Page 125 of Convict's Game
Convict
Manny clicked the next magazine into place and lined it up with the rest on the steel table. “Are you sure about tonight?”
“I am.” I racked a weapon. The weight in my palm was solid and real. Better than the storm brewing in my gut. I couldn’t shake the edge of it. Mila had been rattled for days, and tomorrow was the meeting everything had been leading up to.
So far, I’d failed in my promises to help her.
I wanted to solve the Jacobs problem for her and had the chance of going out with my crew on a raid of Salter’s HQ.
She’d told me to go. That she’d be safe here.
I would, if they stopped trying to babysit me.
I also wanted her under me where she belonged. In minutes, we were meeting in the club. I’d planned to mess with her, but the way I was feeling demanded something darker and more twisted than a satisfying fuck while strangers watched.
Bootsteps sounded in the corridor. Past the open door to our weapons room, Shade plus two crew members dragged a man, the prisoner’s hands zip tied and his face a mess of bruises. Though a bandanna covered his eyes, from the loll of his head, he was out cold.
“Sit his arse down,” Shade ordered.
I went to the door. “Who’s that?”
The enforcer glanced over. “A small-time runner we leaned on for intel on Salter. Your woman got the name Dumbo but figured it was code. Turns out everyone calls him that, and he’s been in and out of every gang in the city. He took our money, blabbing on Salter’s warehouse and the part he knew about the auction, which was pretty much nothing, but my guess was he’d turn tail and run, so we picked him up early. Save spoiling the evening’s fun.”
They hauled the guy to a chair in an adjacent room. His shirt rode up, revealing a tangled scar low on his side. The skin was puckered and white, shaped like a spiderweb with jagged edges.
My breath caught. On my own side, hidden under my crew t-shirt, was an identical scar. The same shape. The same mark.
“What the fuck is that scar on him?” My voice came out rough.
Shade answered without looking up. “That’s a Four Milers mark. They’d brand new recruits with a tattoo or cut the skin if they thought you were at risk of doing them dirty. Sometimes both.”
I stared at the prisoner. My pulse spiked, and my vision swam. A flash of memory hit, me strapped down, breathless. The sizzle of heat followed, then a knife and the stink of burning skin. A punch to my gut. Someone laughing.
I didn’t give a fuck about being scarred on the job or the fact the Four Milers had done it. My skin was a mess of ink, welts, and jagged lines. But the sense that I was missing something major glimmered at the edge of my brain. It was infuriating that I couldn’t remember. It was so close yet so far. And it felt vital.
Manny and Shade discussed something in low tones that my heartbeat drowned out. Manny took over managing theprisoner, and Shade gestured for me to follow him into the corridor.
“Are ye sure about coming on the raid?”
I rolled my eyes. “For fuck’s sake. Look at me. I’m healed, my head works, why the hell wouldn’t I?”
“We lost ye once. Don’t want to risk it again.”
My annoyance fled. “I don’t want that either. I also can’t stand the thought of being left behind.”
The enforcer heaved a sigh. “I get that. Ye always were at the front of any fight we went into. Arran said the two of you went back to Leith. He asked me to try to come up with any memories of our time there.”
With the way my head was reeling, I almost didn’t want to know, but maybe it would help. I recalled Shade in pieces of splintered memory. A dark-haired furious teenage version, obsessed with some girl he would never talk about and a stepfather he intended to one day kill. Pure savage boy. No wonder I’d liked him. “And did you?”
“Aye, it was about your nickname. How Convict came about.”
I should’ve stopped him. There was no way this was going to end well, and I was clinging to the edge of my sanity. Yet I needed to know. I lifted my chin, and Shade scratched his cheek with a hand tattooed with the Scottish flag.
“We never used real names at the club, only numbers or nicknames. Ye fought dirty and would take any fight going so long as ye were still standing. Ye didn’t care about the prestige, only the money. One night, some guy paid ye to take a dive so his kid would be the victor. The club didnae give a fuck. The problem was your reputation. No one believed some golden boy got the jump on ye. After hours, you’d vanished, and Arran and I discovered a group of arseholes surrounding ye. They called ye a conman and claimed to have lost money in bets. Does any of this sound familiar?”
I shook my head. Complete blank.
“We pulled ye out. A few nights on, when ye next took to the ring and some of those bastards booed and yelled out ‘Con’, we changed the chant to ‘Convict’. Ye won every fight that evening and the nickname took.”
