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Page 7 of A Trap So Flawless (Titans and Tyrants #4)

Darragh

J im Shaw hasn’t eaten in three days. He’s lost just as many fingers. I keep those fingers in a neat little row on the warehouse floor right in front of his chair, each one aimed at him like an accusation. I wonder how many will be pointing at him like that by the time we’re through.

The motherfucker won’t talk.

Well, he did talk at first. He admitted to killing Callum mere moments after Rowan and I strapped him to this chair under the level grey gaze of Amos.

But he won’t tell us why, or who hired him.

Jim Shaw is a goddamn nobody. A spineless little weasel who never would have even fucking breathed on my grandda if someone hadn’t paid him off.

His greasy head hangs low, his skinny chest rising and falling with whistling inhales and harsh exhales.

I think he’s unconscious again, the vile bastard.

Cutting off another finger ought to wake him up.

“I can start doing some more digging on my end,” Amos says. “Look into the banking side. Where any funds might have come from.”

He is here again today. Or tonight, rather, since the one small warehouse window has long gone dark.

Amos seems to want to prove himself an ally to me.

I have stopped to think once or twice that it’s just a little too convenient that Amos came out of nowhere after Grandda’s death with a name of some fucking nobody conveniently ready to go.

But Grandda’s demise seems to be fucking with Amos’ plans even more than my own.

Amos al-Khatib is apparently big in fintech and trade, and was looking to move a large portion of his western operations from London to Ireland for tax reasons since it’s still part of the EU.

But clearly, not all of his business is on the up and up. For one thing, he was partnering with Callum Gowan. For another, he seems completely at ease in his multi-thousand-euro suit standing in an abandoned warehouse with a man tied up and bleeding in front of him.

“Do it,” I reply. My voice rouses Shaw from his stupor.

“I don’t know,” he moans. “I don’t know!”

“Oh, hush now,” I say, the words a vicious caress. “You can think harder, can’t you, Jimmy?”

I close the distance between us in one step, pressing the point of my knife to the base of his left pinky finger. It’s like the knife is live with an electric current. Shaw’s whole body reacts, spasming so hard against the bindings that the chair bucks a couple of centimetres across the grey floor.

“I used to sleep on the floor of a warehouse just like this,” I say to no one in particular. “It’s where my grandda found me.”

Getting no sleep is making me fucking chatty, I guess. Sentimental.

Or maybe it’s Ireland that’s making me sentimental.

I experience a sudden, choking throb of feeling, so forceful I literally don’t breathe for a second. It’s not nostalgia. It’s not grief for my grandda.

It’s longing.

Jesus fucking Christ. Darragh Gowan. Fucking longing.

I want to touch her skin. Want to bury my face in her hair. Her pussy.

I want to know what she’s doing right now.

“Rowan,” I growl, withdrawing my knife and giving Shaw a brief moment of reprieve. “Check if there have been any updates from Tommy.”

My soldier Tommy is still in Montréal, sending me updates on Valentina’s activities. So far, she’s mostly been accompanying her parents and cousin around town, alternating between dress fittings and schmoozing with some mafia bozo named Salvatore Di Mauro.

Rowan nods and strides to the corner of the dark space. Unzipping the bag there, he sifts through ropes and plastic and cleaning supplies and pulls out his phone. He unlocks it, raises the screen to his face…

And quietly swears.

“What is it?” Hot urgency scrapes in my throat. I’m already moving towards him, my pulse more a thrum than a beat.

Rowan doesn’t speak. He merely turns his phone around so that I can see the screen.

At first, I want to ask him why he’s wasting his time showing me a picture of some bride with blonde hair, walking down the steps of a church on a street I don’t recognize. Why the ever-loving fuck would this warrant my attention right now?

But Rowan doesn’t move. His stoic silence makes me take a second look.

And then?

Then I see her eyes.

Eyes that have fought me, begged me, searched for me, hated me. Eyes that punctured something in me, just like her pretty fingernails, the first time they met my own.

But it doesn’t make sense that those are Valentina’s eyes, in Valentina’s face. Because the body they’re attached to is in a wedding dress, not for a fitting appointment at a shop, but for the actual fucking wedding.

A wedding that looks like it’s already happened, judging by the fact she’s leaving the church…

On the arm of another man.

My fiancée has gone and married someone else.

Waited until I was out of the country, waited until I was distracted dealing with the one thing important enough to temporarily take me away from her.

And it isn’t just her. I know she can’t marry anyone without her dear daddy organizing the entire shebang.

There’s Vinny just behind her in the photo, now that I look closer.

I got him Halifax. I offered him my support against the bikers and the bratva. I gave him exactly what he asked for, exactly what he needed, all while I lost sleep and money and time. I made myself his fucking dog.

For her. All for her.

If this was a trap, it was a damn good one. I walked right into it and happily left all my weapons at the door.

No, I didn’t walk. I was dragged. By those long, beautiful, bloodied fingernails. She dug them in and that was it. I was snared. It was too late.

Maybe it’s the lack of sleep. Maybe it’s the obliterating punch of pain – not rage, not the familiarity of fury, but fucking pain – that suddenly blinds me.

Whatever it is, my vision slides and warps, like someone’s poured oil across my eyes.

I can’t see this strange, married, blonde Valentina clearly anymore. I can barely see the phone at all.

I think I’m having a goddamn stroke.

I think I’m fucking bleeding.

There’s a hot stripe of moisture on my cheek. But when I reach up to wipe it away, it isn’t red. It’s colourless and watery. I blink, and feel more of that moisture sluice down my skin at the same moment that my vision clears.

Holy fuck.

I can’t let this happen. Can’t let this be what I’ve become. Fucking weeping in a warehouse because of a picture on a phone. Because of her.

If my grandda could only see me now.

But he can’t. Because he’s in the ground. Maybe rolling in his grave at what’s become of me. But dead all the same.

And you know who isn’t?

Jim fucking Shaw.

I turn from Rowan, turn from the photo and the phone and my foolish fucking ruin. The knife in my hand feels like salvation. A sacred, soothing weight as I stalk back to the chair.

“You know, if we were in Morocco,” Amos says coolly as I pass him, “I’d make him walk out into the desert until he went mad and died.”

“We’re not in Morocco,” I reply through clenched teeth, raising my knife. “We’re in Dublin.”

And in Dublin, I am going to make him bleed.