He hums. “Sure. I’ll play.”
“How did you know who I was?” Glancing up, he tilts his head, looking for the meaning in my words. “You knew who I was when I came toThe Wharf. How?”
Killian nods to himself, cleaning his knife. It’s methodical and precise. “You look like your mother.”
The wind rushes past my lip with a heavy sigh. “What?”
“Your mother.” His gaze flickers over me as if double-checking. “Liv was Senior’s favorite for a long time. He brought her everywhere.” He puts one knife down to clean the next one. “When I came into the clan, I met her one night. She, uh, waskindto me.”
I don’t breathe as I listen, afraid I’ll miss something. “What was she like?”
“Beautiful.” He clears his throat. “Soft. Too soft for this world.” Those dead eyes hold my stare as he says, “I gave her the drugs to take her life. Senior was slowly killing her. And you?” He drops the blade. “Not having you was torture. So I took mercy on her.”
Everything rushes in my mind. Killian assisting my mother with her suicide. Killian knew who I was. Killian knew my mother.
“Hate me, yet?” he asks, smirking, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.
“I should,” I agree. But I can’t find it in my body to hate him.
He saved her. He gave her peace. It’s hard to reconcile the reaper I know with the kid passing drugs to a hopeless woman in captivity who couldn’t hold her child.
But he did it. There’s a flicker of admiration for him in the depths of my black soul.
A knock on the door pulls him away, and there’s a few hushed words over the blood pounding in my ears. I can only peek, my eyes swollen from his fists, but I notice Finn standing there, Killian gripping the doorway with white knuckles.
He pulls the door open wider. “Watch him. I’ll be back.”
Killian stalks through the halls, and I’m left with Finn, who quietly shuts the door. There’s a finality with the way the lock clicks into place and I will my eyes to widen.
Something is happening. The niggle at the back of my neck sparks like lightning in an electrical storm and I’d be an idiot to ignore it. Later, I’ll think of my mother. Right now, I’m in danger.
Finn looks down at me, smirking. “Poor little kiddie, all tied up.”
My heart stops, the old nickname a frigid burst of cold, chilling me to the bone.
The nickname all the Johns called me. The only name I had until my mother called me Hayes before her death.
“What did you say?” My voice sounds like the growl of an injured animal ready to attack.
“Oh, did you not know I knew that?” He kicks my shin, something snapping, but I refuse to answer. I’m pretty sure hedidn’t break it, but it could be fractured. And it fuckinghurts. “Roman said it was an old nickname. A family name?Kiddie.”
I wince as if hit. It’s nails on a chalkboard, digging into my ears. That name is what I hear in my darkest of nightmares, when I can’t wake up fast enough to stop what they do to me.
Coughing, I push myself upright. If he’s going to kill me, I’m going to stare at him head-on.
“You’re the leak.” I roll my neck. “Pretty cliché, but hey, you do you.”
Leveling a gun at my head, he presses the barrel into my bruised temple. If I wasn’t restrained, bloody and beaten, this would not be happening.
But everything aches and he caught me at the right time.Fucking coward.
“Roman said I’d be his second—and not under somebitch.” God, he even sounds cliché. “All I had to do? Get rid of you and take Collins to him.”
“She’s your cousin,” I say, eyes hard. Distant, but there’s still some blood between them. “You’re just going to give her to a man who breaks women? Who uses children for profit?”
Finn shrugs. That when I know he has no conscience—and why my hackles always rose with him. There’s no soul in his eyes, no compassion. No kindness. He’s as dead as a corpse.
It’s the same eyes as all the men who would visit me. Whether they came smiling with presents, or grinning with glee to hurt me, they all had lifeless eyes, souls gone.
