Page 9 of Stolen Rival
I don’t believe a word coming out of her filthy little mouth. I rack the slide and jam the muzzle against her forehead. Fat tears flow in rivers down her cheeks, and her bottom lip quivers. “I’m begging you, please. Let me live. If you let me live, you can have all Da’s money.”
Little does she know that her family’s money is already mine. I tighten my finger on the trigger.
“Wait!” she shrieks. “P-please wait. I’ll do anything you ask. Anything.”
I’m a planner. Every move I make is carefully calculated. I don’t do things off the cuff. It’s all part of my need to stay in control because the one time I let that control slip, my parents died. So, there’s no one more surprised than me when I slide the gun into my holster and grab the only living McCarthy by the scruff of her neck.
“Anything it is,mo mhuirnín. Your family owes me a fucking bride, and you’re it.”
Chapter 5
SORCHA
I’m so fucking stupid.
If you let me live, I’ll do anything you ask.
Anything, I said.
Anything it is, he answered.
I’d drag my hands through my hair, but it’s matted, and I’m already in enough pain as it is. I’m not adding scalp ache from finger combing this tangled mess to my list of woes.
Zigzagging the cross hanging from a gold chain around my neck, I run the conversation through my mind a million times. Was there anything I could have said, or done, that wouldn’t have resulted in me ending up here?
Oh, I dunno. Maybe not gone out the front door? Or not headed home in the first place?
I bet my brothers would have found their way out of the clusterfuck of a situation much easier than I did. I can hear Da in my head, tearing me a new one for letting Mahoney get the upper hand so easily.
If Tiernan had opened the door, this piece of shit would have been dead in seconds.
But sure, why would they bother to train little old me? Frail, inadequate, useless. Words that have been tossed in my direction since my brothers were old enough to speak. Long live the patriarchy, I guess.
So obviously, when faced with a situation where it was life or death… I stood there, damn near shit my pants, and cried.
Ugh.
I didn’t really mean I’d doanything.And this prick knew it, too.
But when the barrel of a gun is pointed directly at your forehead, you’ll sayanythingto keep from being murdered by a brutish leader of what is now the last remaining mafia family in Ireland.
I pace the length of the room the murderous psychopath who claims he’s my future husband tossed me into. It’s ten feet by twelve feet, white walls, white sheets. If the windows had curtains, I bet they’d be white, too.
It’s all so goddamn bland.
The Mahoneys are anything but bland. Yet, that’s where I am. Trapped like fucking Rapunzel in one of the rooms upstairs in Mahoney Manor, without so much as a glass of fucking water.
Just as well, I’d smash it over his pretentious, unhinged, murdering face and give him a matching headache to the one beating a steady rhythm in my temples.
I survey my prison.
The bed faces a wall of built-in wardrobes, there are a couple of plastic coat hangers dangling pathetically from the rail inside, but I was thrown in here without my bag or my phone. It’s just me, my dirty clothes, my aching wounds and… white. Fucking. Everywhere.
No lamps, no weapons, and a sharp tug on the window tells me it’s locked, too.
I wrinkle my nose. Ugh. I need a shower, a dressing change, clean clothes, a stiff drink, and something to stab this arsehole with.
Maybe not in that order. We could skip straight to the drink and stabbing.
