Page 38 of Cruel Games

“Like a shot from someone you’ve betrayed. Someone who wanted to break your heart like you broke theirs.”

Was she just guessing, or did she know?

There weren’t many people who knew the real story behind that scar, and almost all of them were dead. And since the other two were in the room with us, I was pretty sure none of them had given up my secret.

“A jilted lover, perhaps?” She brought the cigarette to the edge of my wound, and I recoiled, not because I feared the pain, but because I didn’t want to lose the reminder of the biggest mistake I’d ever made.

The only mistake I wished I could take back.

“Don’t,” I begged, eyes drifting shut to hide my shame for pleading with the enemy. “Not that one. Anywhere but there.”

She pressed the cigarette to the edge of that scar, and I felt my whole world shift on its axis. The heat was inescapable, but when I looked up—or down, direction was really starting to fuck with me, being upside down—she had just narrowly avoided the scar, almost like?—

—like maybe she had some of her own.

“Who scratched up your pretty little heart, kitten?” I mused, loving the way she clearly hated not only the nickname, but that I dared to ask her such a personal question. “Who broke the glass window and changed the view of your world from the inside?”

She sighed, her eyes only holding a fraction of the enjoymentthat they’d had when she was actively burning me, her lit cigarette forgotten as it fell to the floor only half-smoked.

FIFTEEN

IVY

You.

I wanted to wipe that smug smile off his face. Wanted him to know just how much he’d affected me in our short acquaintance. Not that he remembered me. Even if hehadseen me that night, I’d changed a lot since then. I went from an innocent, bare-faced girl with strawberry blonde hair to a fiery-red inferno with shadowy makeup to compliment the darkness inside. I carried myself differently, looked at the world in a completely new light. People who knew me then wouldn’t recognize me now.

But I didn’t mourn the loss of my old self. No, I embraced it instead, relishing how I felt knowing I’d overcome what might’ve broken a lesser person. Not only that, but I excelled as my new self. Embracing a whole new lifestyle, I learned so much, developed so many skills I’d likely never have even considered useful in my old life. Hell, the old me would have pissed herself if someone had told her what she’d one day become.

Look at me now.

I had the men who killed my father strung up in a warehouse, here to torture as I saw fit, do whatever I wanted to do to them, and then?—

And then I’d kill them. And they’d be gone, and I . . .

. . . would have to live with the monster they’d turned me into.

How was that fair?

As I pondered my plans, the fucker in front of me started to wriggle again, his chains rattling as a low, mechanical whine sounded from the pulley above him.

It’s a warehouse pulley. It’s designed to move heavier things than him. I’m sure it’ll be fine.

“Why should I give you what you want, Jackal?” I whispered, more to myself than to him. “Why should the man who killed my father get any sort of sympathy from me?”

His eyes widened, and it was like understanding finally dawned on him at the slip of my tongue. “Sothat’sit. We offedyour daddy, huh?” The shift in her posture told me I’d hit the nail on the head. “You know we only kill people who deserve it, kitten.”

“He wasinnocent!”I shouted, standing up so fast it toppled the damn chair I’d been sitting in. “You killed him based on someone else’s word, and he died for sins he never committed.”

Enraged and out of control now, spiraling like I’d not done in years, I flipped the table with all my tools on it, sending them sprawling all over the floor in a scattered mess. I wasnotgoing to believe the word of a killer over what I knew to be true. If my father had been involved in something that bad, I’msurethere would have been signs.

And there weren’t.

Jackal was aliar.

“Go to hell, you asshole,” I muttered under my breath, picking up the knife I’d abandoned earlier. The blade still bore a trace of his buddy’s blood on it, and I smiled to myself as I contemplated making themblood brothersnow. “You’ll pay. You’llallpay for what you did.”

Dingo groaned from his place on the table. “We don’t kill people who don’t deserve it, girl. I promise you, your daddy wasn’t what you thought he was.”

---