Page 73 of Ruthless Reign

He dropped his hand, leaning over his knees conspiratorially.

“What I find even stranger,” he whispered. “Is that the graves my son dug for my men were empty.”

He waited for me to fill in the blanks for him, but I wasn’t there.

He had to believe I wasn’t ever there.

“If you think it was the Saints, you should’ve tied one of them to a chair to interrogate. I don’t know shit.”

“Oh, sweet girl,” he crooned, reaching across the gap between us to run the flat edge of the blade down my cheek. I recoiled back, but when the tip reached my chin, he used the sharp point to lift it back to face him. “I know the Saints were involved. You’ve said as much with your eyes. What I’m much more interested in is why my son would lie to me. And that, I think you might know something about.”

My face must’ve betrayed something I’d been trying to keep hidden because his eyes sparked with life, widening infinitesimally before his expression darkened, twisting. The knife sliced cruelly into the tiny cleft in my chin as he withdrew the blade and stood, throwing an angry fist through his hair.

Then just as quickly as he stood, he sat back down, drawing the chair closer to me. Close enough to rest his hands on my knees.

My stomach lurched at his touch.

“I found it odd,” he said, his mismatched eyes tracking across my face, across the floor as he thought through something I was oblivious to. “My son never misses. But my men tell me the St. Vincent boy lives. In fact, I’m told he may make a full recovery. Very odd.”

This wasn’t about Damien at all. Or about the Saints.

He wasn’t looking for intel on their operations or their movements, he fucking knew every single one of them without any help from me. This was about Aodhán.

Séamas thought his son was compromised.

A traitorous ache spiked into my chest, crushing something there that had no business existing.

I shouldn’t care what Séamas would do to Aodhán if he thought him a traitor.

I didn’t care.

“Why?” he asked, but I could tell the question wasn’t for me as he considered the reasons himself.

Something occurred to Séamas and his gaze met mine again, this time with scrutiny as he looked into my damn soul.

“It’s you, isn’t it? Were you there at Gilligan’s Finch that night?” A pause. A narrowing of the eyes. “Does my son care for you, little Saint?”

“He’s a liar and murderer. Just like you. He doesn’t have a fucking heart.”

Séamas smiled and it was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. “As much as I tried to teach him the disadvantages of keeping it, I’m afraid he still does.”

A sharp prick in my thigh made me jerk my head down in time to see Séamas push the blade in. I screamed at the pressure, the all-consuming agony of it ricocheting through every nerve ending in my body as the knife tip hit bone and dragged.

I felt my body sag as he withdrew it, the blackness of unconsciousness ready to take me. But Séamas slapped me, bringing me back.

“Stay with me, little Saint,” he snarled. “I’m not finished.”

He hit me again and this time my head snapped back. My right eye burned as blood leaked into it from a split brow.

I knew he was a liar. He was never going to let me live.

“Fuck you,” I spluttered out. “I hope you rot in hell when the Saints are finished mounting your head on a fucking spike.”

I spat at him and his upper lip curled.

The distinct sound of a key turning in a lock was like a death knell in my ears and I craned my neck to see, shouting as loudly as I could. “Don’t open it!”

But Toby stepped through, cursing at his stuck key before jumping at the sound of my voice.

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