Page 112 of Soulless Saint

“That’s enough.” Dad seethed, his fingers flexing on the stock of his rifle. “Let them go and I’ll agree to your terms. Twenty percent. It’s yours.”

He spat each word like they were poisonous, filled with a venom so potent that he was shaking. A king reduced to the role of jester in his own court.

This guy had no idea what kind of monster he’d woken here tonight.

“Done,” Séamas said, whirling with a violent gleam in his eyes, pulling one of his pistols from its holster. The gunshot echoed back to us from the canyon walls, boomeranging until it faded like thunder.

“Oh Christ,” Ma gasped, hurrying to pull the rifle from Dad’s hands as Archer keeled over to one side, the hole in his head still smoking as blood pooled around him.

“Arch,” Zade cried out, his voice loud, broken, and raw, grating enough to make my skin crawl. “Archer!”

Dad stormed forward, his neck thick, face red, eyes bulging as he went straight for Séamas, his knife raised.

Damnit.

I stepped in front of him, disarming him with one quick twist of my arm, pulling him in tight to hold him back as he tried to push past me with a string of pained curses on his lips.

I felt his pain as if it were my own, knowing Archer was a brother to him, feeling guilty as fuck for ever having thought he could betray us.

“It’s done,” I hissed in Dad’s ear, fighting him back with everything I had. “He’s gone. He’s gone.”

Kaleb came to help me while Séamas laughed behind us.

“This is what he wants,” Kaleb whispered harshly, and I knew he was right. If Dad attacked him now, it would only get worse. Séamas could kill as many of us as he wanted right now and we wouldn’t be able to stop him. Not until we knew Becca, and the people in the safehouse were free.

“Don’t give it to him.”

The fight went out of him all at once and he threw us off him, standing on his own.

“I knew you’d see the big picture,” Séamas said, his laughter dying out as he put his pistol back in its holster and lifted his arm, making a motion with his hands. His four men left their stations, three piling into the back of the truck while one went for the driver’s seat, starting the ignition.

“It’s been a pleasure doing business with you. Shall we say, same place, same time on the 15th of the month?”

Séamas backed away, stepping through Archer’s blood to leave a gory trail behind him as he hopped up into the back of the truck with his crew and pounded a closed fist on the side of the wheel well.

The truck drove off into the night, leaving us standing under the spotlights with our fucking dicks in our hands… and another dead Saint to bury.

The safehouse at 1322 Hightower Street held enough souls to make the good lord work overtime and enough explosives rigged into its walls to shake the foundations of the earth.

I should know, since I was the one who placed them, burying each one tenderly beneath brick and mortar.

But she wasn’t supposed to be there.

When the one called Pope brought Becca in to join the others, something in my chest crumpled like cheap wrapping. I sat heavily on the upturned stool from the fifth-floor window in the apartment building where I watched at a safe distance.

Damn it all to hell.

She wasn’t supposed to be there.

I balled my hand into a fist, pressing it into my teeth until I tasted blood. Until I felt the sting of it like air on a fresh cut from Da’s whip. I spat onto the carpeted floor, rising despite the lightness in my head and kicked the bucket into the wall with a roar.

“Fuck!”

I could fix this. I could.

There was a chance Da wouldn’t blow it. If Damien St. Vincent just bent the knee, he would let them live. But if Damien refused…

I snatched my phone from the windowsill, tapping out a message to Becca.

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