Page 41 of Gilded Locks

“I’m sorry,” she cried.

“Not yet, but you will be,” Hunter threatened.

“Enough!” Stone shoved him back.

“Why should we protect her from the truth?” Hunter snarled at his brother. His black eyes found her. “Our sister lost the baby at twelve weeks. She attempted suicide twice before that. After the miscarriage, she stopped eating, stopped speaking, stopped being our bright, beautiful Katya.”

Katya.

Their sister had a name, a face, a life that Jordan had destroyed with casual cruelty. And Marigold shared his blood, carried his DNA, bore the same family name that had become synonymous with the suffering he caused.

“Now, it’s our turn to make things even.” He lunged for her and she screamed, scrambling off the bed and running to Ash.

“Stop!” Ash curled his body around her trembling body. “What the fuck, Hunter? Get control of yourself!”

She sucked in a jagged breath, then another. Her mother’s voice couldn’t penetrate her panic. “Please…” she begged. “I swear, I didn’t know. I’m not lying.”

Hunter’s tone was as cold and unbending as ice. “Not lying like you swore you were Mary Langford?”

She twisted in Ash’s arms. “Jordan is everything wrong with my family,” she sputtered. “Everything I was running from. If I’d known what he did?—”

Her words cut off as his hand closed around her throat. Ash and Stone shouted for him to let go, but when they touched him, he shoved them away with merciless force.

“You’d what?” Hunter’s grip tightened as he towered over her with the presence of an avenging angel. “Turn him in? Testify against him? Make him pay for what he did?”

She tried to pry the fingers around her throat loose, desperate to make him understand. “Yes!” The word tore from her throat like a battle cry. “Yes, absolutely, whatever it took?—”

“Lies!” he bellowed, shoving her into the wall. “Calders can’t be trusted. Deceit’s written into your fucking DNA.”

“Hunter!” one of the brothers snapped, but she couldn’t see past his looming presence. Lack of oxygen was making it difficult to hear.

“I’m not like him. I’m decent. That’s why I was trying to escape.” Tears burned her eyes as she sputtered for breath. “I hate him,” she rasped. “He’s the reason I’m running!”

“Why?” Hunter demanded, his fist knotting painfully in her hair. “I want the fucking truth.”

“Because I know what he is.” The confession stuttered past her lips on a narrow wheeze. “I knew about the women he brought home. I saw how they looked afterward. Hunter…please.” She clawed at his unbreakable grip and wheezed, “You’re choking me.”

“How did they look?”

She flinched when the brothers tried to pull him off of her, his unbreakable grip jerking her around by the neck like a ragdoll. Blackness bled into her periphery.

“Broken.” She gasped for air. “Empty. Wrong.”

“Hunter, you’re killing her!” Ash jumped on his back, fisting his hair.

“Your brother is a cancer,” he seethed through gritted teeth. “A poison on this earth.”

“I… know.” The words pushed painfully past bruised her larynx as her eyes closed.

He snarled then Stone shouted something in Russian and her body crupled to the floor. Air rushed into her lungs like fire. Painful coughs sputtered past her ravaged throat. Her vision tunneled into a narrow keyhole of black as tears blurred her vision.

Stone tried to help her stand, but her legs collapsed. “Goddamn it, Hunter, you could have killed her!”

“Big loss.”

Stone helped her sit up as Ash’s large hand rested on her back. She heaved for breath. Hunter might have let her go, but she still felt his grip around her throat. Her body still radiated with the fear he instilled.

“There are other ways to deal with this,” Ash snapped.