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Maddie stood in the doorway, a gun pointed directly at Emrick as he moved around the room before stopping to get dressed. Behind her with his arms crossed over his chest was Tate.
Emrick moved to stand at the end of the bed, linking his hands behind his back and making the same gesture at me.
“I knew you two were involved somehow,” Maddie said. “Iwarnedyou, Cara. I tried to get you to stay away from him. I knew he was going down. Now you’re dating or some shit. You’re literally in bed with the enemy!”
“You’re the one with the gun, Maddie. From where I’m sitting, you’re the enemy right now.”
“We’re notdating,” Emrick hissed.
Maddie ignored me, cocking a brow at Emrick. “Oh?” The gun’s barrel swerved toward me, and she cocked it, her finger twitching on the trigger. “Then you won’t mind if I kill her?”
“No!”Emrick roared, holding a hand out and taking a half step forward.
Maddie returned the gun’s aim to him and smirked. “Oooh,” she drew out the word, heavy with sarcasm and victory. “So youdocare what happens to her.”
The look in her eyes shook me because I knew that look. If she had to shoot me then and there to prove a point to Emrick, then she would have. There wasintentbehind her eyes, intent to follow through and take my life. After everything, after how long we have known each other, she had been right—when it came down to it, she’d choose herself over me any day. I was as expendable as anyone else in this city to her. I was nothing. There wasn’t an ounce of remorse on her face.
I was yanked from my shock when my eyes were drawn to the movement of Emrick’s hands behind his back. There was that gesture again. Desperately I tried to figure out what he wanted me to do as he confronted Tate.
“I should’ve known you were behind this,” Emrick said coolly.
“Should’ve but didn’t.” Tate seemed unconcerned with the situation, his tight black T-shirt clinging to his muscles as he stood casually slightly behind Maddie, who held a triumphant grin on her face. “You were sloppy, Emrick, you didn’t know shit about running a business like this. Loyalty doesn’t mean spit. You need to get resources, and always…alwaysdo a background check on your employees because you never know who you have working for you.”
“And who did I have working for me?”
“In a previous life, I was Thomas Murphy. If you weren’t so fucking arrogant and had done even an iota of research, you would have known who I was from day one.”
Emrick stared at him without speaking, then a muscle in his neck twitched. “Murphy.”
“Yeah, the fucker you threatened and kicked out of here was my father. This business should’ve been mine. Did you know he died shortly after what you did? He left here to protect his family, his daughter more than me, and then without the protection of the club and his business, his biggest rival came for him.” Tate scoffed. “But I bet you don’t care.”
Shrugging, Emrick’s voice was still cool. “You’re right, I don’t care. He took what meant most to me, so I have no regrets over his death. If I had known who he was before I shafted him out, I’d have killed him myself. So, the man who took his life did me a favor.”
Tate smirked, and his demeanor changed. “Turns out, they did me a favor too. Murphy had cut me out of the business, and I was getting ready to fight my way back in. After all he had put me through, the fucker thought he could just cut me out. Then you came along and swept the business out from under him, and my opportunity to get back in arose.”
“Why not kill me, Tate?”
“You were good at one thing, Emrick… building the empire. So, I let you. I let you do all the hard work for me. Then all I needed to do was destroy the business’ trust inyou, and it wasn’t difficult to make you look incapable. The loss of a few inconsequential buildings was nothing compared to the loss of trust that was growing in your ability to run this business. Employees can be turned with money too easily when they feel the boss can no longer protect them. It was easy to make you look weak because you are. Your celestial strength and remaining invulnerability doesn’t make you smart.”
My head snapped up.
Celestial strength?Surely, Tate didn’t buy into this whole fallen angel thing.
But then Tate’s eyes turned yellow.
What the fuck?
Maddie didn’t see Tate’s eyes. She was staring firmly at Emrick, and he tilted his head at her. “And what’s your stake in this, whore?”
Maddie lifted a shoulder. “Money, lots of money.” As I reached over the side of the bed, Maddie screamed at me, “Stay still!”
“I’m just getting a T-shirt,” I said, holding up the gray shirt I had seen on the floor. Maddie’s stance relaxed slightly as I pulled the T-shirt on, but when I had leaned over, I’d seen it, what Emrick had been trying to signal to me.
A gun under the pillow.
Of course, he slept with a gun under his pillow.
Lifting the pillow and holding it against the front of me, hoping it looked like I was trying to cover my body, the T-shirt not quite covering my thighs, I hid the gun between the pillow and my body and slowly moved off the bed to stand next to Emrick.
