Page 45 of Hold Him Like Gravity

“Now are you paying attention?” he asked, staring down at me.

“I can’t do this,” I insisted, swallowing back the urge to plead for him to release my brother. That was what he wanted. He thrived on beating me down. I couldn’t give him that satisfaction ever again.

“Yet, you will. This is a start. But there’s plenty more in that building.”

“You’re… even dumber than you used to be,” I scoffed, watching as his face hardened, as he took a step toward me, hand cocking back. “Go ahead,” I invited. “It won’t look suspicious or anything that I got my face messed up twice in a month.”

It killed him to pull back, his body practically vibrating with tension as his hand curled into a fist.

“The money is there. And you will get it for me. Or I will hold you down and force you to watch as my men torture, then kill, your brother.”

He would do that.

There wasn’t a doubt in my mind about it.

But Ididdoubt that there was enough money in the store to placate him. It was ameat shop, for God’s sake. And they balanced the books. They would see the money missing eventually. It was only a matter of time before they figured out it was me.

What choice did I have, though, but to try? To placate him. He had my brother.

“Fine,” I said, staring up at him, lifting my chin defiantly.

“Really lucky that you fucks decided to rob that store,” Kyle said, whacking his friend on the back as he smiled. “What?” he snarled at me, his smile falling as a strange, high-pitched laugh escaped me.

“I gave you too much credit,” I said, close to hysterical from the shock and stress.

“What?”

“I thought you were some criminal mastermind,” I chuckled, shaking my head at the movie-level villain I’d painted in my mind of him.

Someone calm and collected enough to pull off some patient, multi-step plan to get back at me.

That wasn’t it at all.

This had fallen into his lap.

He’d never tracked me down at all.

“I’m curious,” I said, pulling myself together as the two men watched me like I was deranged.

“About what?”

“How you found out it was me. It was you, wasn’t it?” I asked, looking at the other guy. “When Jake saved me, lied to you about the alarms, and the cops never came. You were the one to put it all together.”

“I put it together,” Kyle claimed, but I saw the other guy’s eyes go hard, clearly pissed to have his credit taken away. “See, once I recovered, I went looking for you. We needed to have a little chat.”

“Chat,” I scoffed. “That’s what we’re calling domestic abuse now, huh?”

“And, of course, I went to your brother. He was so helpful before,” he said, taking a fist to my heart at that memory.

The brother I was going to steal from my job for had sold me out to my abusive ex for… nothing.

“Was interesting to hear you’d cut him off too. A cold little bitch you turned out to be,” Kyle said, tssking at me. “But me and Jake, we started to talk, got close,” he said as my heart shrank in my chest. “He told me about this crew he was working with,” he said, glancing over at his accomplice. “We joined forces. When the heat got too hot in the Bronx, we set our sights on Brooklyn.”

“It was a complete accident that you robbed my job,” I concluded.

“I like to think it was fate,” Kyle said. “And then there was that little incident in the office.”

“By ‘incident’ you mean your friend here trying to rape me?” I asked, proud at how little emotion slipped into my voice.

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