“Hey, hey, mouth. Pretty little girls like you make themselves ugly when they talk like a man.” He bopped the back of his fingers against her mouth, an act that made her wish with all her heart that she could throw up on command. “Hades Colgrave is the cold-hearted sonofabitch who runs the Gravediggers MC—your boyfriend’s uncle. I bet you thought you were being protected by the Gravediggers, but you weren’t. Your man’s uncle is the one with all the power, not Tyr and Loki. Hades is the one who let us know his nephews had your idiot foster brother in custody, and how best to get at him. Specifically, through you.”
She blinked, trying hard to follow. But that was so hard to do when her head was splitting. “Wait, just…wait. If Hades is so powerful, and he says he knows Tyr and Loki have Felix, why was I dragged into this mess? Why doesn’t this guy Hades simply order his nephews to hand Felix over to you and leave me the hell out of it? You’d owe Hades a favor, and I imagine he’d love to have someone like you indebted to him. So why not just order Felix to be handed over?”
Stringer lifted a careless shoulder. “There’s some kind of beef going on between Hades and his nephews right now, but it’s none of my organization’s concern. The only concern I have is getting my hands on Felix Fielding once and for all, and making sure that little fuckwit never makes a fool of me again.”
So Felix was destined to be made an example of, no matter what. And if Stringer couldn’t get his hands on Felix, she would stand in Felix’s place.
Perfect.
“None of this is making sense.” She closed her eyes and tried to sift through the new information. “You say you’re friends with the president of the Gravediggers, yet you attack me like you think there won’t be any retaliation.”
“There won’t be. I’ve got Hades’s word on that.”
“But… he’s not in charge of Felix.” And there it was, the problem that this Stringer bastard couldn’t see. She could, probable concussion and all, but he couldn’t. “Wow, what an idiot.”
Stringer loomed. “What’d you say?”
“It’s not just a beef going on between Hades and his nephews. It’s all-out war for supremacy. There are two factions of Gravediggers battling against each other, and you’ve been dragged into it so you can be used like a tool. You’re a tool.”
“Shit.” Alice glanced dizzily across the dingy, colorless office to Stringer’s pal, the same man who’d driven the car into her path. “Bitch called you a tool, boss.”
“I heard her, moron. I warned you about that mouth of yours, little girl,” Stringer went on, turning his blocky head back to her. Her stomach rolled, hot and greasy, at the dull gleam of cruelty in his lizard-beady eyes. “I don’t want to fuck up that pretty little face any more than it already is, thanks to the clowns who were supposed to bring you in without a scratch. But make no mistake—you mouth off to me again, I have no problem with fucking you up and taking my chances with your man.”
In a strange, disconnected kind of way, she heard her mouth go off again. “You don’t understand—”
“No, you don’t understand,” he suddenly yelled in her face, and she cringed as flecks of spit hit her. “I’m trading you for that pissant, Felix-fucking-Fielding, and you’ve got nothing to say about it. We’ve got a call into your man and told him that if he doesn’t bring me Felix right the fuck now, I’d mail you back to him in pieces. Get it?”
“You’re the one who doesn’t get it.” The words came out of her mouth without her permission, as her head pounded so hard, the noise of it should have filled the world. “You’re all going to die.”
Stringer’s thin lips pulled back in a snarl, and he raised his hand to smack her.
That was when the lights went out.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chaos.
Alice couldn’t help but sag in relief as darkness closed around her. Thank goodness. The light hurt so much, like needles going through her eyes and into her brain. All that mattered was that the lights were now off.
Wait.
The lights were off.
Who turned off the lights?
Uh-oh.
Chaos, her brain whispered again. Chaos was coming.
And its name was Loki.
“What the fuck.” Stringer’s pissed-off voice cut through the dark a second before a light from a cellphone lit up, making her wince and look away. “Doyle, get those fucking lights back on. And kill anyone who doesn’t belong here, understand me? Move!”
“You got it, boss.”
Alice closed her eyes against the thin, bluish light coming from the cellphone as the sounds of Doyle’s footsteps faded away. A few seconds later, more sounds reached her ears—shouting, crashing, metal clanging and the unmistakable impact of flesh on flesh.
Hello, Loki.
I’m sorry. I tried.
“You listen to me, girlie.” There was a tug on the tape binding her to the chair and a flash of a knife, and suddenly she could move again. “I don’t want any of that Chuck Norris kung-fu shit outta you, you got that?”
The world spun like a sick nightmare as he jerked her to her feet. “I can’t… I can’t.”
“When they get here, you tell them we treated you good, yeah?” He jostled her, making the bile rise once more. “Your face got fucked up when you took a header into the sidewalk, and if you think about it, that was on you. This was supposed to be a nonviolent trade, goddamn it.”
“I told you,” she said thickly, even as something crashed against the office wall hard enough to make a framed picture fall to the floor. “You were lied to. Hades lied. Now you’re all going to die.”
“Shut up.” Knife in one hand, he spun her around and put her back to his front. The movement worsened the rocking under her feet, and her stomach heaved, hot and terrible. “Just shut the f—"
The office door exploded open so hard the knob and some of the doorframe went flying into the dark, and a dark silhouette filled the threshold. Stringer instinctively backed away from the overwhelming wave of rage that emanated from the newcomer, and it was all she could do to stop herself from crying at the sight.
“Loki,” she whispered.
“This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.” For some reason, Stringer thought it was a good idea to hold the knife he had to her neck. His breathing shallowed out in obvious panic as he backed away from all that hostility, until he hit the far office wall. “Hades swore there wouldn’t be any retaliation from the Gravediggers, so you need to talk to your uncle, kid. This was just supposed to be a simple trade—your girl for her foster brother, that Fielding brat. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”
Without a word, Loki began stalking toward them through the shadows. As he did, it was his eyes that Alice noticed first.
The insanity that glimmered there broke her soul.
“Don’t kill him, Loki, please.” It was getting harder to stand, and all around her the darkness grew deeper to smother not just her sight but her ability to think. “Please, please, don’t be like your father. I love you and I believe you deserve better than… than being a Colgrave killer. Let’s just go, please. I’m fine, I sw—”