Page 143 of Convict's Game

There was no way I’d take the deal. I didn’t believe him. I couldn’t even fake it to offer my crew another chance at being undercover. I was done with lying.

Lying…

My brain rebooted.Mila. The meeting.

Fuck! I was going to be late.

Scrambling on the table, I managed to sit up and wrenched at the cuffs. “Get these off me, I need to go.”

“You’re not going anywhere. You took my money and you owe me information.”

“I don’t owe you shit.”

She’d think I abandoned her. Even if she read the note, there was no way I could get back for the start of the meeting. I didn’t even know what the time was. I patted my pockets, moving my chained-up hands from one side to the other. Nothing.

“Where’s my phone?”

Purposefully, the cop folded his arms and returned to lean against the door, the only exit from the room. “I’ll make this as plain as possible. You’re on probation. Daniels has splashed the cash to keep you off the radar in Deadwater. That means you’re valuable to him, not as a friend, don’t get him wrong, but because he’s suspicious of what you’ll get up to in your spare time. He already suspects you. So you have a choice. Go back tohim, play nice, supply the harmless bits of information I ask for, as I need them, or I’ll drive you to prison myself.”

Any easiness in him faded to cold, hard truth. “Believe me, I can invent multiple ways for your sentence to be extended once you’re there. You’ll find yourself in a lot of fights behind bars, Convict. You may never get out.”

If he thought I’d accept, he was dreaming. Yet I had no way out of this room apart from through him.

And no one had a clue where I’d gone.

Chapter 49

Mila

The moment we came to a halt, I leapt from the car, my heart constricted in fear. When I’d flown out of the lawyer’s office, Tyler had stepped from a shadowy corner and taken control. He’d driven me to Leith in Edinburgh where Arran and Shade were heading with other members of the skeleton crew.

Convict had been seen being put into the back of a police car. His friends had rushed to his aid.

According to updates Tyler received as he drove, Convict hadn’t left the port area.

Under the cover of a garage down a narrow street, the leader of the crew watched my approach, his enforcer alongside plus a few others I didn’t know.

“Where is he?” My breathing came ragged as if I’d been running, not sitting still for over an hour of agonised travelling.

Arran tipped his head at a window onto another street. “Inside the building at the end of the row.”

“What are we waiting for?”

He shrugged as if weighing up a detail. “Leverage.”

Shade took over. “That building is used for police surveillance. We’ve known about it for some time but couldn’t get blueprints. Nor do we know how many cops are inside, andit’s broad fucking daylight. None of us can walk in there or even past it without risking being made.”

“I can,” I blurted. “Send me in. Give me a gun.”

He rolled his eyes. “Stand down, Annie Oakley. You’ve been seen around with Convict enough to put ye in the same category. If we fuck this up, we lose our edge.”

Frustration had me mangling my fingers together. “So what, we just sit and wait? They could be doing anything to him. They might have moved him elsewhere already.” A thought occurred to me. “How do you even know he’s in there?”

Arran eyed his enforcer. “Tell her what you did.”

Shade didn’t flinch. “On the night he came back from hospital, returned to us from the dead, I shot a tracker into him.”

From nearer the window where he kept watch on the street, Tyler gave a quiet laugh.