Page 11 of Crown of Lies

He storms up the stairs, flicking the light switch and plunging me into darkness. Then he slams the door so hard that the sound of it echoes in my ears long after he’s gone.

4

NICO

They saynothing will bring you down faster than a woman with a vendetta.

And I think they, whoever the fucktheyare, might be right.

I’m tallying the damages in the aftermath of losing the clubhouse, and monetarily, we’re pretty fucked but not unfixable. Move a decimal here, dip into funds there, and there’s enough of a margin that rebuilding is a possibility that exists on the horizon.

But in terms of morale? Security?

Money can’t fix that. It won’t.

I’ve gotten at least ten calls today, and it’s not even noon—all from people in various positions in the club, from newbies just asking how they’re supposed to replace shit they’ve lost, to old heads who are out for blood.

And oh, are they out for blood.

No one may have died in the fire, but it doesn’t stop our people from moving like someone did.

We’re going to war, right?

We’ve gotta take more blood.

Scorched earth, right, Nico?

It doesn’t matter that they believe Silas was responsible—and that he’s now conveniently too dead to refute that claim. My people are too smart to think this was some kind of lone wolf situation, and while I’d usually be proud of my club members for being so savvy, right now it’s proving to be a headache that I don’t fucking need.

More lies. More manipulations. I don’t care much about lying one way or the other when it’s to other people, but when it’s to my own…

“Fuck!” I curse aloud, yanking my helmet off the seat of my bike where I left it.

As a flock of birds scatter from a tree beside me at my outburst, I immediately think of Quinn—because of course I do. That’sallI seem to think of these days. All of this bullshit, leading right back to her. To my own wife.

It’s been two days since we brought her back to her place and locked her in the basement, and she’s still refusing to talk. Chained in that basement in the dark, with a single meal a day and a few bathroom breaks at most, she’s holding out, not saying a damn thing.

She claims that she has no idea why The Saint wants her.

But I don’t believe that. Ican’t.

Because I need fucking answers. I need there to have been a reason for all of this, a point to the utter chaos that I’ve unleashed on my people.

Atlas, Killian, and I have all been taking turns down there with her, doing our best to get her to talk. But she’s remained stubbornly silent.Defiant. Refusing to give us anything, not even the insistence that she has no more idea about why The Saint wants her than we do. She doesn’t speak at all, despite everything we’ve done to try to break her.

I knew my wife was a fighter from the very beginning, but she’s proven herself to be even stronger than any of us expected.

My wife.

The words bounce around in my head, and I rub my chest absently as I settle onto my bike. Despite everything, despite how fucking furious I am at Quinn, I can’t seem to stop thinking of her that way. As my wife.

The vows we took weren’t supposed to mean anything. It was all just part of the plan, what I thought at the time would be an easy way to kill two birds with one stone—earn a hefty paycheck for Carnage while doing recon on one of our biggest rival gangs.

But more and more, I’m starting to realize that Atlas was right.

This plan was fucked from the beginning.

It went off the rails the moment Quinn snuck into my bedroom on our wedding night. The moment I touched her. The moment Ikissedher. And although I kept telling myself it didn’t mean anything, that I could get shit back on track…

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