Page 166 of Sinful Hearts

I storm over there to tell them to scatter—to get the fuck out of here before I start shooting. When I get to the van, I frown.

It’s empty.

What the fuck is going on?

Suddenly, something catches my eye: liquid, dripping from the side sliding door of the van.

My brow knits, and when I lean closer, my veins chill.

It’s blood.

Pulse racing, I yank open the sliding door, and instantly grit my teeth.

Fuck me.

George and the two other guys I sent are dead in a heap on the floor of the van, all with their throats cut.

I don’t think. I just whirl, bolting across the street, smashing in the keypad code to my building, then bolting up the stairs through the unfinished floors until I get to the top.

I can’t tell if I want her to be there so that I can kill her with my bare hands, or if I’m hoping she’s gone so I don’t have to.

So I don’t have to kill the woman I love for being instrumental in the death of my friend, and in almost killing my family.

But, luckily or unfortunately, she’s not there.

I tear through the house, looking under every bed and in every closet. But the place is empty.

Her clothes are missing from my closet. The toothbrush she left here a few weeks ago is gone.

Elsais gone. And I have no idea if the roaring sensation inside of me demanding I chase her is so that I can kiss her as if my life depended on it…

…or kill her.

34

HADES

Anger is a powerful thing.

Anger is a drug that’ll restart your heart if it stops. It’ll keep you going when you just want to fall down and die. It’ll sustain you when you’re too broken and fucked up to eat, drink, even sleep—at least, for a time.

Maybe forever. So far I’m on day five of running on pure anger, and I don’t remember the last time I did any of those things, so who the fuck knows.

Since the blast ripped through The Banshee, my world has upended. On the plus side, Callie is healing and Ya-ya was cleared to leave the hospital. She’s doing okay aside from a bunch of painful bruising she took in the explosion. Eilish is on bed rest at Mt. Sinai, but she’s going to be back home at the Kildare brownstone in just a few days.

So, those are all good things.

Everything else is on fire.

It started the night of the bombing, when the Russians went onfulllockdown. When we got reports the next day of more Reznikov muscle being flown in from Europe and Russia, the defcon meter moved a little higher.

Then, three days ago, a laundromat that’s a front for an underground high-stakes casino run by one of our vassal families went up in flames. Thenextday, Kratos and I blew a hole in the keel of one of the mid-sized yachts Gavan owns and keeps moored at Chelsea Piers Marina, sending it to the bottom of the Hudson.

And this morning, the expected return shot came, in the form of one of Ezio Adamos’ construction projects getting shut down by Homeland Security because of “personnel security concerns”.

Guess which fucking Russian bathhouse the head of the New York division of Homeland Security has a membership to.

At this point we’ve moved past bullshit.

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