Page 124 of Cruel Games

Which, of course, only made me more curious about what was on that damn drive. But I pulled it from the phone and stuffed it back in my bag, vowing at least to never let her know I still intended to listen.

“Why did you wait until I turned eighteen to put a hit out on him?”

“I thought I could protect you. Things changed. We ran into Lilly St. Clair at a party one night, and after she got me alone, she told me she knew all about his little side gig, and that she’d take care of everything. All she needed was some solid proof.”

There it was. The missing piece of the puzzle. How she’d even known how to have something like that taken care of was beyond me, but it was unsurprising that they might’ve rubbed elbows at fancy dinners and special city events. My father was an influential man in Port Wylde; those circles of the elite and the illegal often overlapped.

But Lilly St. Clair pretended she had no idea who I was when I showed up on her doorstep. She acted like she had no clue she was rubber-stamping my joining the very men who’d been tasked with taking out my father.

She’d known all along. Perhaps even facilitated it, in her own way.

Had she left her room door unlocked intentionally?

So many new questions I’d likely never know the answers to.

Just then, a guard rushed in—one of the assholes who’d tried to keep me from getting inside—and made a beeline for me, a taser in one hand, a set of cuffs in the other. His mouth twisted in a mockery of glee, and then, when he launched himself for my upper half, I leaned down in my seat, letting him fly headfirstover the back of the couch as I brought up the bat to land square in his ballsack as he went.

He lay on the floor, howling in pain as more guards filed in, not all of them sporting injuries from me, but enough of them to make me smile.

Behold, mother, what I’ve turned into.

“Who wants some?” I asked with a grin, turning in place with the bat thrown over one shoulder, begging for someone, anyone, to do something.

For once in my life, I welcomed the physical pain. It meant I could do something other than focus on this bullshit.

“That’ll be enough,” my mother said instead, motioning for them to lower their weapons. “She’s not a threat to me. She’s my daughter.”

There was a mixture of relief, rage, and confusion roiling inside me as I listened to my mother claim me as her own. Even with the bad terms we’d parted on, even with the bullshit I’d put her through, that, even now, knowing what I knew, I couldn’t bring myself to apologize for, she was willing to let bygones be bygones and claim me, welcome me home.

“I’m not staying,” I spat at her, shoving the remainder of the things I’d brought with me back into the backpack in haste. “This doesn’t just undo everything that happened.”

Her soft smile was infuriating. “You can come and go as you please. I can have a room made up for you if you’d like?—”

“I watched him die, you know,” I threw over my shoulder at him in an accusatory tone. “I was in his office when they showed up to murder him. Watched as they took their bats to him and beat him to a pulp. And then I stood in the window and memorized their faces as they put his face to the tire and ripped it to shreds in his own driveway. No matter what kind of scum he was, the truth can’t erase that kind of trauma.”

Her eyes widened in shock.

Yeah. Didn’t know that, did you, Mother?

“And then I left home and sought out his killers, thinking he’d been wronged.” I let that sink in, let her realize what I must’ve done to find them. “I planned to kill them in revenge. I practiced on other pieces of scum. Captured them. Tortured them. Told them their lives were forfeit. And now I live with them. I work with them. Ifuckthem, Mom. I gave up any chance at a normal life when Ibecame one of them.And that’s not the sort of thing you walk away from.”

“You joined the Guild?” she asked, her voice climbing an octave. “How?”

“I walked right in, and your friend Lilly St. Clair opened the doors wide with a smile on her face. She even let me shack up with my father’s killers under her own roof.”

If my goal was to hurt her, I’d succeeded. I didn’t know what I expected when I came here. I hadn’t planned to hurt her for what I subconsciously knew she did. I knew now why she did it, and it made sense. But why was there some part of me that yearned to see her as wounded as I was?

I threw the backpack over my shoulder, gave her a two-finger salute at my temple, and flipped the guards the bird. “If you ever need some other scumbag killed, you know where to find us. Just ask for yourdaughter.I think I’ll call myselfthe Hyena.”

As if to punctuate my point, I cackled much like I had in the apartment with the guys, and marched right out the doors I’d come in through.

In the driveway, though, there were two guards standing beside Dingo’s dirtbike, and they didn’t seem interested in letting me go without a fight.

Until I swung the bat in their direction menacingly.

I don’t know what direction I even went in when I left the estate. I drove and drove until I ran out of road.

And just like that, I was at the edge of the Dread River. Just like my life, this street was a dead end. And now I had a choice to make.

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