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A cough hit him, and he pounded his chest, a sound coming from him I had a hard time placing. Wheeze? Gasp? Croak? Didn’t really matter. He wouldn’t have to worry about it for much longer.
“I’m actually here for your other daughter, Brandy.”
“Hmm,” he grunted. “She finally made it over to the club, did she?”
He started coughing again, and I left him to it while I contemplated his words. No matter how hard I tried to make the pieces of the puzzle fit, they just didn’t. Clearly, I was missing something and judging by the smug smile on his face; he was about to enlighten me.
“This is just too good. You still don’t have a clue who Brandy works for, do you?”
He’d handed me the last piece of the puzzle, and everything clicked into place. Dean Earl Argeneau Inc—DEA. The most disturbing part was that it had taken this waste of skin to make me see it.
She might have been a traitor, but that changed nothing. He still had to die, and I might even enjoy it more now, given the circumstances. But before he did, I wanted him to answer one simple question for me.
“Why are you out to destroy the club when we’re the ones who helped Cherry pay for your treatments?”
He threw his head back and laughed, causing another coughing fit. When it finally faded to a wheeze, his eyes, so like Brandy’s, met mine.
“You dumbass. It was never about the club.”
“Enlighten me, then.” I pinched the bridge of my nose and prayed for the patience to keep him alive long enough to make sense of his babbling. “Because I can’t see how any of this would benefit you.”
“Revenge.”
This man was off his nut, and my patience was fading fast. He needed to spit it out before I killed him on principal.
“Revenge?”
“I was being scouted by the NFL when the girls’ mother came to me and said she was pregnant. The last game I ever played in high school, I was so damn distracted I didn’t see the tackle until it was too late. Tore my knee to shit.”
He stopped there like I was supposed to understand where he was going with this. I raised an eyebrow, hoping he’d get on with his pathetic walk down memory lane.
“Don’t you get it?”
“Get what? That you’re a sad excuse for a man who blames the woman he was fucking for his injury? Sadly, yes.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Don’t act like your shit don’t stink. The guy that came to see me told me who your family is.”
That was where he was wrong. I knew exactly the type of monster I was, but at least I wasn’t a delusional pedophile who’d let himself be so easily manipulated by a DEA agent.
“Let me guess. This man promised you’d be the hero you always should have been by helping him to rid the streets of crime.”
“Nope.” His left eye twitched, and I wondered if he was too far gone to recognize sarcasm. “The cocky little puke didn’t even need to threaten me, though he did, to get me to answer his questions. He had no idea he was giving me the means to finish what I started. What better way to get back at my late wife for refusing to get an abortion than to destroy the very thing she’d been trying to protect?”
Jesus Christ. “Come again.”
“You see, I thought raping Brandy over and over would surely get her to turn on Cherry and destroy them both. But instead, Brandy guarded Cherry better than a secret service agent assigned to the president.”
My nails dug into my fists, and it took everything in me to wait to kill him.
“When I got sick, I thought that was it. That I’d die without getting the vengeance I so richly deserved. Then what does Cherry do? Whore herself out to you guys in order to save me. I thought that would finally be the nudge Brandy needed to drive her over the edge.”
He shook his head. “Nope, wrong again.”
Psychologists would have a field day with his maniacal smile as he looked up at me. And people thought I was crazy.
“It wasn’t until that guy, the one in the blue suit who, ironically looks a bit like you, came to see me that I knew I would finally have my revenge.”
Fuck me. It wasn’t a DEA agent who’d manipulated him, but Piotr. Brandy was the thing he was lording over the club. Cherry would never rat us out, but Brandy was obviously willing to do anything for her sister.
