m too doped up on adrenaline to register the familiarity of the voice in my ear.
“Where’s J?”
Trey stops barking orders at his men to answer me with a shrug. “She was here a minute ago.” He drags his head to the left before veering it back to the right. “She couldn’t have gone far.”
When his scan of the terrain comes up empty-handed, he instructs a man with a tattooed head to take the first load of men to Jim’s before he tells Nero to find Justine.
When Nero jerks up his chin in understanding, Trey gestures for me to follow him inside. My throat works hard to swallow when he stops walking near a table brimming with pharmacy canisters. They all have familiar-looking labels.
“Do you know what’s inside these?” He doesn’t give me the chance to reply. He simply stares at me like I’m dog shit on the bottom of his boot while announcing, “Abortion medication.” He points to each pill canister while naming them. “Cytotec. Mifepristone. Hemabate. Dinoprostone. And last but not at all least… misoprostol.” My eyes jackknife to his when he mutters, “Your crew’s flavor of the month.” He bounces his eyes between mine. “Or should I say Dimitri’s crew?”
I laugh off his claim Nikolai’s disappearance is Dimitri’s doing. I don’t claim to know all of Dimitri’s inner-workings, but there’s no fucking way he’d join forces with India. He wants her dead as much as I do. Furthermore, excluding India’s current scapegoat, Trey is theonlyman from her past still living. If this isn’t a deflection of blame, I never loved Demi, and we both know that’s my biggest lie to date.
Trey works his jaw side to side when I ask, “I never picked you for a pharmaceutical rep. What was your major in high school? Chemistry, or working out which abortion drug was most effective for teen pregnancies?”
It dawns on me that his temper is as short as mine when he pins me to the wall as Rico did to him earlier. He’s a little taller than me, but we’re of similar weight, meaning he can’t get my feet off the ground as Rico could. He has to choke me the old-fashioned way.
“Do you wanna know how I know the name of those drugs?” he asks after tightening his grip around my throat like I don’t have one of his guns shoved down the back of my pants. “I studied them in great detail after Duchess’s pregnancy test came back positive because I know all about the sick shit the Petrettis are capable of. She’s been hurt before. I won’t have her hurt again.”
He’s choking me to death, suffocating me with his bare hands, yet my brain can only focus on his confession that his girlfriend is pregnant instead of the screaming demands of my lungs. His admission changes everything, and it has me wondering how deep India’s ruse runs this time around. Could she be endeavoring to kill two birds with one stone?
“Where is she?” I ask, talking with the last smidge of oxygen in my lungs. “Where is Duchess?”
“Far away from the sick fucks you like to play with,” Trey breathes out slowly, his grip tightening.
Realizing I’ll never subdue a hothead with words, I jab my fingers into his rib before executing the move I did when Igor paralyzed me with a bear hug, except I don’t throw my head backward this time around, I headbutt Trey right in the fucking nose.
He stumbles back with a roar before he rares up with his fists blazing. We both have loaded guns at the ready, but we’re too amped up with testosterone for a quick, uncallous battle.
We want carnage.
Lots of it.
“You’re a fucking dead man, Ox.”
The scarce bit of air I sucked down when I loosened his grip on my throat is forcefully evicted with a brutal left-right-left combination to my stomach. With my focus on breathing, his right fist kisses my jaw without any deflection.
Demi would have chewed me out for that back in the day.
