Page 118 of Cruel Games

She had a point, but I wasn’t going to play this game with her. I was done playing the dutiful dog. There was no reason to hide the truth anymore, no reason to play along with the little power dynamic.

“You make me want to.” And with that, I reached out withmy free hand, shut off the light next to my bed, and curled around her, making myself a safe space for her to do whatever breaking down she needed to. She could cry, swear, dream, lie awake, and lament the things she’d lost today: her innocence, a hero, the image she’d painted of her whole life.

Whatever she needed, I’d be that for her, for as long as I could. Girls like Ivy never stayed still for long. And it was just a matter of time before she lost what little purpose remained, and she left us.

Or killed us.

I would have almost preferred the latter. At least then it wouldn’t hurt when she broke my heart.

FORTY-FOUR

IVY

I wokein the middle of the night in a cold sweat. Yet, somehow, I was still hot despite the droplets clinging to my brow.

And strong arms were wrapped gently around me.

Coyote snored softly in his sleep, undisturbed by the warmth between us. I didn’t want to wake him as I wriggled free, but I shouldn’t have worried.

Man slept like the dead.

I wasn’t whole yet; sleep couldn’t fix the brokenness inside me. The only thing that could do that was answers. And those answers were buried with my father and the men he’d worked with that I killed in short order as I searched for the Neon Dogs. Men I thought had wronged a kind man.

Turned out, they’d just done what I’d been doing all along. They killed a man who didn’t deserve to breathe the same air as the rest of us.

But something in me refused to reconcile the man I’d known with the man I was beginning to suspect him to have been. Something in me still held out hope that they were wrong, that something was missing, that this wasn’t really him I was looking at.

I needed to know the truth, but to do that, I had to figure out who had ordered the hit.

And that was classified. Not even the Dogs knew who their client had been.

That information was between God and Lilly St. Clair. But could they convince her to divulge that information?

I slinked over to his bathroom and pilfered a robe from the hook by the door, covering myself so I didn’t freeze as I slipped out of his room and into the commons. I didn’t expect to find Dingo passed out on the couch, his arms slung over the back like he’d been waiting for someone.

Maybe me.

I stopped behind him and brushed a stray lockof his hair from his face, studying the lines at the edges of his eyes where life had etched memories into his skin.

The corner of his lips twitched subtly as I caressed the side of his jaw, revealing he wasn’t as asleep as I first thought.

“You finally get away from Coyote?”

The silence between us dragged on until I coughed, deciding I couldn’t stay quiet forever. “Yeah. It got a little hot. He’s like a personal furnace sometimes.”

“We’ve shared a few watch shifts for targets before. He runs hotter than a furnace in winter.” His hands grazed my shoulders as he stretched his arms upward, that playful smile he always wore strangely absent. “You, ah, want the couch?”

I tried for a soft smile but missed the mark entirely. “I don’t think I can sleep right now.”

“You wanna talk about it?”

There was no need to dignify that question with an answer. Instead, I just shot him a pointed glare and marched into the kitchen, divesting the fridge of a bottled water.

“How long are you going to stay mad at us?”

I wasn’t going to give him my attention, but that assumption hooked me and reeled me in like an unsuspecting fish. I turned back to the living room and leaned against the counter, the robe gaping a little. “Who said I’m mad at you?”

“The behavior implies you’d be upset. And if not at us, then who?”

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