Page 102 of Twisted Trust

“Maeve!”

Chaos descends. Donald tosses the wood to Antony who uses it to crack Levi over the head. Several guards surge forward from the walls toward the brawl in the middle while Donald hooks a hand around my arm and drags me up.

“Wait… Donald, wait, what are you doing? You can’t be—no, there’s no way. There’s no way!”

“Shit the fuck up,” Donald hisses. Such sharpness from a usually mild-mannered man shocks me, and I put up no resistance as he drags me to the back of the room.

It’s not until he tries to drag me through the back door that it all falls painfully into place. “You!” I sneer. “All this time it wasyou! You told Antony about me and Levi! You told him where I was, where we would meet! How could you? How could you do that to him? You’re one of the few he trusted, you bastard!”

Twisting and turning, I try to wrestle my arm out of his grip, but Donald is relentless. His fingers dig painfully into the soft inner flesh of my upper arm and he slaps me hard, twice in quick succession, to try and calm me.

“You know nothing,” Donald growls as he drags me outside. “You don’t know the shit I have to put up with!”

“What shit?” I gasp through bloodied teeth. “He looked out for you! He got you the best treatment money could buy after the airport explosion—wait, you didn’t need it, did you? You weren’t unconscious when they were trying to kill him, were you? You were fucking in on it!”

Outside, the air turns to ice as heavy gray clouds settle overhead. I continue to fight until my feet slip free of my heels and I can bite, kick, and scratch with all my strength. Donald gets an arm around my waist so I pour all my energy into thrashing.

Until an explosion of gunfire erupts within the hotel and I fall silent, frozen in Donald’s arms.

No…

It can’t be…

Not like this. Not Levi. Not now. Not after everything.

“Levi!” I scream at the top of my lungs. “Scott! What have you done, you bastard!” Turning in Donald’s grip, I claw at his eyes like an animal until he releases me with a cry of pain, but I stumble right into the arms of another man who doesn’t think twice about scooping me right up onto his shoulder. “Put me down! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!”

My screams last until the burly man reaches the vehicle and, tired of my thrashing and screaming, hauls me by the hair around to the hood of the car. Half a second later, he slams myhead down so hard on the metal that I see stars and lose all control of my limbs as the stun flips something in my mind.

My last hazy thought as I’m dragged into the vehicle like a sack of potatoes is of Scott.

37

LEVI

“Fuck!” The last body falls at my feet, splashing blood up my legs and soaking into my socks. Gun in hand, I step over the corpse and meet Naz who stands beside me, panting.

“We get them all?” he asks breathlessly.

“Think so. How many did you lose?” Antony choosing to rain gunfire down from above hadn’t been considered last night when Naz and I came up with this makeshift plan and I feared those who died would have tipped the scales in Antony’s favor.

Luckily, Naz’s men are a force to be reckoned with.

“Twenty odd,” Naz replies with a grimace. “Less than expected but more than I hoped.”

“It was good thinking, though, filling the church with your people. Thank you.”

Nazario claps my shoulder and nods. “Did it work?”

Pounding footsteps behind me make everyone tense, and we whip around to see Chip sprinting back into the church, breathless.

But Maeve isn’t with him.

“Where is she?” I ask, my voice rising. “Chip, where thefuckis she?”

“I’m sorry,” Chip gasps. “I wasn’t fast enough.”

Everything around me becomes suspended in time.