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Troy screams.

“You were so fucking wrong.”

33

Cora

Idon’t know what time it is when the door opens.

I surface slowly, dragged up from the deepest of sleeps. The room is dark, the blackout curtains drawn tight. For a moment, I don’t know where I am.

Zevran fills the doorframe, and the sight of him cuts through the fog instantly. He’s shirtless, a crisp white bandage strapped tight around his ribs and butterfly closures across his eyebrow. All the blood has been cleaned away. He looks like a king who has torn through a battle and come out victorious.

He has one hand twisted in the collar of the man before him. A limp, pathetic rag doll.

Troy.

Zevran shoves him into the room. Troy’s face is a wreck, with a swollen jaw, blood drying on his chin, one arm dangling and useless at his side. The petty arrogance and swagger have been beaten out of him. What’s left is just a broken coward who knows he’s lost.

Zevran forces him to his knees in the center of the floor.

“Tell her,” Zevran grits out. “Tell her what you just told me.”

Troy’s eyes stay fixed on the rug. His shoulders shake.

“I owed them money.” His voice is a trembling whisper. “Simeon’s crew. Gambling debts. It got out of hand, and I couldn’t— I didn’t have a way to pay it back. They made me do it.”

I sit up straighter among the bedclothes, cradling my fresh cast against my chest. Lorenzo gave me a clean wrap and put two neat stitches in the back of my head.

“Made you do what?” I ask, my voice cool.

“They said if I handed you over, the debt would be cleared.” Troy starts to whine. “I didn’t want to do any of this. I had no choice, Cora. They made me tell them where to find you.”

Troy sold me.

My own husband sold me to the mafia, the way you sell off furniture you no longer have use for. A woman he vowed to protect, handed over to violent men for a line of credit.

“Look at me,” I say.

Troy’s eyes flick up, wheedling, willing to surrender every scrap of his dignity to save his skin.

“You’re a liar,” I tell him. “You had a choice. You made your choice, and you enjoyed it. Every second of it.” I look at this man I married and feel none of the terror that used to paralyze me. Looking at him now, shrunken and trembling, I don’t understand why I was ever afraid of him. “You found me when I was grieving and alone, and you saw someone you could control. That’s what you wanted. Not a wife. A woman too beaten down to leave you.”

Troy opens his mouth to object.

“Shut your mouth. I’m not finished.”

He snaps it shut.

“The only reason I stayed as long as I did was because you convinced me I was worthless. But I want you to know something, Troy. Where I got that hidden money from. I was skimming grocery money behind your back to escape you. I was already on my way out. Even broken, I knew you were a loser.”

Troy’s jaw tightens. He hates hearing that.

By the bed, standing tall and imposing, Zevran watches me with dark pride burning in his eyes.

“I’ve outgrown you, Troy,” I say, my voice steady. “The woman you married is dead. And you’re exactly what you always were. A small, weak man who needed to hurt someone smaller just to feel like a man.”

Zevran steps forward, grips Troy’s arm, and hauls him up. Before Troy can scream, Zevran pulls a thin steel blade from his pocket and slashes it across Troy’s eyes in one clean, brutal stroke.