Page 95 of Caged Bird

“My cum is dripping down your thighs. That’s all you care about. That and getting your hands on the old man’s money.”

She huffed and slammed her way into the bathroom.

But she didn’t deny it.

I dragged my pants back up, tucking my limp dick back into my underwear but not bothering to do up my jeans. I just lay back against the headboard, smoking my cigarette, and stared at the back of Otis’s head.

The kid hadn’t moved through the whole thing. He just sat there, watching the TV, exactly like I’d told him to.

A surge of hate for him filled me. He’d been a good pawn, useful for getting Fawn to obey me, but it pissed me off, the way he took all her attention.

Attention that should have been mine. But she’d learn.

A knock on the hotel room door had me glancing lazily over. “What?”

“Housekeeping,” a female voice called back.

“It’s the middle of the fucking night. Fuck off. We don’t want no housekeeping.”

“I have the food you ordered?”

I hadn’t ordered no food. But my stomach growled painfully, reminding me we hadn’t eaten for hours and I was starving. Wasn’t my problem if this place was too stupid to get a room service order right. I’d happily take the food and not pay for it.

I took one last drag and stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray on the bedside table. Yanking up my jeans that were falling off my hips because I hadn’t done them up properly, I crossed the room and opened the door.

The woman on the other side was tall, her dark hair flowing over her shoulders and across her black leather jacket. I frownedat her lack of uniform, but she held a brown paper bag out to me, and my stomach growled again.

“I ain’t fucking tipping you,” I told her. “You were slower than you said you’d be.” The lie fell off my tongue easily.

The woman nodded. “I understand. I guess I deserve that.”

Stupid bitch. I snatched the bag.

I didn’t even see the gun in her palm beneath it, until it was pressed against my chest.

My mouth dropped open, and I instinctively reached for mine, the one I always kept tucked into the back of my jeans. My brain catching on a second too late that I had no idea where my damn gun even was, and my pants weren’t done up enough to hold anything.

Vincent ‘Scythe’ Hanover, though I’d heard he went by a different last name now, since the crazy motherfucker had escaped from prison, stepped out of the shadows. “You should always tip your delivery people, Eddie. Because look what happens when you don’t.”

My heart sank. My gaze slid back to the woman with the gun. She wore a matching grin, and it suddenly occurred to me who she was.

Fawn’s sister.

Fuck.

I knew who they were. Knew exactly what they were capable of. A tremble started up in my fingers, and I clenched them into fists. I forced a cocky grin across my face and leaned on the doorframe like I didn’t have a care in the world. “How’s it feel to be five years too fucking late?” I sneered into Ophelia’s face. “Five years I had her.Five.” I stretched. “Actually, it’s probably closer to six now. Since the kid had a birthday.” I leaned in and whispered, “And you know I’ll have her again. Once she’s learned her lesson.”

Ophelia whipped her hand up and cracked me across the face with the gun. Pain splintered through my probably broken cheek. But something dark and sick inside me liked it. It fed on the pain, not just mine, but the one in Ophelia’s eyes that had me absolutely fucking delighted.

“I’m going to kill you in the most painful way I know how,” she seethed, pressing the gun into my face. “And I’m going to swallow up your screams like they’re the goddamn air I need to breathe.”

The tremble in my fingers started up again, and this time, I couldn’t control it. I knew Ophelia’s reputation. Knew exactly what she was capable of. She was no less deadly than her brother.

But then her gaze slid past me, and her jaw tightened.

And I remembered the kid.

And that the one thing that Hanovers all had was bleeding fucking hearts.

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