AllFreeNovel
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“Okay. So. Get this, I was waiting for your text back tonight when that guy I was telling you about sent me a Snapchat.” She bites into food and it’s probably something her mom cooked the night before. Lucky bitch. Miranda is a professional cook and has a famous TV series for it on Netflix. She’s kind of a big deal.
“What was the Snapchat and what are you eating?” I can feel my muscles relax and my heart rate mellow.
“His dick! He sent me a photo of his dick!” That does it. I burst out laughing and I can’t stop. My stomach aches and tears roll down my cheeks, only this time it’s for something other than shame and disgrace. “And I’m eating coconut shrimp!”
My nose wrinkles. “Okay, you lost me.”
I rest my head against my window. “I love you, Ev. Thank you for always being my rock.” I don’t even have the heart to tell her about the real reason I ran tonight. The thing that triggered it.
“Aw. Come over and stay with me. We can perve on Damon all night.”
“You mean Ripper Stefan.”
“No. I’m pretty sure I mean Damon.”
“Kai?” My brow curves with hope.
“Halen V’cent Hayes…” She pronounces V’cent correct.V’cen-tay.
“All right, all right, we both know Klaus is the real MV—" I yelp when a van pulls up beside my car. The side door opens and my heart is back to its rapid beats against my rib cage.
I pump the clutch and try to shift into first.
“What just happened?” Evie yells through the phone.
I let the gear slide out when reality crashes into me. They’ll never stop.
Squeezing my eyes closed, my fingers find the buckle as I slowly unclick my seat belt. “Evie,” I whisper, reaching beneath my chair, shoving my 21A Bobcat into the inside of my boot. “I need you to call the number that I have saved in your phone as ‘Shit I forgot’ and tell him that they have me.”
“Who has you?” Evie screams this time, but it’s too late. My door is ripped opened, and a hand is buried in my hair. Whoever it is drags me across the road as gravel bites into my flesh.
I don’t scream. My mouth remains closed as I hold on to his arm until he yanks me up to my feet and throws me into the back of the van.
My eyes explode with pain when I land on the side of something hard, and my movements slow to a daze. Light flickers on above me, showing two others in the back. None I recognize. I don’t think. The van jolts forward and I slam against the panel again, my head cracking against it, and I’m out.
***
“We can use her as our bargaining chip.” Hushed whispers stir me to life.
“Why? When she’s worth more! That’s Bishop Vincent Hayes’s daughter! She’s worth an easy fifty million!”
“Because we don’t have the means, dumbass! I wear a crucifix with a tie to you? Or a fucking skull, or Thorn of Armor tattoo? That’s not our niche.” I hear rustling, before a dust of warmth over my cheek. “She’s waking. We need to decide what we’re doing. I don’t trust anyone back at the village,” the dumb one announces.
“They got so many killed for this bitch. So many of us, man! The Kings might kill us too!” the dumber one blurts.
My chest cackles with fluid, and I roll to my back as blood dribbles down my cheek. “I can assure you, they will. And they’ll find you. Within minutes. In fact, I would say they’ve already found you now.”
A shadow casts over my body and I peer up at the man standing over the sofa. “What if I got her pregnant? That’d be a big fuck you to them all.”
My lip curls. “You come near me, and I promise you, it’ll be you the one who is pregnant, only not with a child.” I swipe the blood from my mouth and glare back at the girl who is sitting on another old sofa in the center of the lounge. I don’t know where we are, but it can’t be far since we couldn’t have been driving long. The blood is still wet on my face.
“You killed a lot of our people.”
“Wrong!” My eyes widen on them. “We did something better… we gave them hope, made them chase their tails, made them think they had a future, andthenwe ripped their spleens out and watched them wither with time.” My legs swing off theside of the bed. I don’t even know who exactly it is they’re talking about, but if they’re going to blame me, I’ll be theatrical about it.
But I do know why I’m here. “Where is he?”
The bones of my ribs ache and I wince, applying pressure to the side. Photographs line the fireplace and I study each one carefully. There’s one taken near a lake, where fireflies glow through the night, and a large boulder in the middle of the water. Cute. It looks picturesque.
