Page 71 of Trust in the Fallen

Very freaking wrong.

I’m shoved into the back of an SUV before I can think to look back, and it takes off so quickly I slide off the seat. My head slams into the window so hard my ears ring painfully, and my vision spots.

“Where the fuck are we taking her?” Jason yells from the driver’s seat. Wasn’t he part of whatever plan they’re executing?

“Just drive. This is our chance to take out those Legion assholes,” my father barks at him from the passenger seat.

I look at the guard next to me, his cold, dark eyes intensely staring at me. He presses the knife tighter into my side, and I suck in a breath. This was a trap? They used our wedding as a goddamn trap?

Jason takes a sharp corner and sends me flying into the hard body beside me, jamming the knife right into the boning of the bodice beneath my ribs.

A startled yelp escapes my throat, and three sets of angry eyes turn on me. “Shut the fuck up, slut,” the governor snarls, a world away from the man who had come to me a few days ago to insist on me playing along with this little game of theirs.

They knew Wyatt and Elias would come for me.

And they knew they would call on the help of the Legion.

Something warm drips down my face, and when I reach up to touch it I find blood, but no one in this car is going to care that I’m bleeding.

At this point I doubt they’d care if I died.

“Take a left here,” my father instructs and another sharp turn sends me flying into the window. “Head over the bridge to the business district. We have a warehouse there we can lure them to.”

I stare at the back of his head, wondering what the hell is going through his mind right now. What kind of father uses their only child as bait? What kind of man forces his daughter to marry a cold, vicious man in the hopes their wedding will be their opportunity to take out their enemy?

The Legion may be ruthless killers, the glue that holds the underworld together, but at least they’re honest about it, unlike the men in this car parading around as saints.

The next turn throws the three of us in the back seat to one side, and I realize too late the agony that burns in my side as the knife slices through the lace and straight through my skin.

“Shit,” the guard mutters but doesn’t bother pulling the blade from my side.

My father turns his dark gaze on us, his eyes locking on my wound as blood starts pooling around the knife. “We only need them to think she’s alive. Don’t worry too much about it.”

Tears fall against my cheeks, but I’m not sure what they’re for.

The agony?

The heartbreak?

The hopelessness?

The men I love who are about to walk into a trap to save me?

It all hurts too much so that when I allow my eyes to flutter closed, nothing but an abyss of darkness waits for me.

CHAPTERSIXTY-TWO

ELIAS

“What the fuck was that?” Crew barks as we pile into a blacked-out van.

“I have no fucking clue.” Bishop shucks his jacket and throws it onto the pile of bags at the back. “We knew this was a possibility, I just didn’t think Leighton would be used as bait.”

I rub my hands down my face.

Fuck.

“Should have gone with my plan to blow the place up.” Kaos shrugs from the driver’s seat, and despite the possibility we could have hurt our girl, I don’t disagree with him. There would have been fewer variables to prepare for, but we assumed the police commissioner would care more about his reputation than anything else. As soon as he had a knife pulled on his daughter, it became abundantly clear that wasn’t the case.

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