Page 8 of Three to Fall

Trigger’s upper lip curled. “I let her go and you and your boys kill me before I say what I came here to say.”

A murderous rage rose inside me, taking the place of everything else I was feeling. It twisted through my muscles, fighting to be released. I wanted to throw myself at him. Hurt him the way he was hurting her. Punish him for taking every single thing I’d ever cared about. “You think I care what you have to say, Trig?” I roared. “You self-centered, narcissistic psychopath! You think I give one tiny fuck about whatever pathetic excuse you have for the way you took the one good thing in my life? And now you’re doing it again. I’ve barely had a chance to know her, and now you’re taking her away.”

“Everything I do is for you.” Trigger glared at me. “You don’t see it, but it is.”

Oh, that was fucking rich. That might have been true when we were kids. He’d taken a vicious beating the day at the beach when our foster dad had tried to drown me. It was Trig, older and bigger than me, though still no match for a fully grown man, who’d thrown himself at my attacker, giving me enough time to get out of the water and away from his vicious temper. It had been Trigger who’d taken the beating when we’d gotten home, and who’d spent days in a cage afterward, learning his lesson for questioning our foster parents’ discipline.

But that boy who’d loved his brother wasn’t inside him anymore. He’d disappeared the day Trig had killed my wife. Clearly, nothing had changed. His blind hatred for women as blisteringly strong as it had been the day he’d killed Annette and her sister.

“Just let her go,” I begged him. “She’s done nothing wrong.”

Trig shook his head. “Don’t take orders from you, little brother.”

I pulled the belt tighter around my neck, feeling the burn of the leather when it closed around my throat. I shoved the end of it into Whip’s hand. “Do it.”

Trig chuckled darkly. “He ain’t gonna do it. You’re an innocent. Whip never could kill the good ones.”

Whip’s eyes narrowed at Trig’s arrogance, his voice deadly cold, no sign of any emotion. A peep into what he must be like when he buried the bodies of the men and women he killed. “You’ve been gone a long time, Trig. You don’t know half as much as you think you do.” He tightened his grip on the belt.

It flattened uncomfortably against my skin. Made swallowing difficult. Fear rose inside me, but I stared my brother down, refusing to budge when Kara was in exactly the same position.

He’d let her go. Or he could watch me die.

It was the only way I knew to hurt him the way he was hurting me.

Trig eyed Whip. “You were loyal to me once. I helped you.”

Whip shrugged. “You walked out and left us. Doc didn’t.”

“You ain’t gonna kill him.”

Trig’s taunt held the barest hint of worry. One you wouldn’t have noticed unless maybe you’d been his therapist for years.

Or if you were his brother.

I glared at him. “He will if I tell him to. You care so much about me? Prove it. Whip can let go of the belt as soon as you’ve let Kara go.”

Trig stared me down, his lips mashed into a hard line. “Whip is a fool who doesn’t know his ass from his elbow.”

I took a deep breath and gave Whip the tiniest of nods.

He didn’t give me a chance to back out.

He yanked the belt hard. Cutting off my air.

Kara screamed. “No, please! Stop! Grayson!”

Trigger’s grip on her arm tightened as she fought against him, trying to get away. But there was no chance of her goinganywhere. Trigger was huge. Easily one of the biggest men I knew, up there with Rebel’s partner, Fang, who had to be at least six foot five and two hundred and sixty pounds of solid muscle.

Trigger shifted his weight to one side and eyed Whip over my shoulder. “We really going to do this? I thought you and Gray were friends? You know he’s an innocent. What happened to your morals? You were always mister ‘no killing innocent people when there’s plenty of bad ones in the world.’”

Whip didn’t loosen his hold. If anything, he only planted his feet harder, using leverage to keep the belt from slipping. “We are friends. But it’s not me killing him, is it? I might be the one pulling it so he can’t breathe, but it’s you who’s killing him. Let the woman go, and I’ll let go too.”

The belt squeezed around my neck, so painfully uncomfortable I wanted to tear at it until my fingernails bled. But I didn’t flail. Didn’t fight against the hold Whip had on my throat, refusing to give in to the panic coursing through my body and the way instinct told me to do whatever it took to save my life. It took every self-calming technique I’d ever learned in med school to just stand there and let another man try to kill me. I stared my brother down in a deadly game of chicken that dragged out, every second a lifetime.

Kara’s frightened gaze bounced around the men standing like soldiers at my back. “Help him!” she screamed at them. “Why aren’t you doing anything? He’s dying!”

In the reflection of the window, my face paled until it was almost white, a bluish tinge spreading across my lips. Black danced at the corners of my vision, while my lungs screamed for air I couldn’t give them.

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