Page 105 of Fortress of the King

ANGELO

“What the fuck?”Marco says, his face paling when I tell him the details back at Fortress, where we’ve gathered within the hour.

I left the particulars out from my brothers earlier; I didn’t want their coldness toward Rayne to give anything away. Fuck knows it would have.

“So, she’s been sent in…as an assassin? “Marco’s disbelief almost has me smiling.

“For want of a better word, yes,” I reply, running a hand over my face.

He stares at me, waiting for the punchline. “You’re fucking kidding me?”

Nobody is more shocked than I am.

“I wish I were. The whole thing was a fucking setup. Send in the femme fatale, the oldest trick in the book. Simple yet effective.”

This not only reflects poorly on me personally for being weak, but on the whole organization as well.

Fooled by a fucking broad.

To think I’d even considered a future with her, that I, somewhere, in my dark and twisted heart, thought that we had a connection. This is precisely why women make men fucking weak.

“This is pretty fucked up,” Enzo says. “Even by your standards.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I mutter.

“If it makes you feel any better, she wasn’t going to go through with it,” Enzo tries to reassure me.

“So that makes plotting my murder somehow romantic?”

“That’s not what I meant. She was a fucking mess when I met with her…”

“That doesn’t make any of this okay.”

“I know it doesn’t, but what would you do under the same circumstances?”

The truth is, I know why he’s saying this. He wants me to fucking spare her, and I want to hear him say it.

“You got something to say?” I prod. “Then just come out, and fucking say it.”

“We don’t kill innocents, Angelo,” he says. “I know a killer when I see one, I know cold-heartedness when it rears its head, and she doesn’t have any of it. You know probably more than I do that she doesn’t have the killer instinct.”

I laugh in his face. “You know that do you? Like you’re some kind of fucking expert?”

“I know manipulation when I see it. I saw how unsure she was, how she told me repeatedly that she didn’t want any harm to come to you…”

“Save it.” I shove him and step back, running a hand through my hair to try and compose myself.

Marco grasps my shoulder, but I shrug out of his reach.

This is the price I pay. For everything.

This is how I must live, and I was a weak fool to think it could be any different.

That I could live any other way except always looking over my shoulder, keeping the women in my life at arm’s length, I dropped the ball with Rayne Michaelson. She got right under my skin, an itch I couldn’t scratch.

The thought of her curled up, drugged, in the back seat of my limo has me seething as well as hard.

Even after all of this, that fucking traitor…she has the ability to undo me. The hole in my heart doesn’t grow bigger, it fucking shrivels up into nothingness, because that’s all I really am when it all comes down to it. A cold hard shell of nothing.

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