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Dante snorts. “Well, your place sure as shit ain’t here.”
“I never said it was,” she snaps, then quickly covers her mouth when her eyes well up with tears.
I legit don’t know if she’s playing us or having some kind of breakdown, but I’m pretty sure it would be hard to fake the way her voice cracks as she continues telling her story in a broken whisper.
“I pushed back when he said that shit, because hell no, you know? But he… he hit me. Not just a regular slap or something. The fucker beat me.” Her eyes dart up to mine again, then away. “He wouldn’t stop. Wouldn’t let me get away from him. He tried to kill me, just for disagreeing with him.”
“If he’d wanted you dead, you would be,” Logan says flatly. “If he wanted you to come to us with a sob story, he’d give you a few bruises and send you in to win our trust.”
“Oh, fuck you, Logan,” she says, rocking back. “He knows none of you dickheads are ever gonna trust me. And hedidtry to kill me. I lost consciousness while he was hitting me, and when I came to, I was in the river.”
“What?” I blurt out, an involuntary shiver of terror rocking through me.
I had way too much time to think about how Austin would get rid of me after I signed over my inheritance while I sat in that prison cell of a room, and I blamed Sienna for putting those thoughts in my head in the first place. But none of that changes my horror at hearing that he went and actually did it.
She nods, twisting her hands together in front of her on the table. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure he threw me in there while I was unconscious. Or I mean, he probably had Tony or Jackson do it, the sick fucks. But Austin definitely never meant for me to make it back out.”
She stops talking, and after a couple of minutes of silence, Maddoc asks, “Does he know you’re alive?”
When Sienna blinks, looking up with a lost expression that shows just how hurt and traumatized she is, it hits me harder than I’m ready for.
She’s really not faking this. And I’ll never like her, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a little bit sorry for her too. She’ll always be the bitch who betrayed Maddoc, and since she made that bed, she definitely deserves to lie in it… but not to be fucking dumped in a river and left to die for it.
No one deserves that.
Maddoc doesn’t seem to be softening much toward her, though, and she definitely deservesthat.
“Well?” he presses, his voice hard. “Does McKenna know that you’re…” He stops and shakes his head. “You know what? I don’t actually give a shit. I also don’t see why you think this is gonna help us stop him or take West Point down.”
“Oh, really? You don’t think anything I’ve picked up over there might be useful?” Sienna asks, her snark killing off most of my sympathy.
“Doubtful,” Dante mutters, leaning back in his seat… but not so far that he can’t keep his weapon trained on her under the table.
She glares at him for a moment, then deflates, slumping against the back of the booth as if exhaustion has finally caught up with her.
“Fuck you too, Dante,” she says tiredly, tucking some of her limp hair behind her ears before looking back up at Maddoc. “Austin may never have seen me as his partner, but that didn’t mean he didn’t talk about shit in front of me. I thought we were in it together, and I gave him some damn good ideas over the years that he took fucking credit for, but his current plan is suicide.”
“Suicide?” Maddoc shares a skeptical look with his brothers. “You just said you wanted to destroy him. If that’s true, you’d let him burn.”
“Yeah, except what if it’s not? Do you have any idea what you can buy with the kind of money she handed over to him? Fuckinganything. Maybe even this.”
“Maybe even what?” Maddoc asks. “Quit fucking around if you really want to take him down, Sienna. What’s McKenna planning?”
Her eyes flash for a second, like she wants to snap back at him with something else nasty, but then, to her credit, she sucks it up and just nods, straightening her spine. “Austin hates you, but this is bigger than you.” She swallows hard, looking at each of us. “He isn’t just planning to decimate the Reapers. He’s set his sights as high as they can go here in Halston.”
It takes me a minute to realize what she means.
It takes Maddoc a lot less.
“McKenna’s planning to take down The Six,” he says grimly.
I blink. “He… can’t though, right?”
I wish I felt more confident about that, but there’s too much I don’t know. I can tell the Reapers are shocked to hear that McKenna is planning on it, though, so maybe I’m not too far off.
And maybe,maybe, this information is actually worth dealing with Sienna for too.
“Fuck,” Maddoc mutters after a moment, scrubbing a hand over his face. Then he gestures to Logan, who guides me into a seat on the far side of the booth from Sienna before sitting next to me. Maddoc takes the seat across from her. “Fine. Talk. How does he think he can manage to take down The Six?”
