Page 73 of Cruel Lies

"Forget the fuckinggun,Harper," he growled, his eyes pinning me to the stone ledge I sat on. "Areyouokay?"

I looked away from his penetrating glare, unable to stomach the way my head and my body were at odds with each other. "I’m fine. I’ve been through worse, remember?"

I knew that line would hurt him, but I didn’t care. Right now, I needed space between us. I needed to put that wall up between him and I that he’d been building and plastering and adding bricks to this whole time. I had to plug the holes that eroded in it. If we didn’t keep up our guard, we’d end up caring for one another.

And I couldn’t afford to get attached. Rule number five was don’t fall in love. And to date, my track record was impeccable. I’d avoided any and all attachments to men, especially ones I knew I couldn’t trust.

I wasn’t about to break that rule. Not for a Blackwood boy.

Even the prettiest one.

Angel winced at the reminder that he and his brothers had tried to kill me once before, and then winced again as the double meaning—the second attempt—settled in. His attention died out in a heartbeat, and though he attempted to hide it, his expressive eyes were never good at feigning disinterest. Not to me, anyhow.

"Good. Hate to think about what might happen if you just show up at a hospital right now." His eyes trailed back to the room, and that steely gaze darkened. "Stay right the fuck here while I go wipe off the gun."

I nodded, but he seemed unconvinced, so I did it again, holding my hands in a prayer position as he eyed me with speculation. "If you think I’m stupid enough to try and figure out how to run this bike, you’re overestimating me."

He chuckled under his breath. "Harper, you’re a mechanic.Not only do you know how to start it, you could probably take it apart and put it back together in less than a day or two. With your eyes closed."

He wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t the mechanics of the damn thing that stymied me. It was the skill needed to handle the damn thing.

"Taking it apart and actually operating one are two different things."

He didn’t seem convinced, but he nodded and disappeared into that grim hotel room, flipping his cellphone open as he went along, probably to tell Rowan he’d done his job. Or gone above and beyond the call of duty, maybe. Somehow, I suspected Rowan’s orders hadn’t contained the words ‘kill the man’ when he’d given them out to his brother.

That worried me as much as what Nash might do to the other target, whoever he might be.

The panic attack I expected to hit me never did. I wasn’t sure if it was because I was slowly desensitizing to the carnage and killing, or if I was just too overloaded to care enough to panic. Perhaps there was a third reason, but I’d never be able to parse it out alone, and seeing a therapist when you’re on the run was pretty much a no-go.

When Angel finally strolled out of the hotel room, the gun was nowhere in sight, and he’d stopped at the front desk again and no doubt told the man not to worry about the gunshot—cleaning his gun, no doubt. Went off by accident. Put it on his tab.

I couldn’t stop making up different scenarios in my head, and perhaps I was deluding myself into thinking I wasn’t having a breakdown. Maybe my panic attacks were changing form. Melding to the shapes of the new experiences I was living.

Fantastic. I never thought my panic attacks had heard the phrase ‘adapt, improvise, overcome.’

One more thing to add to the list of shit I was so over.

THIRTY-ONE

ANGEL

She was resilient;I’d give her that. Most women would have caved when their own father turned a gun on them. But I’d seen the fight in her eyes the moment she realized he was too strung out to hold onto that gun for long.

I had to act fast. And playing with her life was risky business. It went against every moral fiber of my being. It set me on edge, made me wanna vomit. But I knew I was right. And I just had to trust that the same instinct for self-preservation would serve her as well as it’d served me over the years.

When I went back in to wipe down the gun and put it in his cold, dead hand, I kicked him in the dick for good measure. The way he’d looked at his daughter made me fucking sick to my stomach.

He deserved so much worse than he’d gotten. But I’d never been the type to enjoy torturing them. That was Nash’s realm of chaos. I just took out a target and moved on. It was efficient, calculated, and quick. But Dante deserved to feel so much more pain than we’d given him.

Prick.

Piece of shit.

Scum of the earth.

He made some of our targets look like saints.

Harper sat on the ledge where I’d left her when I came back out, and the sudden thought that she might not be together enough to hold on for the ride back caused me a moment of panic. However, when she spotted me coming, her long legs stretched out in front of her, and she slipped effortlessly to the ground, her leather boots and their steel accents shimmering in the hot desert sun as she strode over to the bike and grabbed her helmet.

---