Page 129 of Vengeful Princess

If I got the opportunity, I’d be asking them some tough questions, but my priority was rescuing Eden before she got hurt.

“Why don’t you come with us?” Lachlan scored extra points for persistence, while Ryan stayed quiet. Mostly likely because he’d gotten nowhere with me previously. The other two meatheadsdidn’t contribute either. Instead, they looked bored and one kept glancing at his phone.

“Come where?”

“To a cool party. A friend of ours has a penthouse apartment. You can meet him. He makes movies.” Lachlan’s eyes drifted down my body, taking in my slip dress and tanned legs. “I bet you’d look good on the screen, babe.” Hmm. Were they working for people traffickers? Or merely opportunists? It was hard to tell.

“A party?” I pretended to be interested while stumbling closer. Ryan smiled, looking pleased at the fact I was showing an interest in his friend’s party.

“Look man, the car will be here shortly,” one of the suit guys snapped with irritation. “Grab the second girl and let’s go before anyone else comes outside.”

“Who’s in charge here?” Lachlan said in a deceptively calm voice. “Yeah, not you, asshole, so shut the fuck up.” He turned back to me. “You wanna go party, Kylie?”

In the few seconds he’d taken his eyes off me, I’d edged behind Ryan, who was too busy looking at Lachlan to spot what I was up to. Ryan was barely 5’9”, so it was easy to grab his hair, yank him back, and slash his throat.

He didn’t have time to react. None of them did. Crimson blood arced across the alley, covering Lachlan and Eden, much to my chagrin. Poor Eden. Thank God she was out of it. I doubted she’d be happy to know her white bodycon dress might never recover. Oops.

Ryan Gosling’s less hot twin brother dropped to the ground, gurgling as his life-force ebbed away.

Lachlan’s eyes bulged in shock. He didn’t seem to know what had happened. The arm supporting Eden’s slack body loosened, and she slid down. Good. She’d be safer on the floor.

Both suits recovered just as I stabbed Lachlan in the neck. One pulled a gun and fired at me. The other ran. Lachlan helpfully acted as a human shield, taking a bullet in the chest. I threw my knife, hitting the shooter in the eye, killing him immediately.

With the fourth man long gone, I scanned the alley to make sure there were no more threats, then knelt in the filth to check on Eden.

“Thea?” She groaned when I half-lifted her dead weight, grunting with the effort.

“It’s OK, you’re safe,” I said. I needed to get her out of here. Although the gun used by the now dead suit man had been fitted with a suppressor, someone might still have heard the shot. There was also a camera above the door. It wasn’t blinking, so I suspected it had been deactivated, but again, I couldn’t be sure.

“Call Declan,” Eden muttered, still out of it. “He’ll come.”

Declan Kelly, Irish Mafia heir. There was a risk he’d know who I was, but I was all out of ideas. So I pulled her phone from her purse, unlocked it, and found his number.

“Eden,milseán, is some boy bothering you again?”

“This is her friend, Thea, and yeah, you could say that…”

Declan’s voice went from teasing to savage in a heartbeat. “Tell me what the fuck’s going on and why you’re calling, not my cousin!”

69

Thea

I’d met a lot of intimidating men in my life. Any psychologist worth their credentials would diagnose my father and Torrance as psychopaths. Both of them lacked any empathy and when I looked into their eyes, all I saw was a bottomless void.

Declan Kelly wasn’t quite that bad, but it was clear he was used to being the big man in a room.

Well, I respected that. He’d taken one look at the bloodbath in the alley and nodded like this was the kind of thing he saw on the regular. To be fair, he probably did.

He sported a vicious scar that cut across one eyebrow and dissected his cheek before disappearing into a closely cropped beard. The guy was a handsome bastard, but strangely, I felt nothing. No glimmer of attraction whatsoever.

Thank goodness.

I did not need any more psychotic men in my life. Kyril more than fulfilled that role,

Speaking of…

He’d texted me asking what I was up to, which I ignored. Now didn’t seem like a good time to get into a conversation. Not whileI was knee-deep in dead bodies and under the scrutiny of the Irish mafia.

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