Page 74 of Unleashed

And I see it. “Oh my God.”

A cross. Small, wooden. Soaked in thick, smeared red.

Anthony edges closer, his cane thudding against the floor. His voice drops into something that sounds foreign, tight, strained. “Is that a cross?”

Isaia doesn’t touch it with bare skin. He rips the sheet from the bed, wraps it around the wood, and lifts it. The fabric darkens immediately where it soaks through.

My stomach lurches, bile burning my throat. “Is that…blood?”

Isaia swears, low and guttural, like the sound of something breaking inside him. His eyes scan the jagged strokes carved across the wood. “Punishment owed to…” He stops short. His silence is worse than the words.

“Isaia.” My voice cracks. “What is it? What does it say?”

He looks at me then, just for a heartbeat, and the fear in his face is something I’ve never seen before. It guts me. It tells me more than any explanation could. Then his gaze shifts past me, locking on Anthony, dark and hollow.

“I was right,” he mutters, voice barely audible, a death sentence whispered into the room. “It’s a sentence.”

Anthony’s knuckles whiten on his cane. “What’s the fucking sentence?”

He tilts the cross forward, and the words come into view, slashed across the wood in thick red paint that drips like it might still be wet are the words ‘the Troublemaker.’

Isaia exhales slowly, grim. “Punishment owed to…the Troublemaker.”

My blood freezes in my veins. The room tilts, sound rushing out until all I hear is my own pulse crashing in my ears. My lips move, my voice breaking on a single word that tastes like death. “Molly.”

Chapter 25

EVERLY

The SUV smells like leather and tension. Isaia’s knuckles are white on the wheel, his jaw flexing so hard I think his teeth might crack. Every turn he takes is sharp, angry, a barely restrained lunge of the vehicle that makes my stomach churn.

Anthony’s in the passenger seat, cane braced between his knees, his voice a sharp counterpoint to the growl of the engine. “You’re going too fast.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Isaia snaps without looking at him.

“Do you have a death wish, Del Rossa?”

“Just yours.” Isaia throws him a dark, cutting look before whipping into another lane.

Anthony slams a hand against the dashboard. “Do you drive like this with Everly in the car? No wonder she’s half terrified of you.”

“Don’t you fucking talk about her.”

“Oh, that’s rich. You get to wreck her life, vanish for months, then reappear like Prince Charming, and I can’t even say her name?”

Isaia growls, actually growls, like the sound comes from somewhere deeper than human. “One more word out of your mouth and I’ll snap that cane in half and nail your head to the dash, I swear to God.”

“At least that’ll prove my point.”

“And what point is that?”

“That you’re a murdering psychopath, and Everly deserves better.” Anthony shoots him a cocky grin, and Isaia slams the brakes at a red light, jerking all three of us forward.

“Fucking say that again.”

“Say what? That you’re a reckless asshole?”

“I said?—”