"Come and try me. I'm well armed, I have six guards... Sounds like a good time. You want to talk to Darius? Darius?" Shaw prodded.
"Naw, I'm good," Darius said in a laidback voice.
Then I heard a violent sound and Darius going, "Unh!" as if struck.
"I see your friend also likes to be difficult," Shaw growled. "I just told him I'd kill his sister if you didn't come up here."
"Maybe he doesn't believe you," I said coolly, but I felt like I was trying to diffuse a bomb over the phone. The guards were watching every move I made. My team was still parked way back, almost out of sight, although I was sure they had been seen.
"Where is his sister?"
"She's fine." Darius was on the phone again, panting in a pained way. "She'll be fine; she can handle herself."
"Oh, fuck. Don't try and be too tough. There is...some serious stuff going on, Dar, you don’t know.” I took a deep breath like I was plunging into the sea and walked up to the guards. They stepped aside to let me in.
They weren't impressive guards. They didn't carry themselves like real fighters. Kind of like the guys we took out at the hotel, I'd definitely seen scarier guys than this.
You'd think Bloom could hire better guys, I thought.
I made a quick call back to my crew.
“If Bloom hired these guys, he doesn't actually give a shit about Shaw.”
“What are you saying?” Ian had answered. I could hear Frankie trying to talk in the background.
“Not sure yet, just…something to be aware of.”
My unsettled feeling spiked further as I ran up the stairs to Darius' apartment.
The door was open. Darius was on his knees with his hands behind his head. Shaw had a gun pointed at him and the other hand held his phone, but as soon as he saw me peer in, he put the phone away and took out a second gun. "There you are, my pet. I think you know that this won't end well unless you cooperate. If you go with me, then everything's cool. If you don't, I kill your friend and Bloom kills his sister. If you manage to kill me instead and save your friend, Bloom still kills your friend's sister."
"Is that true, Darius? Does Bloom have your sister?"
"It's true," Darius said, eyes on the floor. "But she can take care of herself. At least, that's what she always told me. I’m really sorry. He made me call you earlier. I shouldn’t have, I just—”
He was worried. I could tell. And he was right to be worried at this point. I thought I could move faster than Shaw and take him out, but I didn't want an innocent sister going down in the process.
"Don't do it," Darius said.
"He won't kill me," I said. "So...in that way...I will be safe."
This psycho would never let me go. I should have known he'd keep plotting. He had Bloom’s help, so this probably had something to do with me being a consort. Maybe that was even why Shaw was so obsessed with me. Maybe they would use me to blackmail Frankie.
"I'm going to call my friends to say goodbye," I said, carefully holding up my phone. "You win, Shaw, okay, just let Darius go."
"Okay." Shaw's grin flashed, and my stomach churned. I remembered that grin; I still remembered too much.
I called Frankie now. "I have to go with Shaw.”
“What—?”
“Bloom has Darius' sister and they'll kill her. So I want you to know that--thank you, and don't risk your life for me, okay? You're way more important than me and I'll be fine. I'll figure it out. I've been through shit before. Promise me." She kept trying to interrupt and I barreled through the words, shouting over her.
"Florian! No," she said, in a low voice that I knew meant business. "No. I'm coming."
As she was talking, and I knew what she was steeling herself to do, Shaw trying to come at me and strike me with the handle of his gun.
"Eye for an eye, pet!" he yelled, since I'd beaten him good the same way before, but I saw him coming in time and barely dodged. I dropped the phone and Shaw lunged at me, shoving me down so I hit the ground.
With Shaw's attention off of him, Darius sprung into action himself and turned into a lion.
He jumped onto Shaw's back and tore at him.
"What the fuck?" I yelled. "You're a wolf!"
Darius roared and--I got the picture. We could talk about this later. While Darius lashed Shaw's back and neck with his claws, blood ran down onto my shirt.
Shaw screamed. He pointed his gun at my head now and cried, "Stop or his head gets blown off!"
I grabbed his arm and wrestled, shoving him, making a bet that Shaw still wouldn't kill me.
A bet I almost lost. The gun fired, ricocheted off the floor an inch from my head, and flew out the door.
"So you were willing to kill me," I grunted. "So much for being your irreplaceable pet." I slammed my elbow into his arm, and his hand slacked, dropping the gun in pain. He was covered in blood. I grabbed the collar of his jacket and pushed him down, dragging him up, up back on his feet and against the wall.
"Bloom will kill her," Shaw said, groveling a little now. “Please. You can’t hurt me.”
"Kill him," Darius said, transforming back. He tried to hand me a gun.
"Are you sure?" I asked him.
"Like I said, Camille can take care of herself."
"A bullet is too quick," I whispered.
"No--please--my wife... Don't kill me. She'll be so heartbroken. I don't want to leave her!”
"The wife who likes to watch you force yourself on shifters? Boo fucking hoo." I drove a fist into his face. I felt another tooth or maybe a bone, a hard crack of jaw. If my hand hurt, I didn't feel it. I struck him again. And again. And again. Shaw was crying, begging.
He had made me cry and beg. He never stopped, never cared at all. It fueled him, and now it fueled me.
"This is how you raised your pet," I growled at him, just as I could see him losing consciousness. "This is what you get."
I pummeled him to unconsciousness and then I dropped him. His body slid to the ground like a dummy, and I realized I was nearly out of breath and my hand was scraped.
Darius pressed the gun into my hand. "Just finish the job," he said. "You always want to finish the job." He sounded sad for me, though.
I had just realized there was a lot I still didn't know about Darius, but I'd never seen him take any pleasure in hurting anyone.
I took the gun, pointed, and pumped Shaw full of bullets.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Waylon
Frankie cursed and went to fling open the van door as soon as she heard a fight break out on the phone.
She finally wants to use those powers of hers. A part of me felt very satisfied; it was all I'd been pushing for all along...but something was off.
I didn't know what it was. What instinct should I follow? "Wait," I said.
"I can't wait. Flor--"
"Frankie, when we were at the hotel I felt weird magic. As if Viktor was there, sort of, but--"
"Viktor was there."
"Yeah, but I feel it right now. You think Viktor's here too? One of the guys working with Shaw knows magic. I feel like...there's some kind of trickery going on."