Page 148 of Boy of Ruin
She was inside his house.
I heard her dragged back to Maverick’s.
Saw the guards too.
The longer I wait, the longer it plays in my head. The worse it hurts, not having her here.
But if I had gone after her then, unarmed…
I slam my fist on the desk when Nicolas opens his fucking mouth to speak again. He wasn’t there when I needed him. He wasn’t there when she needed him.
“Did you hear me?” I ask him, tossing down my pen. My handwriting marking through the numbers on the expenses on my desk is garbage, but I have to use my right fucking hand because my left one isn’t working.
Nicolas’s dark eyes are narrowed, his jaw clenched, palms splayed on my desk. If he doesn’t back up in about three seconds, I’m going to break his fingers.
“Lazarus didn’t take those photos. Didn’t kill Elijah’s guard. Cindy,” he says, working at keeping his tone even. “He might’ve helped with the kitten, and the hacking, but he didn’t do those things. She could still be in danger, because it’s not just your mercenary fucking shit up. And right now, she’s with him again.” He takes a deep breath in. “I don’t want to wait, J. I don’t like this. You know what he did to her.”
I arch a brow, tilting my head as I cross my arms and lean back in my chair. I can hear her, screaming for me as I screamed for her. I can hear them fighting.
I can see her running to the truck, hauling herself up. Over and over again in my mind.
“I don’t know what he did to her. She never got a chance to fucking—”
“That scar on her brow?” Nicolas asks, his voice deadly.
My blood runs cold and I swallow down the tightness in my throat.
“He gave it to her. He’s having hallucinations.”
I flex my jaw, try not to feel it. The hurt. I know he’s having hallucinations. I’ve known that before even Maverick told me he was behaving erratically. It’s how Lazarus started working for me, giving me valuable information. But I didn’t know about the scar, even though I assumed Sid lied to me. “And how do you know this?” She let me brand my name on her skin, because she fucking belongs to me, but she didn’t feel comfortable enough telling me that?
“I asked her,” Nicolas says back, in a tone that suggests I should have done the same.
I stand, my fingers grazing the top of my desk as my chair rolls back behind me. “So. Did. I.”
Nicolas arches a brow, looking up at me as he straightens, sliding his hands off my desk. “And you just listened to the bullshit she gave you, right off the bat?”
She said she ran into something. I knew it probably wasn’t true, but I let it go.
“Yeah.” Nicolas laughs, but there’s no humor in it as he takes a step back from my desk. “You wanna own her, huh?”
I curl my fingers into fists, ignore the tremble in my left one. Ignore the sounds of her screams in my ears.
Ignore the thoughts of what they’re doing to her right now.
“But do you want to go through the work it takes to love her?”
“I do love her.” I would have thought that would be obvious by now.
“So, what’s your plan?” he asks again, shrugging, tucking his hands into his pockets. “Why are you waiting? You don’t need them in one place. You can pick them off one by one, but instead, in the meantime, you gonna go over all the millions you make?” He nods his head to the paperwork I’d been pouring over. “The bodies you’re gonna fucking drop? Why are you waiting to get the girl you love back?”
At that, I can only stare at him. Is he really that stupid? Does he really think I don’t have a plan?
He exhales, rolling his neck. “You know, I was fine with Ignis before, but I’m not anymore. Not with all the shit going on that we can’t account for.”
“It’s probably one of their own, trying to set a fire from the inside to distract from other hideous shit they’re doing, Nicolas.”
“Someone stalked Sid through the woods, and you don’t give a fuck? Someone sent a message with her photos on the lap of a fucking corpse,” he counters.
