Page 52 of Cruel Games

There was blood. Bitch broke the skin.

Of my face.

My fucking face.

“I warned you already not to talk about him like that. Or any way, for that matter. He was agood man,unlike you dogs.”

I would have moved to retaliate if not for the look Coyote turned on me. Something there made me pause because he clearly had ulterior motives. I just couldn’t figure out what they were, and he wasn’t talking with her in the room.

“I’ll need accommodations inside the Guild, of course, as an honorary new member of the Neon Dogs. And I assume I’ll need a name, because it’ll be suspicious if the daughter of a former contract hit shows up in the Guild with the men who killed her father, don’t you think?”

“Ought to just call you psycho. It fits.”

She tossed her head back and howled with laughter, the broken sound grating on the edges of my sanity. It didn’t sound human. It almost sounded animalistic, like something very clearly not-human pretending to be one of us.

“We’ll figure out your name later, kitten,” I drawled, eyeing her up. “You’ll need a mask, bike, and believable weaponry. We don’t use guns.”

“I think you’ll find I have everything but the bike ready to go.” Her eyes narrowed, and I held my breath as I waited to see what else she had planned. “As for a bike, well, I could just use yours. You can ride bitch with Dingo.”

Oh,hell no.Nobody touched my bike.Nobody.“You’re not taking my bike. I draw the line there.”

“Interesting place to draw it, but okay,” she conceded, shrugging with a disinterested huff. “I’ll ride behind you for now. You can buy me a bike later.”

“I ain’t buying you shit.” My teeth ground against each other as she tried to walk all over us. All because she held a fuckinggun in her palm. First chance I got, I’d take the damn thing out of her grip and turn it on her. Boom. Problem solved.

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride . . .

“Debatable. But another time.” She stared at her fingers, pretending I was of no more consequence than a fly on the wall. “As for the mask and the weapon, I’m already prepared.”

A pink mockery of our own masks flashed through my brain, a fleeting image I’d seen before I gave in to the gas she’d thrown in the storage unit with us. Sure enough, she wasn’t kidding. She already had a mask ready to go.

As for the bat?—

I’d seen the beaten-in faces of the targets she took out before we could reach them. She had a bat, or I’d eat my shorts.

“You planned for this, didn’t you?”

Her look of indignation spoke volumes. But why go through all the trouble if she didn’t plan to take over us?

“My plan was never to join you. It was to eradicate you.”

I chuckled as she shifted beneath my intense gaze. “Plans change, kitten.” I glanced back at Coyote, growling in the back of my throat as a warning. “You’d better know what you’re doing.”

Trust me,his eyes seemed to say, pleading for the trust he’d always so blindly given me.

I had no reason not to. He’d never once betrayed us or done anything to endanger us. I doubted he’d start now. I just had to figure out what his reasons were, and I couldn’t do that right now.

So, I made the decision to ride it out and see where this led. And when I had him alone again, I’d wring the answers out of him if it killed me.

Because being this woman’s bitch boy just might do it for me if I wasn’t quick to turn the tables.

“Okay, say we go along with this?—”

“Do or don’t. There’s no time now for hypotheticals. I’m nottoo keen on letting you live, so if you like your heart beating and your blood pumping, I’d take the deal while it’s still on the table.”

She held out her hand like some sort of businesswoman making a run-of-the-mill deal at lunch with a client. Warily, I offered her mine in return, gripping her dainty fingers hard enough to cause her pain.

I had to give her credit; she didn’t flinch at all when I finally released her. Instead, she turned to Dingo, doing the same with him. He was less wary and more curious than anything as he shook on the deal that could make or break us in the long term.

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