Page 7 of Crown of Lies

I lick my lips, gazing at the raw, red wound.

I’d say she’s earned that mark.

I clean up and step back, picking up her torn shirt from the floor. But Nico holds his arm out in front of me, stopping me from putting it back on her.

“Leave it. She can freeze down here until she gives us what we need.”

I glance at him, my fingers digging into the soft, dirt-stained fabric. Wrong. Wrong.Wrong.

Slowly, I force my fingers to uncurl, releasing her shirt so that it drops to the floor. Following my leader’s orders, like always.

“Cuffs,” Nico says next, and Atlas grabs a set of handcuffs from the shelf.

Quinn eyes them with a venomous look, scowling as he unties her from the chair and drags her over to the far wall of the basement, where he raises her arms overhead. He hooks the chain of the cuffs over a curved pipe before securing each restraint to her wrists, locking her in place.

“There. Don’t think you’ll be running again any time soon,” Nico says with satisfaction. “Now let’s try this again. What do you know?”

Quinn bares her teeth, leveling a hell of a glare Nico’s way. “I know as much as you know, which is nothing. I already told you, you’re wasting your fucking time asking me questions about what Silas said.”

“And I already told you I don’t trust you. I think you’re a liar.”

She spits on the floor in front of him. “That’s rich, coming from you.”

Nico’s shoulders tighten, and although the unfinished basement is rather large, there’s so much tension in the air that it feels like the walls are squeezing in around us. He takes two steps closer to her, dropping his head a little to find her gaze.

“One way or another, mia cara,” he promises, “you’re going to sing for me. It’s up to you to choose the tune of your song.”

Before she can respond to that, he jerks his head toward me and Atlas.

“We’re done here tonight. We’ll give her some time to think about how she wants to proceed next.”

He turns and strides out of the basement, and Atlas follows him more slowly up the stairs. I leave the room last, lingering for a moment at the bottom of the staircase. When I glance over my shoulder, my eyes lock with Quinn’s.

Defiance burns like fire in her gaze, and the feeling of wrongness twisting inside me ratchets up.

She’s not going to talk. Not easily.

And I don’t know what will happen if she doesn’t.

Taking a deep breath, I turn away from her and head upstairs. Atlas and Nico are already in the kitchen, and the tension filling the room is almost as thick as it was in the basement. Nico is leaning over the kitchen table, his palms braced on the smooth wood as he stares into space. Atlas has his back against the fridge, his tattooed arms folded over his chest.

There’s not a single ounce of satisfaction in this room right now.

But can I really blame my brothers for that? Between Quinn finding out that we were spying on her for The Saint and exacting her revenge, to learning that Silas was not only working for the bastard too, but that he had his own designs on Quinn—nothing that happened tonight is a cause for celebration.

“We just have to break her,” Nico declares, straightening suddenly. “She knows something. How the fuck can she not? We need to make her talk.”

He doesn’t say it, but we all know what he means. There are plenty of ways to loosen a tight tongue, and not many of them involve asking nicely.

“Well, this is kind of what we get, isn’t it?” Atlas speaks up, his tone tight. He’s pissed.

I glance between him and Nico as our club leader narrows his eyes.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” he demands.

“We wouldn’t exactly be in this situation if we hadn’t decided to work for some mysterious client, running around playing a game of double-cross, would we?”

“It was a good enough gig in the beginning,” Nico says stiffly.

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