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Watching.
Morana stayed silent.
Waiting.
The man holding her arm turned to her, his face just a little above her. “What were you doing, girl?”
Morana stayed silent.
“What’s your fucking name?” the man spit out.
Morana glared up at his attempt
to intimidate her, knowing she couldn’t let her real name be known, not in a crowd she didn’t know, in a casino in her father’s territory, and especially not when Tristan Caine stayed quiet. That told her enough for the moment.
“Stacy,” she finally said the first name that came to her mind.
The man raised a skeptic brow. “Stacy?”
“Summers,” she supplied sweetly.
“Well, Ms. Summers,” the man bit out, his voice harsh, his tone gleeful. “You see this room? Here’s where we play. But it’s not for money. For information.”
Ah. That made sense.
“There are only two ways you leave when you come to this room,” he grinned, his tobacco-stained teeth gleaming in the red light evilly. “You play and win, or you leave with a bullet in you.”
Dead or alive. Nice. Very mob-like.
Morana raised an eyebrow, looking pointedly at the gun on the table, her mind racing. She didn’t know what the game was but she did know that if she refused, the gun digging into her ribs would go off in a second, lodging the bullet very, very close to her heart. Plus these men were playing for information. If there was something she wanted more than freedom from this world, it was information.
“I’ll play,” she informed the man in a saccharine tone of voice, completely hiding her nerves.
She saw the disbelief flash on the man’s face momentarily before he pushed her into an empty chair, right in front of Tristan Caine.
Morana sat down, her back to the door. It was a vulnerable position. Anyone could enter and shoot her in the back.
But she looked up and saw Tristan Caine watching her, watching the door, watching everyone in the room without moving his eyes from her, and she felt her insides relax minutely. If there was one thing she knew for a fact, it was that this man would not let anyone else kill her. Her death was his, and only his. And looking at him, seeing not Tristan Caine but The Predator, she believed it with every fiber of her being. That was also the reason why she could not relax. Because she did not know this man. She’d met him once when he’d pushed her own knife against her throat back in Tenebrae. She’d met him when he’d threatened her on top of her car. Since then, she’d seen only terrifying glimpses of him.
But he was completely in his element now, any trace of the man who’d taken her riding on his bike, given her refuge in his territory, or cooked meals while she’d watched, completely gone.
She realized in that moment how much she’d come to know Tristan Caine without really knowing him. And how much she did not know this man leaning back in his chair, casual, composed, like a sleeping panther, crouching down, readying itself for the strike.
He would’ve realized by now how she’d ended up there. That made her stomach knot. She didn’t know how he would react, didn’t know if he would kill her right at this table or take her somewhere to torture her first.
Her heart hammered in her chest as she kept her eyes on him, her spine straight and every sense in her body on high alert. She was in a jungle of predators and the deadliest was watching her.
The slimy man, who’d dragged her in, loaded the gun at the center with one bullet and put it back on the table, within the reach of every arm, taking a step back.
That was the precise moment Morana realized the game.
There was one bullet.
Her stomach sank.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
She was dead. She knew she was dead. There was no way she was going to live this game through.
