Page 50 of Cruel Games

I shook the thought from my mind, hating that they’d even managed to plant a seed of doubt in my mind. They had ulterior motives. This was another game they played, one that they supposed would work in their favor?—

“Join us.”

I blinked from my position on the floor, hands at my temples stilling for a moment as my head lifted to follow the source of that voice. Coyote knelt at the end of Dingo’s table, hands gripping the legs so tightly I could swear I heard steel buckling. My lashes fluttered slowly, as if I couldn’t fathom he’d said the words I knew I heard as clear as day.

“What?”

Those dangerous eyes flashed as he narrowed them, staring into my very soul with the emerald gaze from hell. “Join us.”

“Who gave you the authority to induct new members into our ranks, Coyote?” Jackal nearly screamed in shock. “The fuck you mean asking her to join us? Why is today suddenly the day those lips loosened up?”

Dingo groaned, his laughter dry and humorless. “This is a trip. She wants to kill us, and you ask her to join us?”

“I would never join the ranks of dogs like you,” I spat, refusing to look away from his piercing gaze.

“Lead us, then,” he countered, leaning forward another inch.

There were no words for the shocked silence he managed to throw me into.

Never in a million years had I ever imagined joining them. My enemies, the men who’d ruined my life and toppled the little sanity I had left. Who stole my innocence and turned me into a monster.

Join them? As fucking if.

“What makes you think I’m looking to adopt three new dogs?”

“You—fuck out of here with that. You’ll lead us over my dead body, bitch?—”

“Jackal, shut up!” Coyote’s words were rough, coarse around the edges, like a pumice stone on sensitive skin. But they managed to stop his partner in his tracks as well as a brick wall. Jackal’s mouth hung open, but no words came from it as he stared between myself and his buddy, clearly at a loss for words for once in his life.

Coyote smiled at me, actually fuckingsmiled,a sad sort of thing that felt like it hid traces of pity in its depths. “Our lives are yours either way. Kill us or use us; just make it quick.”

“You’ve been reading too much of that Shakespeare shit.” I crawled over to him on my hands and knees, hands empty, and knelt at his side, something inside me twisted at his words. “You would really give your life to me, swear it in fealty like some sort of knight to his queen in some medieval story?”

He nodded once, the pity warring with something else in those swirling pools of jade green. “Yes.”

“You would do as I commanded, without argument, no matter what the request?”

“Yes.”

“And your fellow dogs?” My eyes trailed to Jackal first, whose gaze was still frozen on Coyote, as if staring at him long enough would burn him alive for daring to speak for them. “Jackal doesn’t seem too keen on your plan. Dingo, either.”

“They don’t have to like it to respect it.” He shook the hair from his face and licked his dry, cracking lips.

I could read the truth to his words in the gaze, however heated, coming from his friend on the floor. “So you’re saying if I unchain Jackal, he’s not going to try and kill me the second he’s loose.”

Coyote nodded, his words seemingly all used up now.

Jackal let out a little snort but didn’t say a word contrary, which was interesting. I’d at least expected a half-assed sarcastic comeback at the minimum.

Dingo, on the other hand, was full of words all of a sudden. “Our word is the one thing we keep. It’s sacred, because sometimes, it’s all we have. If Coyote makes a promise, he’s not making it lightly.” He huffed in annoyance. “And you’ll get no argument from any of us.”

“The fuck she won’t,” Jackal muttered, looking very much like a worm who’d been left out on the concrete in the sun too long. “I don’t plan to just bend over and let you have your way with me. I’m a Neon Dog, dammit. Not someone’s pet.”

I closed my eyes, imagining the him from years ago, and putting that same face side by side with today’s Jackal. He’d lost some of his bite, but the fangs remained. And besides, killing him now would only grant him an easy out. There weren’t enough days in the year for me to drag out his torture to pay him back for what I’d become.

My lips spread in a slow smile as I finally opened my eyes and stared straight into the pits of hell in his hazel stare.

“You’reallmy pets now.”

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