Page 20 of Dance with the Devil

Right. So Noah sucks, too.

Doesn’t matter. “Sorry, but I can’t do it.”

“You will.”

No.

“If the boss wanted you dead, you’d be dead,” Mickey says, nodding at the plate. “Now eat.”

I push the tray away from me. It takes every ounce of strength I have to do that as I give the two men a defiant Libellula shrug. “Pass.”

Mickey sucks in a breath. “You can eat it off the plate, or you can eat it off the floor, but you’re gonna eat it.” He pointedly meets Cross’s quiet stare. “Both of you.”

When we don’t respond, Mickey makes a move to knock the plate off of the cot, onto the floor. Shit. He’sserious. He’ll really expect us to lick the pasta up off the floor?—

“Here,” Cross rumbles. “Give it to me. You want us to eat? Fuck it. I’ll go first.”

“Not very gentleman-like of you,” Mickey snorts, taking a step back as Cross snatches the plate. “Shouldn’t it be ladies first?”

“Not unless you did something to the food. In that case, I’ll be the one to test it.”

“You got a death wish, da Silva?”

“No. But if it’s laced or poisoned, it’s better that I find out over Genevieve.” He swirls his fork in the pasta, gathering up the noodles then plopping them into his open mouth. He chews, swallows, then adds, “Not that I think it is. Like you said. If your boss wanted us dead, we wouldn’t have survived the motorcycle crash.”

The taller man laughs. “You’re smarter than you look, pretty boy.”

Cross doesn’t respond. He just sets the fork down on the plate, then offers it to me.

I hesitate.

He nods. “We don’t know when we’ll eat again. Go on. Have some.”

“Listen to the Sinner, princess,” Noah says mockingly. “Be a good girl and, if you’re lucky, we’ll come back with breakfast.”

“Or maybe we won’t,” adds Mickey. “Haven’s gone. Dumb bitch got relocated right before we got the orders to move you in. With the compound down to a ghost crew and only two visitors, maybe we forget.”

I know what he’s implying. If I refuse to eat, I’ll be punished. If Idoeat, they’ll know they can control me.

Cross has already shown them that they can use me to controlhim.

I guess you could say the same about me. I’m not going to let him go hungry because I’m too stubborn to save my own skin.

Damien would tell me to do whatever it took to survive. Now that Cross tasted the food first without any obvious adverse reactions, I might as well take a bite or two.

So I do, and once the two hired men get what they wanted, they each smirk at us, then Noah lets Mickey out of the cage, leaving Cross and me behind with a mound of woefully under-seasoned fettuccine alfredo.

I set the plate down. My stomach is roiling, unwilling to eat another noodle, and I ignore how uneasy it is by focusing on something else.

Cross.

“So,” I ask, breaking the awkward silence. “Your name is Carlos?”

“It was,” he says flatly, a clear signal that he doesn’t want me to push the topic without actually having to shut me down with his words.

It isn’t often he takes that tone with me. In fact, when you consider how often I badger him with my questions, trying to get to know him, I can only remember one distinct time that he did: when I asked him about the flames on his neck and discovered his family died in an apartment fire.

He’s hungry, I tell myself. The promise of the food is probably twisting both of our stomachs, plus the realization thatthis wasn’t some big misunderstanding. They know our names. They know who we are. They took us on purpose, and it doesn’t look like they’re going to let us go anytime soon.

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