Page 59 of Tangled in Knots

“No,” he says breathlessly. “Fucking hurts. Adira is wordlessly screaming and awake. It feels like a deep, dark nightmare inside. I’m just as on edge and can’t fucking help her.”

“The guys are with her,” Jed grounds out, his body twisting until his leg is underneath him, so that he can turn to look at us. “It’s the best we can do until we can explain things to her.”

“You think words are going to be able to fix what happened?” I ask, eyes wide. “There’s no fucking way that’s going to make a difference, Jed. I don’t know what will.”

Morris makes a strangled sound under his breath and I sigh, feeling bad. I know he’s buried in guilt, and noticed the bite on his neck. I’m jealous as hell about it, not realizing he wanted a bite.

Though, by the smug look on my brother’s face when they came out, his possessive ass may have forced the issue. Morris is ours, and that’s never going to change. If he threatened to leave our pack, I have a feeling Jed wouldn’t have taken that very well.

“Okay, fuck,” I mutter. “How much longer?”

“Kane, I swear to God,” Morris groans. I can be the worst backseat driver ever, and I’m aware of this little flaw in my personality. “Twenty-five minutes.”

“Thanks,” I grunt. “What are we going to do when we see her?”

Demon rubs his chest, wincing, and I swear he looks like he has ants in his pants with how much he’s moving around.

“We throw ourselves at her mercy,” he rasps. “This… can never happen again. We have to be able to swear to her that she’s safe. Dad is a fucking menace.”

“Yeah, he is,” Jed says. “We’re going to end him. But here’s the thing about that…”

“We’ll be the new head of his mafia empire,” I sigh. “New enemies, new issues to deal with.”

“Not if you rule differently than your father,” Morris says. “Your father doesn’t run in sex trafficking, but does have the auctions. It’s always felt like a cop out in my mind, because it’s the same damn thing. Cut Ophelia off.”

“That’ll make her even stronger, because she’ll make all of the profits. At least right now, Dad is holding her leash,” Demon says, still appearing in pain.

The mention of a leash makes me flash back to Jed telling me about the leash they put on Adira. I was already out of the roomwith my brother when it happened. I can’t fucking imagine how she must have felt.

Ophelia makes Dad and herself money in the cruelest ways possible.

He may hold her leash, but she gets off on seeing how far she can go on it.

“Cut off her leads,” Morris says. “Doesn’t your father feed her people to sell?”

“I don’t know what percentage that is,” Jed says. “I’ve always stayed away from that side of the business, but it wouldn’t be too difficult to find out. Cutting her off from Dad’s protection would hurt her.”

“I imagine she’s pissed off a lot of people,” I muse. “Dad’s always talked about how we’re inheriting the business once he’s retired, but I figured that would be once he’s dead. Dad isn’t the type to gracefully retire. He likes power too much.”

Remembering how excited he was as he watched Adira being hurt and humiliated makes me shudder. I can taste bile as I swallow hard and reach for a bottle of water. I’m rarely disgusted by the shit we do, but I am today.

The little rabbit is already changing us. She just doesn’t know it.

“I’ve never wanted any part of leading, but I don’t have a choice now,” Jed says. “If we eliminate him and don’t step up, people will come after us, because we share his blood.”

“They’ll expect us to take the reins,” I agree. “No one else will believe we simply need him dead to protect a little rabbit. No one will respect it, and we’ll appear weak. They’ll slaughter us all anyway. It’s what we would do.”

“Yeah, well we’re assholes,” Demon says. “Unfortunately, we set the standard for murder and mayhem, so we’re going to have to cut the heads off of our mafia heads and then show we’re in charge.”

“Murder is a walk in the park for us,” I say. “Redemption is a whole other story.”

“I don’t think we deserve it,” Morris mumbles. “Think about what we know about Adira. Exactly nothing. I’ve kept her unconscious for weeks, drugging her while pretending to give a shit about her. I took her out to the porch before we drove to the safe house and gave her the choice to be injected with a sedative, or take a pill that would keep her asleep.”

I didn’t know this, and my brows draw down. “What did she choose?” I ask.

“At first, she was upset, but realized there was no point in fighting. The entire property was covered in snow. I told her she was going to auction, and it would happen regardless of how much she fought,” he says in a dead tone as he turns onto another road. “She chose the pill.”

“She’s had shit choices forced on her the entire time, since we burned down her father’s estate,” I grunt. “The little rabbit has a lot of fight in her. I know there’s a fire that’ll burn the world down if we let it. I want to let her light the match.”

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