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“What the fuck are you doing?” I hiss. “Hurry up. You’re gonna get us caught.”
“You really think I would let that happen?” he mutters.
“How the hell am I supposed to know?” I throw back at him. “It wouldn’t be the most fucked-up thing you’ve done since meeting me. Hell, perhaps you have childhood abandonment issues and are hoping to use this as some way to gain mommy’s approval.”
“Fucking hell,” he grunts to himself before lifting his gaze to mine. “You have some seriously fucked-up trust issues, you know that, right?”
“Ha,” I scoff, amusement bursting through my chest. “I wonder how that happened.”
Zade rolls his eyes and thankfully picks up his pace, moving around the side of the property before finally taking pity on me. “If there were someone inside, we would have been shot at the second we got out of the car. We’re in the clear.”
“How do you know that?”
He nods up ahead, and I follow his gaze to the camera pointed right at us. “From what I can tell, there’s at least thirty surveillance cameras across the property. If my mother wanted us dead, it would have happened by now.”
“So then . . . What does she want?”
“That’s a good fucking question.”
Reaching the mansion, Zade leads me to a side entrance, and just as he picks the lock, movement across the property catches my attention, and I whip around, preparing myself for the worst. A gasp tears from the back of my throat, and just as Zade jumps on the defense, ready to save my ass, I realize it’s just Easton.
He moves across the property like a ninja, and Zade lets out a sigh, watching as he sneaks up behind one of the guards who Zade specifically said to leave be. “He can’t fucking help himself,” Zade mutters beside me as we watch Easton effortlessly snap the guard’s neck. Zade meets my stare. “This is what happens when someone fucks with his head,” he says accusingly. “He forgets where his loyalties lie.”
“Good thing I’ll be dead soon, huh?” I say, reaching past him and opening the door, ready to get this shit over and done with. “You can have your little henchmen back after that, though something tells me it’s not going to be the same.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he questions as I step through the door, only to have him hold me back and go first with his gun drawn.
“You will always have their loyalty,” I say. “That much is clear. You’ll be their leader, but that’s it. Because once you take me away from them, once you slaughter me for your own gain, they will never respect you. They’ll live a life resenting you, and that friendship you’ve spent twenty-something years building will be gone. They’ll see you as nothing but weak.”
Zade shakes his head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, stepping into me, that big body of his crowding me. “You’ve known them for two seconds. I’ve known them their whole lives. We have a brotherhood, a bond that not even you or your tight little pussy can infiltrate.”
“You see, that’s just the thing,” I tell him, lifting my chin and brushing my lips across his. “It seems this tight little pussy already has.”
Zade clenches his jaw and hardens his stare before finally pulling away and stalking up the long hall. “Keep up,” he throws over his shoulder as a stupid grin stretches across my lips. I’ve never been one to gloat when I’m right, but damn, right now, I want to scream it from the rooftops.
I think putting Zade DeVil in his place just became my favorite thing to do . . . right after fucking his friends, of course.
Moving through the mansion, it quickly becomes clear that we are alone here. There’s not even a hint of life within these walls. The food in the kitchen looks old, and there’s a light layer of dust building across the furniture.
We do a whole sweep of the property, and by the time we make our way back downstairs, we find the boys in the impressive home office, trying to seek out any secrets this home might be holding. “Looks like she left in a hurry,” Easton says, his gaze shifting over her valuables that have been left behind.
“I’m not surprised,” Zade says. “I would have taken off too. She was compromised the second I found her here.”
My brows furrow as I glance out the window to the guard’s body left on the lawn. “If she’s not living here now, why keep guards here at all? It doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s her way of keeping tabs and protecting herself,” Easton says. “Those guards would have specific instructions to report any movement back to her. Meaning the second we left, she would have had a full report. She would know where you are, who you’re with, and exactly how to get to you. And considering that Empire still thinks you’re halfway across the country, that doesn’t exactly benefit us.”
