Page 65 of Torched

He smiles wickedly. “To see the look on your face when you realize you got played.”

Cristina appears from the hallway and comes to stand beside him. I look for something in her expression. Despair. Fear.Anything. But all I find is a dead look, her lashes blinking at me until I see the tiniest glint in her eyes. Heat flashes over my body when my gaze collides with hers, my throat almost too dry to say anything.

“What did you do?” I croak out.

My phone vibrates in my hand, and I resist the urge to quickly drop my gaze to it, not wanting to alert them of the fact that it’s still within reach. Instead, I rub my hand over my face, then glance at the device laying next to me on the couch.

KANE: 10 secs. Take cover.

What?

A jolt of adrenaline surges through my veins at the sight of Kane’s text.

I lift my gaze, my eyes looking past the men standing in front of me, pointing their automatic weapons in my face from across the coffee table. All my senses go into overdrive while trying to keep my features flat. In the distance, I can hear a whooping sound of helicopter blades, but I refrain from the need to let my eyes scan for the source, hoping they are too occupied with me to listen to anything outside. Then I start counting in my head.

“You know you’re starting a war, right?” I bring my attention to both of them. Junior’s eyes are devilish, almost orange when they sparkle with nothing more than excitement at my question.

“Probably. But it will definitely be easier to win when one of you two is already dead and gone.”

“You’re going to regret it.”

Seven.

Eight.

“I doubt that.” Junior chuckles and points his gun at me.

Nine.

Ten.

I launch myself over the cushions and behind the couch, right before a chopper emerges from the cliff below the house. Glass shatters as bullets fly inside. Gunshots are loud enough to drown out the sound of my heart that wants to pound outside of my chest, but thewhooshof every beat is thundering inside my scalp. The gun stays tightly pressed against my chest while I try to make out any shapes in the chaos, searching for anyone who’s here for my head. Within seconds, the air is fogged with all the smoke from the constant gunfire, the room completely destroyed as glass scatters around me. I keep my head low while I keep scanning everything around my perimeter frantically. The chopper lands in the massive backyard, and I hear new voices enter the room when the gunshots have stopped.

“Liam!” I recognize Jeremy’s voice and release a pent-up breath

“I’m over here!” I peek over the couch, seeing the dead bodies of the men who were holding me at gunpoint less than thirty seconds ago before my eyes take in the rest of the room. The heavy sound of the helicopter blades is still audible, keeping the adrenaline pumping through my veins. The fear I felt in every bone of my body is quickly replaced by rage, my fury putting me back on my feet.

“Where are they?” I roar. I look for Cristina’s dead body, or Junior’s, preferably both, but all I find is Reyes’ men, bleeding to death. They are squirming on the glass shattered floor, some still trying to lift their guns, but not possessing the strength due to the fact that they are sifted with bullets. But I can’t find the two people I want to see bleeding in front of me.

“I don’t know!” Jeremy snaps his head from left to right, when one of our men calls out at the back of the house.

“They are escaping through the garage!”

As quickly as I can, I scramble through the living room, sprinting to the hallway that leads to the garage with Jeremy on my heels. I burst through the door, firing my gun when I see Junior reversing the SUV out of the open garage. The shots I fire leave pits in the bulletproof glass as I bare my teeth. Cristina is sitting in the passenger seat, calm as ever, her eyes colliding with mine in an unreadable expression. Junior smirks like a lunatic next to her as he maneuvers the car to the road.

I see the bastard wave from the corner of my eye, but I’m fixated on Cristina. On seeing any ounce of regret. But she just stares back at me with nothing. The brown in her eyes is almost black, and I know this exact frame will be forever in my memory.

Empty. They are empty and hollow, yet sharp enough to cut through glass. I can feel how they chip away a little piece of my heart before they take off, dodging bullets, and the truth of what happened hits me like a hurricane.

“FUCK!” My roar makes birds fly from the trees in front of the house.

She betrayed me.

22

IMOGEN

PRESENT DAY

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