Page 28 of Diamond Desire
I had no idea what he’d done to her on the inside – what he’d done to her that wasn’t visible as anything more than mental scars.
I wanted to be sick. I almost was sick. The only thing holding me back was concern for my cousin and not wanting her to think I was disgusted by her – she wasn’t the problem. She never would be.
“Widow?” she rasped. “Am I dead, or are you real?”
Forcing myself to speak, I coughed and cleared my throat. “Yeah, Barbie. It’s me. I got you – you’re safe now.”
“I knew you’d come for me.” Her eyes rolled a little as she collapsed into my arms. “I told that fucking prick you would save me.”
I hadn’t saved her. Not really. So what if I had burned half of Hendrix City to the fucking ground, trampling over my father’s businesses and everything that had even the slightest Vice King or Jackal connection that could have led me to her?
So what if I’d lost track of the amount of people I’d tortured and killed for information – each one of them blurring into nothing more than bullshit noise in the back of my brain?
So fucking what if my father had outright ordered his Jester’s to bring him my head on a silver platter for standing against him and touching what was his?
I hadn’t done enough. I hadn’t been fast enough.
“Are you okay with me touching you, or do you want Delilah to help?” The words were bitter on my tongue. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
I may have been her blood, but I was still a man. I was still closer to being someone like Rocky than I was to a woman like Delilah, and I refused to let Henley feel uncomfortable even for a minute more.
“You.” Henley rasped, her hands gripping my shirt with surprising strength. “Please don’t let me go, Widow. Please never let me go.”
My eyes started burning and my throat got tighter. I could have sworn someone had a fistful of fingers wrapped around my flesh, squeezing the fucking life out of me with each second I was in the stifling room. There was barely any air in here. It was a fucking trap of all the dark and dingy things in the world and I was choking the more I had to breathe it in.
“I’ll go ahead. You bring her.” Delilah touched my arm, and I pretended not to see her crying, before she headed out of the room, the sounds of her gun firing a few times hitting me a second later.
I shuffled around, trying to help my cousin to her feet as gently as I could.
“I told Rocky you would never let him keep me.” She mumbled.
It was ridiculous, but Henley sounded happy – she sounded smug as anything that she had been proven right and despite the situation I wanted to laugh at her attitude, and just how infallible it was.
“Who else is gonna piss me off until I die?” I tried grinning, but it fell flat.
She winced and her legs gave way the second she was on her feet, so I refused to let her walk even if I knew holding her would hurt, too. Instead, I hoisted her into my arms as softly as I could and followed Delilah out of the room of hell, leaving it empty for the rest of my group of hoodlums to burn to a crisp.
Though I didn’t copy Delilah as she had gone from room to room, shooting the patrons of each space and letting the women inside go free. I would have helped her, but she was already on the phone to Beau and Aiden, who were outside and waiting for us as backup. They would turn up any second and help get the rest of the innocent people out. Then Logan would help them burn the fucking building to the ground with his explosives. None of them had come inside – it seemed smarter for us to go incognito until we found Henley. But now that we had? Everyone in the building would die, and we wouldn’t care who saw us.
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “We’re gonna take you to the hospital – we need to-”
Henley cut me off. “No hospital. Take me to Sapphire’s or something. I don’t want to be somewhere public. I want to be home.”
Her voice was weak, and she was shivering in my arms. She’d always been scrawny compared to me, but I could see her ribs poking out a little too much for my liking and just knew she’d been starved too. No doubt Rocky had kept her too weak to fight back because he knew Henley – he knew the only way she would never have stopped fighting against him was if she couldn’t physically move from exhaustion.
My chest got tighter. “You need to be checked out. We need to make sure-”
She blinked up at me, doing her best to scowl despite the cut across her eye and the dryness to her lips. “There’s nothing wrong with me – I’m not dying, so don’t be dramatic.”
“You’re covered in cuts and bleeding. And you… you’re hurting. And you might be hurting more on the inside, and I don’t want to risk anything worse happening to you.”
Henley started laughing and as much as I wanted to question her sanity, there was no point. She had earned the right to break, and I wouldn’t blame her for it. Instead, I would just pretend that her hysterics were entirely normal.
“I stabbed Rocky in the dick – that’s why he’s not here anymore and he left me just to rot.” She laughed harder and harder. “He pinned me down, and I got his knife – and I don’t care that I lost the fight or that he damn near took my fucking eye. I don’t care that I didn’t get away.” She kept laughing, and it bordered on the hysterical. “I fucking decapitated his scrawny little cock, and he won’t ever be able to use it again. So no Widow, I don’t need help – I feel really fucking good and I just want to go home.”
Pride burned through me in the crazy way only someone like me could feel it when talking about such violent things.
“I knew you were a crazy bitch.” I tried to laugh. “But you still need the hospital – we need to get you checked out and… and I can get a lady doctor. I can let Lilah sit with you whilst you do… so you can…” I couldn’t get the words out. “Regardless of what happened, we are going to the hospital. But it’s practically owned by Raya, so it’s safe – you’ll be safe there and I won’t leave you.”