Page 52 of Still Burning

The door closed with a click as the man closest to it let the handle go.

“I’m not alone,” Brady told them, dropping his Southern accent. “Kill me, and ye will die shortly after.”

“I don’t think we will,” one of the men drawled, as if he were amused.

“What is it ye want? I’m not here to handle business, so whatever shite ye think yer here to do, don’t. It would be a waste of lives.”

“You got something we want,” the one who had spoken before said.

There was a pause, and then Brady sighed wearily. “Yer herefor her.”

“Yep,” another replied. “We are here for her.”

He didn’t take his eyes off the men to look my way. “She’s my sister-in-law. I can’t let ye take her.”

“She’s not anymore,” one of them said. “And unless you want to join your brother, you’ll hand her over.”

“All right, whatever yer being paid to do this job, I’ll double it.”

One of them chuckled a deep, sadistic sound that made me shiver. He was farthest away from me, and I could barely make out his face, but my gut told me that I wanted to keep my distance.

“We must look like we need the money.”

“It’s because you need to fucking shave that shit off your face,” another said.

“You talk to my woman about that, and she’ll tell you just how much she likes my beard,” he replied.

My eyes darted from one to the other as they bantered with each other as if they weren’t holding a man at gunpoint.

“I need a smoke. Can we speed this up?”

“The longer we take, the more likely your guy out there in the black car will end up with a bullet in his head,” the guy closest to me said.

They had Emmett.

“He’ll have called for backup. Ye need to let him go if ye want to walk away unscathed,” Brady warned him.

“There are over thirty men surrounding this property. They’re armed, and they’re trained to kill. Now, unless you want your dead bodies fed to our pigs, then you’ll hand her over.”

Fed to their pigs? Eww. My stomach rolled, and I placed a hand over my mouth and hesitantly swallowed. I did not need to get sick right now.

“Ye don’t know who yer fuckin’ with,” Brady told him.

One of them laughed. “Yeah, Irish, we do.”

“I need a smoke. Hand her over, or I’ll put the bullet in your head and take her.”

Brady’s gun swung then, and it was pointed at me. I was afraid to breathe.

What was he doing? Would he actually shoot me? He said I knew things, and now I really did know things. If I left, then I’d take what I knew with me. He wasn’t going to let that happen.

Oh God. I was going to be sick. I swallowed against the bile in my throat. I didn’t want to die. Especially not like this.

“I don’t know how they do things in Ireland, but in the South, we don’t point guns at women in our family. Hell, we don’t point guns at innocent women in general,” one drawled.

“Ye left me no choice,” Brady snapped. “She knows too much.”

“We don’t want your secrets. We don’t care about your fucking drug trafficking. Not our problem. We want her. You can take the gun off her or die. Those are your options, and you got about five seconds before I let Thatcher take you out before you can pull your trigger. Don’t test it. My guess is, hell ain’t gonna be fun for any of us.”

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