Page 5 of The Girl and the Cobra

I still remember the first time I met him, when I first woke up in this house and it slowly dawned on me that I’d never leave it.

I come to with a pounding headache, groaning as I try to reach for my head—but I can’t reach for it. My wrists are tied down, as are my legs. I’m fastened to a chair that I can’t escape from, a pathetic thing for an ex-assassin to admit.

An unfamiliar voice speaks, causing me to stop struggling and stare at the man sitting across from me with a notepad on his lap, “Hello, Tristan Arrowwood. Or do you prefer the Cobra?” He wears a dark gray suit that’s perfectly fitted to his figure, and he sits there so normally, like he’s used to having people tied up in front of him.

I’m so caught off-guard by the stranger and his question I don’t respond right away. All I do is glare at him and wonder why I’m not in my prison cell with Nix as my guardian.

Who the fuck is this guy? And how does he know me?

When I don’t say a single word, the man goes on, “You can call me Dr. Wolf. You might know my cousin, Atticus Jameson. I believe you recently stabbed him in the gut and tried to kill him?” The look I give the man must say it all, because he continues in the most normal-sounding tone I’ve ever heard, “Believe me, whether you want to talk about your past or not, I know all about you and what you did.”

I grind my teeth. “Then why don’t you let me go? What kind of doctor are you if you keep me tied up like this?” I’m a bit skinner than I used to be; being kept in a jail cell didn’t do me any favors, neither did getting shot—but I could still take this asshole down.

“Dangerous patients are often restrained, but I suppose there is no harm in untying you now.” Wolf pauses as a dangerous glint surfaces in his green eyes as he fixes his glasses. “You will find I’m perfectly equipped to handle you, regardless of whether you choose to go by Tristan or the Cobra.”

We’ll see about that.

Wolf sets his notepad aside and stands. He approaches the chair I’m tied to and walks behind me. I hear him kneeling down and loosening the rope keeping me in place. My feet are loosened first, then my wrists, and soon enough the rope falls to the floor and I am free.

And that will be this asshole’s last mistake.

As Wolf returns to his seat, I leap up and grab him from behind, wrapping an arm around his neck and pulling him back against me tightly to choke him. Such an action would cause any normal man to struggle and freak out, but as it turns out, Wolf isn’t normal. Looks like my psychopath radar was right.

He grabs the arm around his neck with one hand, and his other arm becomes a weapon when his elbow jerks back and gets me in the side. In the same movement, he bends over and uses the momentum to flip me up and over him, thereby freeing himself from my vice grip and landing me on the floor.

Before I can get up, he sticks a hand into his pocket and pulls out a small remote. A millisecond later he must press the button on it, because an electrical shock so strong it knocks the breath out of me causes me to tremble on the floor. Coming from my neck; it’s the same leash Nix had on me.

Damn it. I should’ve known.

Wolf makes it last long enough to make my thoughts get fuzzy and the skin beneath the collar around my neck to get warm from the contact—long enough to make a point, to remind me that I am still a prisoner. Just because I’m not trapped in that tiny glass cell doesn’t mean I’m free.

And if it’s the same collar, there’s no way I can get it off. It requires a tiny key, and if it senses any sort of fuckery, it’ll zap me on its own. I learned that the hard way.

“I told you, Tristan,” Wolf chooses to use my given name, not the Cobra, once he ends my torment and stuffs the remote into his suit’s pocket, “I am perfectly equipped to handle someone like you. Now, get up. Let’s chat.”

The gravity of the situation didn’t really hit me until later that day, as night started to all. I learned I was in the middle ofnowhere, far removed from Cypress—of which I could never return to. Never go back, lest those murderous tendencies surface inside me again. Never see my sister again.

That last one is the one that still stings the most, but it’s also the one that’s probably for the best. The disappointment in her eyes, the hatred… it cut me like a knife to the heart, causing pain worse than the three bullets she shot me with.

Shay found happiness with the men I would’ve killed, but she was never supposed to be with them. She was supposed to be with me. We were meant to rule Cypress together.

Or so I used to think.

But throughout my mostly silent, solitary days, if there is one thing I came to reckon with, it’s the fact that everything I felt was wrong. I was wrong. I was wrong and I should be dead because of it.

Death is too good for me. If anyone deserves to live with the weight of what they’ve done, it’s me.

Assassin skills die hard, so to speak, so although the girl didn’t make much noise at all as she walked down the hall, I still heard her approach. Heard her stop at my door. I didn’t plan on looking at her; I was too busy staring at my sister’s name etched into the skin on my arm, along with all of the other scars I’d given to myself over the years, but after a little while, I couldn’t help it.

She wasn’t leaving. She kept staring, intruding where she didn’t belong.

So I turned my head over my shoulder and met her curious stare.

I don’t know what I expected. Wolf has a thing for the most broken, a preference for the people who might never know a normal day ever again. What I saw… she looked like a normal girl. Around my sister’s age, maybe, though a stark difference when it comes to stature.

A pair of inquisitive gray eyes stare at me from under long, semi-wavy blond hair—some of which hangs over her eyes in haphazardly-cut bangs. She wears an oversized hoodie far too big for her body size, and loose jeans her legs drown in.

I don’t know how long we stare at each other, how long it is before Wolf appears and closes the door between us, shutting me away in my room. I hear him ask her if she has a habit of wandering where she doesn’t belong, though his stern voice is muffled.

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