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I stared at him stonily.
“Drink, or I’m going to throw you out of my house. I don’t care why you turned up here bleeding half to death.”
Well, if he’d had nefarious intentions, he probably wouldn’t have waited to see me stitched up first. And I was a lot more likely to get into a bad situation while my head kept whirling.
I snatched the bottle from him and chugged the blue liquid down. The sour taste of it made me wince, but I managed to finish it.
Frank stood up, clearly in a hurry to get out of there. “That’s the best I can do. As long as you keep it clean, it shouldn’t get infected or need further treatment.”
After he was gone, the brawny guy started to laugh. “You scared the doctor away.”
A cool voice spoke up from behind him. “To be fair, Frank does scare pretty easily.”
Another guy came into view at Wylder’s other side. His hair was dyed a bold, sapphire blue and jaggedly cut as if he’d done it himself. He considered me with narrowed eyes so sharply intent I had to resist the urge to squirm.
“I wasn’t trying to scare anyone,” I said, taking in the room more thoroughly now that I could focus better. I was sitting on a queen-sized bed in a small room with no other furniture except the ebony bedside table and a matching chair in the corner. It had the blank impersonal vibe of a hotel room. No one had bothered to shut the gauzy curtains on the window, which showed total blackness outside.
Wylder glanced at the brawny guy. “Did anyone see us bring her in here, Kaige?”
“Oh, maybe a few,” the other guy—Kaige—answered. He winked at me with a flex of his massive biceps. Tattoos of vines climbed up his muscular forearms, disappearing beneath the sleeves of his V-neck tee. “But they were too out of it to remember tomorrow. Most of the drinks have been laced with the good stuff.”
Ah. No wonder nobody had paid attention to me. Drunk and high without a care in the world. No doubt the Nobles had enough cops under their thumb to ensure they didn’t get so much as a noise complaint.
Wylder returned his attention to me. I met his gaze head on, even though it felt like his striking green eyes could see right down to my deepest, darkest secrets. He cocked his head. “All right, spill. Why did Princess Katz of the Claws show up at my door looking like this?”
My mouth fell open in surprise. “You know who I am?”
He chuckled. “It’s kind of my job to keep tabs on all the gangs that operate in and around Paradise Bend, Princess.”
I made a face at him. “Don’t call me that.”
“Don’t like the nickname? I could call you Kitty Cat instead, because you’ve sure got some claws.”
I ignored him. I wasn’t about to take his bait again.
The pain in my arm grounded me. My body felt stiff, and I shook my feet to bring some flow of blood to them. At my movement, my dress rode up to my thigh, and all three pairs of eyes turned to my bare flesh like it was a flaming beacon. My spine tingled with apprehension—and maybe the tiniest bit of heat—under their collective attention.
I was in a room with three guys who belonged to the most dangerous outfit in all of Paradise Bend. Time to get on with the plan that had propelled me here, even if that plan was seeming foolhardier by the second.
I swallowed, clenching my fists at my sides. The basic idea hadn’t been bad. If anyone could take Colt and the Steel Knights down for what they’d done, it was these guys, gorgeous assholes or not.
“You look like you’re about to stab me in the eye,” Wylder said, giving me an amused look.
“I’d be interested to see her try,” the blue-haired guy said in the same coolly detached voice as before.
Wylder snorted and elbowed him. “Of course you would, Gideon. We can hold the battle royale later. Come on, Princess. Cat got your tongue?”
I dragged in a breath. “I was engaged to Cole Bryant—the leader of the Steel Knights.” The words made bile rise up my throat. For a second I couldn’t go on. The screams echoed in my head alongside the blare of the merciless shots of the guns. The memory of the bodies dropping in quick succession flashed behind my eyes. My grandmother lying dead in a pool of her own blood…
The bedroom door burst open. “I heard that you—”
The new arrival stopped mid-sentence when he caught sight of me on the bed, and my world tilted sideways.
I was hallucinating, right? No way could Rowan Finlay, my first love—and my last, after the wayhe’dbetrayed me—be standing just a few feet away from me in Wylder Noble’s house.
Itwashim, though, even if he wasn’t the skinny boy with an adorable dimple I’d met in junior high. He’d cropped his once floppy ash-blond hair short and spiky, and he was wearing a suit as if he’d just stepped out of a meeting. He had grown into his height, his shoulders broadened. But seeing him shocked me back five years to the last time I’d seen him as if no time had passed at all.
We stared at each other as if challenging the other to look away first. Could he see the fury and pain in my eyes?
