Page 78 of Under His Protection

I shook my head, wondering why she was giving me this sob story.

“If you marry me, he can have some of your money.”

“There isn’t a chance in hell of that ever happening.”

“And if I don’t get you to marry me…” She sniffled as she stood. “He’ll give me to the MC. He’ll hand me over to the Devil’s Brothers. They put a price on me, but Stefan seems to think they’re lowballing.”

This woman was forced to discuss her price. To own up to a future of being sold. I shook my head, frustrated and furious that Stefan would stoop this low. With his own daughter. With his former friend. I hadn’t needed any other reasons to cast him out of my life, but he was giving me more and more motivation to hate him every day.

A soldier rushed to the open doors. He stopped short, volleying his gaze between me and Vanessa. “The gates reported?—”

I pointed at her. “Get her out of here.” I shoved past him, having heard enough.

I had to get Nina.

If Vanessa had timed her break-in and seductive act for tonight, it meant she’d counted on Nina being gone and staying out of the house long enough for her to try.

I ran downstairs, ready to drive to the spa Eva had chosen for a girls’ night. With every step, fear and anger mixed into a heady swarm of violent emotions. And I let it shroud me. I let the rage seep through my bones and give me the drive to capture and kill.

If anything happened to the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, no one would be able to stop me from burning down the world in retaliation.

30

NINA

Nina

Iwoke up quickly. It was a dizzying, blurring distortion of all my senses, and I panicked when I couldn’t immediately tell where I was, what was happening, and who was to blame for this attack.

My vision was cloudy and limited. My tongue felt heavy in my dry mouth, and as I rolled to my side, my stomach roiled and threatened to send bile up my throat. Worst was how my head pounded at the tender ache on the back of my skull. Lifting my hand to touch the massive lump forming under my hair, I realized how shaky and uncoordinated I was in moving my arm.

This was no instant rebound. I was sluggish and so confused. But I knew enough that I would be all right. Once I figured out where the hell I was, I’d get out of this scrape. I knew it. Or I wanted to believe that sort of optimism and confidence.

I had to get out of this dark warehouse I’d been transferred to. I had to. Because I had to get back to Dante. We’d only just begun our lives together, and it was far too soon to lose him. To lose what we could be.

The determination to get back to Dante was all the motivation I needed to shove back the nausea and discomfort from falling.

Without sitting up, I opened my eyes and looked around at this old, dirty place. Old beer signs lay broken and busted in a heap in the corner. A mountain of empty liquor bottles sat at the other end of the wall opposite me. In the distance, I heard the telltale music and chatter combination that signaled I was at a bar.

Maybe?

Despite just being knocked out, I could easily piece together what happened.

I’d heard those men on the second floor at the gala, talking about kidnapping me so Vanessa could have Dante. I witnessed Stefan arguing with Dante that I had to go back to Reaper and be handed over to the MC. With those clues, I figured that this had to be their building, maybe their clubhouse, where they met and partied. It would explain the rowdy sounds of a bar nearby.

He’ll find me. I clung to that fact as I heard men walking and talking in this dark, dirty room. It wasn’t a warehouse, but more like a storage space. And in the darkness, I did all that I could to bring me back to Dante, to facilitate my coming home to him.

He would notice when I didn’t come home. Franco would alert him too. There was no way this could turn into a missing persons case. Dante was too possessive of me to have to sleuth out how to locate me.

Grabbing my derelict phone, I tried to help. I couldn’t be sure it worked. It was mostly malfunctioning, but I prayed that pressing and holding the button on the side would open the camera app. And once in there, that one swipe of my thumb to the left would choose the video option. Groping in the dark, not wanting to move too much to give away that I was awake and recording them, I pressed my finger at where I hoped the record button would be on the screen.

“I don’t know, man,” one said. “Reaper’s fucking nuts if he thinks we can go after the motherfucking Constellas.”

Another man laughed, dark and sinister, before he coughed. “What, like it can’t be done?”

“I don’t think they’d go down as easily as the Domino outfit did.”

“The Dominos were weak,” a third man said, laughing.

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