Casper’s bound arms tremble in my hold, but he doesn’t attempt to pull away. He just lies there, limp and sobbing. He fights a bit when I fit his little finger through the cigar cutter, but I’m bigger and stronger, and once I have the digit secured in the tool, it’s nothing to slide it to the base. And by now, he’s doing that thing where someone tries to disassociate from a situation, hoping to feel less pain.
Not on my watch.
“Let me know when it hurts.”
I squeeze the blade, with Casper’s screams a symphony as I cut through flesh and bone. It’s a little anticlimactic for my tastes, but we still have nine digits left.
The thumbs should be interesting—
The muffled vibration of my phone stops me cold. As one of the five top-level enforcers for the Unholy, I’m always on duty.
Sonofabitch.
I hate interruptions when I’m working.
I stand with an aggravated sigh and (unironically) hold up my index finger at Casper. “Give me a sec.” I pull the cell phone out of the back pocket of my jeans and seehername on the screen.Fuuuck. Morbid curiosity has me striding away from Casper to answer the call. Not that this roach box of a living room affords much space between us. I hate when my stomach clenches in a tight knot and how every nerve in my body feels charged as if struck by lightning. “What?”
“Havoc?”
God, her voice is pretty.
“Who is this?”
As if I don’t knowexactlywho is on the other end of this phone call. Her voice has echoed in my head every day for the last four months. Ever since the last time I saw her at the Fourth of July barbecue at Sanctum, the Unholy’s clubhouse. I can’tunhear the soft, almost whispered way she talks. Like every word she speaks is sacred.
“It’s Kerri. Kerri Ward. Faith’s friend.” She’s quiet for a long moment, and that’s another thing I remember about her. Even when she rushed into Sanctum like her ass was on fire to tell us it was Daniel Davenport who was selling the designer drug Onyx in Mayhem, she had a composure to her. An elegance.
The woman is absolutely captivating.
I hate that about her.
“What happened, Duchess, lost a diamond earring and need me to help you find it?”
“This was a mistake.” Her words are fingers of ice that reach through the phone and claw at me. “Forgive me for calling.”
Tensing, I growl into the cell. “Don’t you fucking hang up on me.” Although why I care if she does, I can’t say. There’s too much strained silence on her end of the line. I don’t even hear her breathing. It’s as if her side of the world inhaled and forgot to exhale. She finally says something, but it’s too low for me to catch above Casper’s whining. “Shut the hell up,” I snap at him.
“Please don’t curse at me.”
“That wasn’t meant for you,” I grunt.
After a beat, she simply says, “Oh.”
“What do you want? I’m working.”
“Oh.” Again, with that fucking word. But she knows the deal. What my job as an enforcer is all about. “I’ll call back.”
I glance at Casper, torn between wanting to finish what I started with him and being drawn to this damn woman like stink on shit. “Are you in trouble, Duchess?”
“Yes.”
That knot in my gut? It coils tighter. But seriously, what kind of trouble could she possibly have gotten herself into? For Christ’s sake, she lives in Brighton—the posh capital of Pennsylvania.
My upper lip pulls into a snarl. Well, my plans are fucked. I march back to Casper and rip the gag out of his mouth. Immediately, he starts with the apologies. A kick to the stomach ends his babbling. I put the phone on speaker. “Tell her what you did.”
“I s-stole.” The stuttering asshole is wise not to lie. “I stole a bunch of money from Havoc.”
“And…?” I coax. “Come on, Casper, the devil is in the details.”
