Page 79 of Suck This

“You… you…”

I smiled a smile that likely wasn’t very pretty.

“I know your name,” I confirmed. “Yes. I also can find anything I want in your brain, but it’s painful. It requires me killing you after I do it. So, which way do you want to play this?”

He answered quickly. “There were supposed to be ten targets. Your club, your office, your home. Mr. Fox’s office. Mr. Fox’s home.” He cleared his throat. “We go in at the same time. Take out our scheduled targets, go home. Easy.”

The list continued until he’d named off each of my inner circle’s most trusted places, even going as far as to include a home that I thought the world didn’t know about.

Fox’s children lived in that home, and the moment he heard the words out of the activist’s mouth, he was gone.

He appeared back in seconds, this time with two children in tow.

They were adult children, yes, but they were both scared—and bloody.

“What happened?” I asked carefully. Guardedly.

“The home was in cinders,” he said. “They were in the panic room.”

All of our houses, offices, and clubs had panic rooms. Ones that we’d built ourselves so no one would know that we had them. Only the most trusted of us knew where they were.

“Round everyone up and take them to The Cellar,” I said, standing up and gathering Acadia’s dead weight into my arms.

Everyone started to move.

Acadia’s hair fell back in wet, reddened strands like a slick curtain straight toward the floor. Her clothes were bloody and clinging to her curves. Curves I’d just tasted less than an hour ago.

When Abe disappeared, Corbin and Nash finally caught on to how we all had gotten here.

“I think you forgot to tell me that you have other abilities,” Corbin said carefully, eyeing the room as a whole.

I turned my smile on him.

“Oh, we have a lot of things we can do, I’m sure, that you don’t know about,” I drawled. “And I’m going to be blunt here. You can’t have her if you’re a part of the inner sanctum of the police department. You made that decision when you chose her life. So you need to choose. Her or trying to get back your job.”

His head hung.

“I was afraid you were going to say that,” he grunted. “What do you want me to do?”

“Fox,” I said. “Take your brood to The Cellar. Render, please offer Corbin a job among your men. Make sure it’s equal to your own, but put him in charge of all human aspects that we are soon to be facing in the future. It’s more than obvious that his skill set is wasted where he’s at.”

Render’s lips tipped up into a grin at Corbin’s startled eyes.

“Oh.” I stopped when I was about to leave. “And one of you make sure that Nash is put on retainer.”

Because if life turned the way I expected it to, we’d be needing both of them in our army.

I couldn’t say exactly why I did what I did next, but I knew tonight, something had to give.

There had to be a better way to do things.

I was tired of being the one to back down. Tired of having my family, friends, and loved ones persecuted for being associated with me.

I’d lost my daughter. My lover. My friends.

Had I not been able to bring Acadia back, I’d have burned this city to the ground, every shitty human activist would’ve gone down with it.

“Pavlov.”