“Egan,” I say softly. Thana abruptly turns to fend him off, but Egan moves like smoke, and he’s so much faster than her, he’s already at her back. “Don’t kill her,” I warn when he wraps one claw-tipped hand around her suddenly delicate-looking throat. “I’m going to let her watch the sunrise.”
Thana’s eyes widen. I can’t tell if it’s my threat she’s reacting to, or Egan crushing her windpipe, but I still enjoy her expression.
“You said you didn’t care enough about me to kill me,” she croaks out while uselessly trying to pull Egan’s hand off her throat.
“You still don’t matter. However, I don’t have the time or the desire to keep an eye on you when I have more important shit to deal with. I may be convinced to give you a quick death though,” I offer.
“Burning in the sun is quick,” she grates out.
“But waiting for it, staked to the ground, won’t be. Then there are those long seconds when your skin will be melting, and the scent of your own burning flesh will lodge in your nose and throat, becoming the last things you will taste and smell. You’ll wish it could be faster then.”
Thana’s eyes narrow, but she asks, “What do you want?” She’s not accepting her fate, she’ll fight until the very end, but it won’t make a difference.
I raise my eyes to Egan’s and lift my chin. He releases his punishing grip on her throat but continues to loom over her. If she makes one move, he might kill her, and the way she looks up at him makes me think she knows it too. “Did you spread the lies about the trials?” I question.
“No,” she replies quickly while rubbing her neck.
“Did you, or anyone you know, have anything to do with what happened to Reaper and Brass?”
“What happened to Reaper?” she asks with what I might call concern, and then she adds an emphatic, “No!”
“What about my father?” Everyone knows what he was to me now, so there’s no point in avoiding the truth. It doesn’t hurt less to call him Harlow.
“You think I knew he was going to off himself?” Her tone is incredulous. I might actually believe her, but I still can’t trust her.
“What about you thr—two,” I amend when I remember one is dead. “Do you have anything to add?”
“She never said anything about the boss or Reaper,” one pipes up.
“She just hated you,” the other adds.
I sigh. “It’s too bad you let petty bullshit like me kicking your ass color your opinion of me and how I would handle the club.” I nod my head to Egan again. Thana’s chest bows out, and her mouth opens, but no sound escapes.
She blinks once and manages to take a shuffling step forward, but then she drops to her knees before falling face-first on the floor. More blood for someone else to clean up paints the floor. There’s a gaping hole in her back, where Egan reached inside her and snapped her spine. I look up at him. I thought he would have taken her heart, but apparently, he didn’t like that idea.
I plant my hand on my hip. “I said quick,” I chastise when I realize she’s only incapacitated and not dead. With his eyes locked on mine, he brings his foot down on the back of her neck, creating an audible crunch as he twists his foot, and her head lolls to the side, misshapen and mangled. That might have been a tiny bit quicker than the sun, but at least she didn’t see it coming.
“Clean up the mess,” I direct her two remaining minions. I don’t feel the need to remind anyone that this same fate awaits them if they fuck up.
CHAPTER21
Modeus
Lore excusedherself to the bathroom. She’s hurting, and there isn’t shit I can do to make it better. I don’t know why her pain is so much harder to manage than my own. I wish I would have been the one to kill the vampire, then maybe I would feel like I was doing something.
When I think about her screaming for a healer, my stomach flips up into my throat. I could smell the death on her before I even reached the porch.
“It was a clean cut. Some kind of blade was used,” Cyrus says, proving I’m not the only one still dwelling on what we saw. “No defensive wounds, but it’s hard to imagine him standing still and letting someone take off his head.”
“Maybe they took him by surprise.” It was just a short while ago when we watched Egan reach inside a vampire, snap her spine, then crush her neck and head. There was nothing she could do to defend herself either.
“Maybe, I’m just making observations. He slept through getting eviscerated,” Cyrus notes, already moving on to the next victim.
I’m right there with him. It didn’t even look like Brass so much as twitched. “It makes about as much sense as Harlow killing himself,” I remark.
Lore
Deekhil is waitingfor me when I exit the office bathroom after shifting back to my other form. “What do you have?” I question as I take my seat behind the desk.
