AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I think just Jersey is probably fine at this point,” I interrupted. “Might as well skip the formalities, huh?”
“I can guarantee you, my boy, that everything you think you’ve known up to this point has been a lie. Whatever she’s told you, whatever service or good you believe you’ve done, I’m sorry to tell you that it’s all a lie.”
“Fortunately for me, I’ve never really been the do-good kind of man, so you’re not really shattering any of my world views with that little revelation.”
“Try to hold onto that attitude, Mr. Jersey,” he said and chuckled. “It might help you get through what’s coming.”
He shoved me back hard enough by my chin that I was a little convinced his goal had been to break my neck. Landing on my handcuffed hands on the concrete floor sent the currents of pain from that bullet hole through my entire body again. I laid there in absolute discomfort for an eternity, but I was not about to aid these assholes in anyway so when they tried to lift me off the floor, I was fucking deadweight and I just let them do it themselves. They put the bag on my head again, but this time someone was nice enough to tighten what felt like a drawstring around my neck to make it just that much more uncomfortable.
I didn’t even bother trying to walk with them when they pulled me from the floor. We were about to be locked into whatever fucked up game this was until I was dead, so I was going to be a pain in the ass at every possible turn now. It didn’t feel the greatest on my shoulder that they had to drag me along with them, but it was worth it to know that they struggled to maneuver all two hundred and fifty pounds of my limp weight. It felt even more awesome when they tossed me across the concrete floor of the next room. I laid right where I landed without bothering to try to move for a few seconds. Somebody stopped right beside me to pull the bag off my head again, then Nate crouched right beside me to get his face closer to mine.
“She is absolute poison. Anything and everything she touches seems to find a way to destruction. You’ll see what I mean soon enough.”
I couldn’t help but wonder what it meant for my own sanity that someone referring to Trista as poison only brought up the image of her smile.
The fact that she tasted like ecstasy.
And injected nitro right into my veins.
My pretty, little poison.
She had absolutely come with a warning label, in the form of a contract for her return to the man who hunted her. The same contract that I’d outright broken when I decided to keep her for myself.
“Hurting you isn’t something that I want to do,” Nate said while he grabbed me by an arm to raise me until I was sitting. “But I’m more than willing to do what it takes to get what I want. Smile for your girls, Mr. Jersey. This may be the last time that they’re able to recognize your face.”
He pressed a gun against the side of my head, and the flash of a camera on somebody’s phone nearly blinded me while I glared right at this sadistic shithead.
That creature inside me that I put so much effort into holding back wanted more than anything to make him eat those words; shove them down his throat as far as they’d go until he choked to death on them.
My girls.
Not his.
Nobody else’s.
Mine.
CHAPTER FOUR
trista
I think it was safe to say that Memphis and I were both confused when I parked the car in front of a giant, white farmhouse quite literally in the middle of nothing but cornfields. It was gorgeous, as far as old farmhouses that were probably haunted went. This was a sprawling two-story monstrosity with a porch that looked like it wrapped all the way around the entire house, with every door and window opening trimmed in black. It was beautiful in the most simple way, and nothing about it looked like the extravagance that I would’ve expected out of Jersey.
“Are you sure you put the address in right?” I asked, looking over the top of the car at Memphis.
“It does feel — weird.”
By the time I’d looked back toward the house, a very unpleasant looking man was coming around the side of the house, walking right toward us.
“Is that a shotgun?” Memphis whispered.
“Sorry, ladies. This is private property. Move along,” he said, but didn’t stop walking until he was right at the front bumper of the car. He was a good ten inches taller than me with unruly blonde hair and a short beard that was more red than it was anything else. And he absolutely had a shotgun laying across his shoulders like it was just any old baseball bat.
“Folks are friendly in Indiana, huh?” I said. “Who are you?”
“That’s not how this works,” he said and chuckled. “Who are you?”
He took the shotgun from his shoulders to swing it casually between the two of us, like it was an extension of his arm, and it was just a normal way to point at someone.
