“And Cordelia?”Bane asked about his biological daughter as he cocked his head to one side.
“Her sentence was death,” Cricket told him quietly.
“Did she fear death coming for her?”he asked after a moment’s pause.
Cricket shook her head.“No, she welcomed it.She was like you and had no soul.”
Bane’s lips tightened and his fingers bit into her already tender wrist.“That may be true, but it doesn’t mean you can say it to my face,” he warned her.He turned his head and searched the faces of the men around him.Then he turned back to her.“As Orrin’s daughter you are family and the Jessins are no one’s slaves.”He growled.
“My last name is Tannis,” Cricket insisted.
“Your last name is Jessin,” Bane corrected her grimly.“You may not want the name but it means something to me and at one point, it meant something to your father too.”He glanced around the room again, then pulled her closer to him and whispered, “Look around you.Do you see their faces?They look to be good men, all of them.”Leaning even closer, his lips touched her ear.“Do you know what I am?What I’ve made a fortune doing?”
Cricket nodded.
“Then you know I am very good at killing people.I kill without remorse and I can kill anyone I choose.Look at them closely my dear.I’m sure in the short amount of time you’ve been here, you have become friends with some of them, have you not?”
Cricket nodded again.
“Then even if you don’t know anything else, remember this one thing.”Bane backed up a bit and stared her in the eye.“I will give you seven days to find what your parents stole from me and return it to me.Seven days from right now, and not a moment longer.If you fail, I will come back here and kill every one of these men and their families.They will all die.This ground will run red with their blood.”
Cricket gasped.“But how the hell am I supposed to find something and return it to you if I don’t know what it is?”
Bane shrugged.“That’s not my problem.It’s yours.”
“You’re insane,” she whispered while shaking her head in disbelief.
Chapter Two
When Mountain was donewith the telling, the room went quiet.
James slowly shook his head.“Bane has mentioned...well, he has said that he treated Cricket horribly and that was one of the very few regrets he had.But from what I found out, he also saved her and all of you by facing that MC who wanted to kill her and destroy all of you.It actually was the reason Bastian found him dying.”
The men in the room all looked spooked by this.
“Bane had said it was because the man was after him, due to Bane’s refusal to do a contract on Cricket.”
