Page 70 of Bloody Lace

“Appreciate it.” I stride towards the heavy metal door, the frigid, wet cold cutting through my jacket as I step inside and see the man hung from a meathook dangling from the ceiling.

He’s stripped down to just his jeans, his torso bearing the marks of how Vik and my men ‘leaned’ on him. Burns are scattered across his pale stomach, one of his nipples cut away and cauterized, and his mouth is swollen. His bare toes, purple from the cold, just brush against the bare ground, and I can see the swelling in his wrists and elbows from how long he’s been hanging from the hook.

Primed to answer my questions, that’s for sure. Or pissed off enough by now that he’ll fight me. But either way, he’s going to sing, and then I’ll put him out of his misery.

I shrug off my jacket, rolling up my sleeves as the man’s eyes slowly open. They’re puffy, too—Vik and the guys must have knocked him around the head a bit. I’m fine with that. They deserve to have a little fun, too. And I can’t imagine this guy made it easy for them, picking him up from wherever they nabbed him.

I reach for the knife on the table, pressing the tip against one finger as I approach him. “Whose plan was it to try to grab Evelyn outside the restaurant?” He’s already warmed up, I see no reason not to go straight to the real questions. And I’m in no mood to play games.

The man spits on the floor, eyes narrowed in on me—from anger or because he’s been hit in the face too many times, I’m not quite sure. “We were told to go with the woman. To watch for her to come out of the restaurant and then try to grab the dark-haired one.”

“What was the woman’s name?” I step closer, close enough to smell the acrid scent of his fear, and he flinches back.”

“I don’t know!” The man shouts, his voice echoing in the nearly-empty space of the warehouse. “He didn’t tell us her name. Just to follow her lead, and wait outside until we grabbed the dark-haired one on the way out.”

It’s not actually necessary for the man to tell me a name. I already know who he’s talking about, just based on circumstances—Nicci Armand, and the knowledge makes me see red. Rage burning through me at the thought that Nicci is part of this. I knew she must be, from the moment Gus told me what happened, but the confirmation makes me burn with fury all over again.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scornedis an old adage for a reason, but I never really wanted Nicci. She had to have known that. And she can’t have imagined that I wouldn’t find out about this, or that I’d want her once it was all over. Once she’d succeeded in hurting Evelyn.

Unless she just didn’t care.

That thought makes me angrier still. I reach up, pressing the knife tip into the cauterized wound where the man’s nipple was, and he lets out a cry, jerking against the ties binding him to the meathook.

“What was the plan?” I demand. “Once you took Evelyn, what were you supposed to do with her?”

Just saying the words aloud makes me feel ill. I’ve been angry before, felt the panicked, sick sensation of knowing someone Icared about was going to be hurt—and then, when it was my brother, there was nothing I could do about it.

This time, I can. I can stop them from getting to Evelyn, stop them from hurting her. Stop them from taking her away from me—but what startles me is just how deep that need runs, how desperately I need to keep her safe. As if what I feel for her is much, much stronger than anything I ever meant to feel.

I twist the knife deeper, and the man lets out a deep, sobbing groan.”Take her to…Valenti,” he manages. “Get you to…cede territory, for her return.” He opens his eyes again, staring at me, pure malice in his eyes. “Valenti had a betting pool on how many pieces would have to come off of her and be sent to you before you’d finally give him what he wanted.”

Rage flares up in my gut, so hot that I drive the knife in deeper, dragging it down and opening up a bleeding slash in the man’s chest before I can stop myself. “He’s going to die for that,” I promise the man. “But you’ll die first. Painfully, unless you tell me everything you know.”

The man coughs, a thick, choking sound. “The woman was…not paid. Something…else. Closer.” He smiles at me, teeth bared and bloody. “I’m not fucking…telling you anything…more.”

And he doesn’t. Not when I go to work on his fingernails, or his molars, not when I put a bullet in his knee. He’s hanging, bloody and battered from the meathook by the time the sun is fully risen, and I’m sweating, but he doesn’t offer anything else up. Just the same two words, over and over—look closer.

I don’t know what that means. When he’s so broken that he’s incapable of speech any longer, I leave him to bleed out, too unsatisfied with the responses to give him an easy death. I don’t know whatlook closermeans, but I know I’m not going to be able to stop thinking about it until I figure it out. And I know that I want to keep Evelyn close—as close as possible—until I do.

I turn the man’s words over and over in my head, as I tell the driver to take me to the family mansion, instead of back to the penthouse. I don’t want Evelyn to see me covered in blood, and I don’t want to answer questions about what happened yet. I want time to think. To try to piece together what Nicci could possibly have been offered that would have caused her to make such a stupid fucking decision. What theCrowscould have offered her that would have been worth it.

Not money, that’s for sure. Nicci has more than enough of that. It occurs to me that her father might have cut her off, for failing to close the deal with me, and I feel a small stab of guilt, but it doesn’t last. If shehadbeen punished for my decision, she could have come to me, and I would have made it right. She knows enough about this life, about how a truepakhanshould behave, to know that I would have set right any injury her father did over something that was my choice. If she chose to make a deal with the fuckingCrowsinstead, I have no sympathy left for her.

I doubt her father did cut her off. Gossip like that spreads, and I would have heard something. My father would have said something to me, if nothing else. But if he did, it still doesn’t make sense. Barca Valenti, so far as I know, doesn’t have the resources to make up for a loss like that. To make it worth her while.

There’s something wrong with this. Some piece of it that’s missing. I text Vik, telling him to keep a lookout for anyone higher up in the Crows they can pinch. I’ll torture every man straight to Barca if I have to, and then I’ll do the same to him, if need be. Whatever it takes to keep Evelyn safe.

The ferocity of that need sticks with me, making me feel more off-balance and uncertain than I ever have before. All my life, I’ve been taught to keep my emotional distance from anyone I might care about. From a spouse, from children, from familyin general—for this exact reason. Because emotion can be used against a man to make him weak. It makes him irrational, makes him lash out, makes him make decisions that he otherwise might not. It takes reason out of the equation, and reduces a man down to his basest urges.

Love, I’ve always been taught, is a weapon that’s used against you. Not something a man, let alone apakhan, should allow himself to feel.

I let myself love someone only once—my brother, who I grew up with, who was my closest and best friend, who I covered for when his hotheaded antics got him in trouble with our father and who I would have stood by through anything. But love lured him away from us. It got him killed. And it made me spend years worth of time and resources trying to find him, to rescue him, until our father put a stop to it. Until he called me weak for exactly that.

By then, we were sure that he was dead, anyway. But I couldn’t give up. Just as I feel that same drive, that same ferocious need to get to the bottom of this, now. Not because my own position is being threatened, not out of ego, but becauseEvelynis being targeted.

Am I falling in love with Evelyn?I’m not sure how I would know if I was. It’s different than what I felt for my brother, of course. Something more primal, something that pulls at me in a different way, that makes me want to hold her close and devour her, all at the same time. Something that makes me wonder how I’m ever going to let her go, when the time comes.

I should fight what I’m feeling, I know that. It’s what I’ve always been told, what I’ve always been taught. But I’m no longer sure that I want to.

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