Page 22 of Dance with the Devil

Food. We get fed twice, a meal we consider ‘breakfast’ and one that’s ‘dinner’. It’s never anything too elaborate. Mac and cheese. A cold hamburger from a fast food joint. A stale croissant from one of those coffee chains you find on every damn corner in Springfield. Pasta. We wash it down with sink water, and wait for one of the goons to pick up the plates.

The plates are always plastic, as though they’re worried we might smash a ceramic one and use the shard to go for their jugular. And if I thought about snapping one of the plates in half and seeing if that might make a good weapon, it’s pointless when the plates are too flimsy to break.

The goons. Turns out, there are at leastthreeof them. Mickey is the squat one with a bit of a belly. Noah has the ponytail, mustache, and the gap between his teeth. Then there’s the bald guy who’s at least a head taller than both of them, who looms in the hallway as the other two take care of serving us the food.

He’s the one who gives me a bad vibe. Even as a kid, I learned to listen to my gut. I knew Chad was trouble the first time my mother brought him home, and I got the same unsettled feeling when Twig came to me to get his Sinners brand. When I saw Devil blow him away from disrespecting Ava the way Twig did, I knew my gut got it right.

I can’t only imagine what this guy is capable of, and I watch him closer than I do the other ones when they open our cage.

That, I realize too late, was a mistake. So concerned with the quiet, glaring bald guy, I completely missed the way Mickey started looking at Genevieve the way she did that first plate of pasta they brought us.

Like he’sstarvingfor her.

By the time I caught on, I started moving in front of Genevieve so that he didn’t get to ogle her. That worked for two days, but on the third?

He doesn’t follow the routine.

First of all, the goons only come by our cage twice a day. Other than that, they leave us the hell alone. We had ‘breakfast’ already—a stack of dry pancakes we were forced to choke down—and only about an hour ago, Noah and the big, bald guy stood there as we used our hands to pick at a couple of pieces of oily fried chicken.

Genevieve barely ate a wing before declaring herself too full to continue. Before Noah barked at her to finish, I tore into the chicken breast myself. That satisfied the prick enough, and they disappeared down the hall.

We’d only just finished doing our best to wash the grease away without any soap when a heavy footstep echoed down the hall.

Genevieve’s eyes widen, both in curiosity and in fear.

I rise up from the cot in time to see Mickey fiddling with the keypad outside our cell. The door slides open, he steps inside, and almost immediately it closes behind him.

And he’s alone. No back-up. No help.

This is our chance.

I have every intention of doing something. Bum-rushing him, using my shoulder to knock him down, maybe even throttling him if I could get my hands around his thick neck first. Something. I would doanythingto save Genevieve, and this seems like it might be my only chance.

And that’s when he reaches behind him, pulling out a revolver, and my plans are suddenly on hold.

“Sit down.”

I freeze in front of the cot.

He cocks the gun. “I said, sit down.”

“Cross, please,” whispers Genevieve.

I drop down on my cot beside her.

Mickey grins. “Better. Now, just in case you get any idea of trying to do anything funny, remember that I won’t hesitate to use this.” He gestures with the butt of the gun behind him. “ That door’s on a timer. In ten minutes, it’ll open again, and I’m walking out of here by myself. You can be alive at the end of the ten minutes, or you can be bleeding out on the floor. Your choice, da Silva.”

Keeping my voice as calm as possible, I ask, “And what takes ten minutes?”

The creepy bastard licks his lip. “All depends on how good she is. So why don’t you tell me?”

Next to me, Genevieve grabs my thigh.

I dare him to make another innuendo. I don’t give a hit that he has a gun. If he’s saying, what Ithinkhe’s saying…

Mickey sighs. “See? This is why I told the boss man that you should have your own cells. I wouldn’t need to keep the gun outif you were tucked away, but it is what it is. I came here to get what I’m owed…” He pauses for a moment, laughing as if he said something funny. “Maybe not one of the Owed. If I was, it wouldn’t be a lot easier to get that Haven bitch to play nice without breaking her.” His beady eyes land on Genevieve. “You gonna be a good girl, sweetheart, or you gonna need to be broken in, too?”

She blinks, stunned. “What?”

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