Page 76 of When Kings Fall

I hadn’t dealt with anything like that prior to that night.

I’d been a little girl, basically.

Not anymore.

It was different now.

Everything was different.

I was different.

As his fingers started to dip inside my shirt I asked, “Are you really this vanilla?”

It worked all too easily—fragile egos of psychopaths and all that—and he took a step back, finally releasing my jaw as he regarded me with a whole lot of dark curiosity.

“What do you mean?”

“You said you wanted a taste, you should make it worth your while, especially considering you’ll be handing me over to Malcolm. You know, I thought you were the softer one compared to him. I guess that was why you were the sidekick. You can’t bring the sadism and intimidation like he can.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Yeah, then prove it. Let’s do a little gun play.”

“What?”

“That’s something he threatened to do to me, but never did in the end. You want me a mess when you hand me over, subdued, then that’s the way to go. I hate guns, they scare me.”

Bullshit.

But I was selling it well.

“Why would you offer me this?”

“You walk away afterward, take me to Lynch like you intended, but call off the kidnapping of Mason Hall and Colton Sharp.”

“What about Knight?”

“I know that could never be on the table because he’s put you in Lynch’s crosshairs by using you to search for that megalomaniac.”

“True.” He played with his straggly goatee, thinking it over. “Fine, you’ve got yourself a deal.”

Then he was snapping his fingers at the guy holding my left shoulder. “Give me your piece.”

I’d already checked that Royce wasn’t carrying his own.

In fact, it was what had given me this idea in the first place.

It had been all about causing a distraction.

Now I’d put my deal out there Royce was no longer so on edge and wary of me, because he believed he was going to get what he wanted—one over on Lynch using me to do it.

And as he had to grab a gun from one of his men, it served to make the guy inadvertently release his painful debilitating grip on my shoulder as he shifted his weight to draw it from his hip holster.

It actually ended up with him releasing me entirely as he was focused on giving his boss what he’d ordered of him.

That was all the window I needed to turn things around.

Just as the Glock was about to be passed between them, I snatched it with my now free left hand and spun and pistol-whipped the guy to my right still holding me.

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