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I know I need her for the ritual, and I’ll try and convince myself and the boys that’s the only reason why I need her unharmed, but fuck. She’s breaking me down. These past few nights not having her in my bed, tucked in my arms has fucking eaten at me. But who the fuck am I to tell the boys to give her up when I’m about to take her from them for good? They deserve what little time they can have with her, even if it means giving her up for the night. I fucking hate it though.
In a perfect world, I would have claimed Oakley Quinn as my own the first fucking second I laid my eyes on her. I’ve been doing everything in my power to keep her at arm’s length, to keep myself from wanting her the way I do, but with only a handful of nights left before the ritual, I’m starting to realize exactly what I’ll be missing.
Fuck. I’ve got to get my head in the game.
Following Sawyer through the entrance with Dalton at my back, we make our way into the underground compound. The cheap lighting fades in and out the further we get, and there’s a muffled chanting coming from deeper in the compound.
We follow the sound, silently taking out Matthias’s army one by one, picking off the stragglers caught in the long, damp corridors. We make our way down, like a fucking maze leading us into the darkest pits of hell, but the further we get, the louder the chanting becomes.
It reaches an all-time high before suddenly falling silent, and we pause, both Sawyer and Dalton glancing at me. “Whatever they were preparing for,” I mutter, my stomach twisting in knots, “it’s showtime.”
Dalton grunts, his face scrunching with horror. “Fuck.”
We forge ahead, my feet pounding against the ground. I glance left and right, peering into each of the rooms we pass, taking out as many of these assholes as possible, but one room has me pulling up short.
Peering in, I find a small room that looks as though it’s been carved right out of rock. There are thick hooks embedded in the rock above with two of them sporting thick chains, and fresh blood drenches the ground below.
“This has got to be where they were keeping them,” Sawyer says, his face turning white at the sight of their blood, and not because he’s squeamish. I know exactly where his mind has taken him, probably the same place that mine and Dalton’s have, but we can’t think about that. I have to believe that the blood is Cross’, not that I’d ever want harm to come to him, but because if it did, I know he’d be able to handle it. That kind of blood loss for someone as small as Oakley . . . well fuck, it could mean we are too late.
A blood-curdling scream tears through the underground compound and my head whips around, the piercing sound one I’ve heard a million times before.
Oakley.
Without a word, we all take off at a sprint, racing down the long corridor as fear blasts through my veins. I can’t lose her like this. This isn’t how it is supposed to go. We still have two days, two short days before I have to let her go, and I promised that I would protect her. I can’t let her down again. And what’s more, I can’t let her go while she still hates me like this. The idea of her leaving this world without knowing how fucking much I need her kills me. She needs to know that despite everything, she owns me.
Fuck, she owns every single piece of me.
Men linger at a door toward the end of the corridor, booming laughter coming from within, and judging by the way they move around each other, trying to peer over one another’s shoulders, I can only assume that the room inside is packed with men, each of them desperate to see the show inside.
There’s so much noise coming from within the room that the men at the door don’t even hear us coming, and before they’ve even looked back, I’m on one of them, my knife delicately slicing across the front of his throat as Dalton effortlessly snaps the neck of the guy to my right.
We shove the bodies aside, quickly picking off these assholes one by one when a familiar voice cuts through the room. “It’s been a pleasure, Oakley.”
Fuck. My mother.
I should have prepared for this. Should have known she was behind this.
Peering through the gaps in the bodies before me, I try to get a glimpse of what the fuck is going down when terror fills every inch of my veins, almost bringing me to my knees.
Oakley sits in the center of the room with my mother holding a revolver to her temple, and the determination in her eyes tells me this is no bluff. My grip tightens on the knife in my palm, quickly surveying the rest of the room and finding Cross on his knees, blood covering his body and a darkening bruise to his ribs, clearly broken.
