Page 46 of Hunted Innocence

Shaking my head, I lean in closer. “It’ll be too fucking late. We need to leave now.”

Instead of just demanding that we leave, I lift my phone and show him the screen. His eyes widen as he watches what is happening. I don’t know if I can stomach seeing it again, so I don’t look down. I have it on mute, and I know that Landon isn’t looking to see if I’m watching. He’s doing whatever the fuck he’s doing with Nadine.

He’s going to die for it, too.

I can’t deny that I’m excited about the prospect of his death. I want to be the one to watch the life drain from his eyes. I want to be the one who does it. I have never wanted anything more in my entire life.

Maybe I’m not meant to be a man who lives life on the up and up. I sure as shit didn’t live that way as a teenager, and as much as we’ve tried to have a legitimate business, we keep getting dragged back into the underworld, and I think maybe we just need to accept that this is who we all are.

I’m craving death. I want to kill this man more than I’ve ever wanted to kill anyone. More than I wanted to kill Ravet. Reaching into my pocket, I palm the thumb drive before I release it, and it falls back inside.

I have a feeling that the thumb drive holds more sick information than I ever wanted to know in my life. This man would not go to these lengths if it didn’t. The legitimate part of me wants to call ATF and turn it over to them, along with Landon himself.

The part of me that is going to win, though, is the darkness. Because Landon Tate won’t be alive long enough for me to turn him in. That fucker is going to die tonight, and it’s going to be by my hand.

“Let’s fucking go,” Broker growls.

And thankfully, that lights a fire under their asses, and we are on the road within five minutes. Which is still much fucking longer than I would have preferred. Now is not the time to bitch about that shit.

Now is the time to get Nadine and bring my woman home.

And with me is exactly where she belongs. Where she’s always belonged. She walked into Securus looking for protection and work. She’s getting that and more from me. She is getting everything that I have to give.

As the car moves down the street, I realize that I have no clue where we’re going, and I’m thankful that I’m not driving, because I’m spun the fuck up, and I would without a fucking doubt not be able to concentrate on the road in front of me.

NADINE

I thoughtI could just blank out, and all of this would be the way it was before I left. Like I could slip into another place in myhead and just do what I needed to do. That’s how I was always able to cope, but I can’t do that, no matter how hard I try.

I feel every single moment of violation from this man in my bones. I’m not the same person I was five years ago. I can’t turn them off—my feelings, my heart, my brain.

None of them.

Brody makes a noise from his chair in the background, but I can’t even chance looking over to him. I don’t think I could stomach it, honestly. I never wanted my brother to see me like this.

Ever.

And now he’s seeing it all. Every ugly moment of it just makes me feel even more disgusted. In my mind, I envision ripping Landon’s balls off with my bare hands. I hope I get the opportunity. I just might feed them to him as well. I want him to be as humiliated as he is making me feel right now.

A hard slap across my face brings me back to this moment—to my unfortunate reality. He’s still choking me with his fingers around the front of my throat, so my head doesn’t even move with the force of his palm against my cheek.

I flick my eyes upward. He scowls down at me. “You don’t get to zone out on this, Nadine. You need to be present for every second of me fucking your face. I want that asshole to see just how much you fucking love it.”

I don’t.

At all.

In fact, I would probably love anything other than this right now. But when he lifts his hand, the same one that slapped me again, he is holding a gun in it and touches the cool barrel against my temple.

Brody makes a noise again in the distance, but I am now completely focused on this man. On Landon Tate and the absolute abhorrent hate I feel for him. He is the most disgustinghuman to ever have existed. And I’ve known a lot of monsters, but this one is the worst.

“Be a good girl and take everything, Nadine. Your life depends on it,” he says right before he bursts out into laughter.

I do what I always do—what I need to survive. It’s who I am and who I was raised to be. It doesn’t matter that my parents’ corpses are just a few feet beside me or that my brother is tied to a chair a few feet in the opposite direction.

I just do what I need to do.

I’ll worry about the aftereffects if I survive this, just like I did when I was forced to marry him and live in a nightmare for years. He thinks I’m weak, that he’s going to break me. But he doesn’t know me, never even bothered to try, because if he knew even the slightest thing about me, he would know that I cannot be broken.

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