Page 79 of Cruel Games

I tugged a thin wire bracelet off my wrist and inched the window down behind him while his attention was solely on the Neon Dog before him and unwound the sturdy metal until it would serve as a garrote. With little trouble, I slipped my upper body out of the window and threw myself at his back, wrapping the wire around his throat and rearing back with all my weight.

His gun hit the ground, and Jackal swooped in to kick it out of the way as the behemoth angrily flailed and struggled against me. His body slammed backward into the side of the nearby shipping container, and I coughed as the wind was knocked out of me.

But I didn’t let go.

Letting go meant I lost the upper hand I’d gained. And I was no quitter.

“Just fucking die already!” I wheezed, my voice rough and foreign between shallow breaths. “Fuck!”

When he slammed me into the metal wall again, I decided if he was going to play dirty, then so the hell was I. With a little muted snarl, still winded and struggling, I hooked a leg around his front and slammed my heel into his balls, taking him down to his knees. He gasped, whining through his teeth, but once he was down, it was game over. I tightened my grip on themakeshift garrote and threw all my weight into him, shoving him face-first on the ground. While he moaned through his groin pain, I stuck a foot between his shoulder blades and pinned him down, rearing back again with the garrote wrapped around my hands so tight it was cutting through the skin.

He finally stopped struggling as my breathing returned to normal, and with a whoop of celebration that was more like a muted cough, I released the metal wire and winced as I stood, sore all over from the force of his backward body slams.

“That was fun,” I rasped, dusting my palms on the side of my hips to return some of the feeling to them. “Who’s next?”

Jackal stepped forward and grabbed my hands, turning them over to study my palms. “You’re bleeding,” he said quietly, a brow quirked but no judgment in his tone.

“I’ll live,” I said flippantly, a half-grin on my lips as I tugged free of his grasp and turned my back on him. He’d seemed to care for a minute there, and I didn’t want his pity. I did what I did out of sheer survival instinct, and I didn’t need any of them feeling sorry for the damage I’d caused myself. “Knock the one we came for out and put him in the back of the car. Throw the other one in his own trunk and see how long it takes his men to wake up and find him.”

Dingo was already wrapping a rope around the wrists of the man we’d come for, tossing him unceremoniously into the backseat I’d just vacated. With a slam of the door, he moved around to the trunk and popped the thing open, whistling low at what he found.

“Looks like their merchandise tonight wasn’t what we thought.”

Okay, so he had my attention.

“What is it?” Jackal asked, strolling over with my bat still slung over his shoulder, right alongside his. “Money? Jewels?”

“Skeletons,” Coyote murmured, his eyes wide, eyebrows currently trying to climb into his hairline.

“Were they getting together to decorate for Halloween or something?” I frowned at my bare feet, wishing one of the guys had thought to bring along my shoes?—”

“Here.” Coyote was suddenly in front of me, on his fucking knees, my shoes in his hands as he reached for one of my feet.

Wordlessly, I lifted a foot and let him slip my shoe back on for me, neither of our gazes meeting for a second. His fingers grazed my calf, and a shudder ran through me at the shocking erotic feelings it stirred within me.

Oh, here we fucking go.

“Give me that,” I snapped, reaching out to snatch the other shoe from his hand. “I can do it myself.”

“Will you two stop playing around and get a move on?” Dingo stared in my direction pointedly, his eyes darting between me and Coyote, who’d already risen and was halfway to the trunk. “We do still have business to attend to.”

“Speaking of,” Jackal grunted, slamming the trunk on the other vehicle after dumping the unconscious man inside, “what exactly do you mean byskeletons,Dingo?”

I rounded the corner at the same time as he did, and both our sets of eyes bugged out of our heads.

Sure enough, there were legitimate skeletons, whole, intact skeletons wrapped up in a nondescript blue tarp in the car's trunk. I counted five skulls, but I didn’t exactly pay much attention in anatomy, so determining how many bodies, exactly, were in that car was beyond my capabilities.

But why were they transporting skeletons?

“There’s definitely something fishy going on here,” Dingo muttered, his brows furrowed as he closed the second trunk. “Skeletons don’t warrant that number of armed guards. What are we missing?”

The contract had specified high-value merchandise was being exchanged today. And unless those skeletons were made ofgold?—

“Open it back up.”

The three men stared at me like I’d grown a horn in the center of my face. So I just took the set of keys out of Dingo’s hands and did it myself, rolling my eyes as they stepped back and let me have my way.

“The only reason bones would be this white is if they were painted,” I said slowly, “or bleached.” My fingers grasped a femur and yanked it up, twisting it this way and that. The single bone was heavier than it should have been, that much Ididknow, and I inspected for sun bleaching marks. But there was no variation. All sides of the bone were the same, uniform off-white. A dead giveaway that they’d either been artificially lightened, or . . .

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