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It. Was. Excruciating. Firewater was raining down on my flesh.

“Sonofabitch!” I sucked in a breath and swallowed a scream, unknowingly squeezing the circulation out of Cobra’s forearms.

I could hear the area sizzle and managed to catch a glimpse of blood, pus, and clear liquid running together. When he did it again, I planned his death in my head. The smell was horrible. I couldn’t tell if it was coming from me or the dead nun across the room.

“Take a sip,” he demanded, a little more gently, pressing the bottle to my lips.

I didn’t have to be told twice. I eagerly welcomed the burning sensation in my throat over the one on my torso.

He wordlessly pulled the bottle away after a few seconds and disappeared from view.

Leaning my head back, I swallowed, staring straight into Cobra’s smoky-grey eyes.

“I think he likes you.” He smirked down at me.

I attempted to furrow my brows to say, “Are you shitting me?”, but whatever I had just been made to swallow was starting to kick in.

Unfortunately for me, it wasn’t fast enough. When I looked down again, Romero was heating what looked like a large fishing hook with a lighter.

“Don’t even––” I began to protest, just as Cobra covered my mouth with the palm of his hand and dropped his elbows on my shoulders, essentially blocking my view with his upper body.

I felt Romero’s fingers near the wound a second before the pressure began. He pushed until the end of the hook popped through my skin, tugging something on the end of it and then pushing it through the other side.

I don’t know if it was from the pain of having a hook shoved through my flesh over and over again, the pills, or both. Either way, I closed my eyes to hide my tears and didn’t open them again.

CHAPTER NINE

Where the fuck did she come from?

Her screams were on a repeating soundtrack inside my head. I still had her blood on my hands. And when was the last time my dick was this hard?

I took another swig from the bottle and then passed it to Grimm. It was almost dawn, and none of us had slept. I couldn’t sleep because, well, I rarely slept, and because I couldn’t stop thinking about the potential problem I had placed in my bed.

It was a problem that had long blonde hair, skin as white as snow, and a cesspool of rage and pain that mirrored my own behind a pair of cornflower blue eyes.

She reminded me of an angel that had been stripped of its wings. It was a fitting description when I thought about the circumstances surrounding her, and I’d been doing that a fuck of a lot.

“You were right about her,” Grimm acknowledged. His neck was bent forward, and he was staring at the liquor bottle as if it held all the answers to his questions. A strand of his dark hair hung partially over his forehead.

“Where did she come from?” He looked at me for an answer he knew I would eventually have. I suspected this would be the most emotion he showed on the topic until he was ready to talk about it, which could be never, and that was more than fine by me.

The first time we saw Cali, we were ten, and she was five. She had been wearing a pink nightgown, and her hair was in two long pigtails. The kid was so fucking pale she looked like a ghost.

I didn’t know where she’d been for the past few years, but it made a lot of shit make sense now.

“So, are we keeping both of them?” Cobra asked, as if we were talking about a pair of puppies.

“Do we really want the loud one?” Grimm asked, referring to the brunette currently sleeping in the dog pen.

“She might be leverage.”

He grunted in response.

I already knew what I was going to do, but I never wanted them to feel like their opinions didn’t mean shit to me, so I always heard them out and then laid it all out for em. Rarely did they disagree.

“I think it could be good for a while. We could use a woman’s presence around here now Lena’s gone.” Cobra added.

Ah, Lena. The stupid bitch more than likely ran off having a temper tantrum and got herself killed.