Page 18 of Pucked Around and Found Out

“Yeah, I am. Now if I'm not under arrest, I'm leaving.”

“Not so fast.” She snaps her fingers at the man. “John.”

He gathers the files and hands them to her. She opens the top one, pulls out photographs, and tosses them on the floor in front of me.

My eyes widen. My mouth parts.

No. No, no, no⁠—

I gather the images with shaking hands and flip through them.

Tears gather in my eyes, hot and immediate, as pain blooms inside my chest—sharp and devastating, stealing the air from my lungs.

I feel like my ribcage is caving in. Like my heart is being crushed in a vice.

Suddenly I can't breathe. Can't think. The panic rises like a tidal wave and I'm drowning⁠—

The only fucking way you're going out is by my hands, Tink, so fucking breathe. Listen to the waves and try to match your breathing with them. In... out.

Xaden's voice cuts through the chaos in my mind. I picture the waves lapping at the shore that day on the beach when he talked me down from a panic attack.

I close my eyes and breathe.

In... out. In... out.

I keep doing this until the crushing weight on my chest starts to ease, until the pressure in my head lessens enough that I can take a full breath.

When I finally blink my eyes open, I look down at the photographs and carefully arrange them into four piles.

Neave.

Miles.

Emery.

KennaDee.

All of them lying on cold steel slabs in the morgue. Eyes closed. Skin pale. Forever frozen in death.

This bitch wants to break me.

That much is crystal clear.

She wants to see me shatter. Wants to watch me crumble and beg and give her everything she's asking for.

I stare at the photos, at the faces of the four people who lost their lives for the greed of another and I feel an indescribable pain wash over me.

But beneath the grief, beneath the agony threatening to tear me apart, something else rises.

Rage.

Pure, incandescent, all-consuming rage.

They're using their deaths as leverage. As weapons against me.

And that's a mistake they're going to regret.

I carefully gather the photos and place them back in a neat stack. Then I look up at the Deputy Director with tears streaming down my face and fury burning in my eyes.