Page 169 of The Fire We Make

“Wait – Wait!” the other yelled.

“Bro just tell her–”

Immediately all three of them began talking over each other.

Ace chuckled darkly.

Joy giggled as well as she whirled around, bloody knife in hand with a sinister smile. “Oh look, baby!” she cackled. “Everybody can talk now.”

“I see that, Rose,” Ace grinned like a proud teacher.

Joy tilted her head slightly as she looked down at Marco twitching on the ground. “You were saying?” she asked.

Marco panted, his head lolling as he put his untouched hand over his stab wound.

“We wasn’t the ones calling the shots!” he sobbed.

Ace stepped forward slowly. He grabbed him by the battered face, forcing eye contact. “I know that dummy, I wanna know who the fuck was.”

The men hesitated, their eyes all flicking to Marco.

“I don’t have the patience my man has,” she snapped. “Answer him or I’m collecting more fingertips. Or maybe I’ll take another kind of tip,” she said, motioning to his groin with her knife.

Ace couldn’t help but cringe.

“Isaac! It was Isaac,” one of the lieutenants cried.

“Shut the fuck up,” Marco grunted.

Ace stilled, then turned to Von. Confirmation that what the video had implied was exactly what it looked like made Ace pace in anger.

He ran his tongue over his teeth as his mind worked to decipher how Isaac had done this under his nose.

“Keep talking,” Ace demanded.

When he didn’t open his mouth, Ace sent a bullet into his forehead, watching with a blank expression as his body hit the ground with a thud. He fired another shot into the other man’s chest.

Only Marco remained.

He licked his dry and bloodied lips, then cleared his throat. Ace could see it had finally sunk in for him that he wasn’t leaving alive no matter what.

“He came to me a few weeks after I was arrested,” Marco started. “Said all the shit going on was because you weren’t fit to lead and that he already had some shit in motion to get you out the way.”

Von scoffed behind them. “And you just went with it? You easy as fuck.”

Marco scoffed through the pain. “Shit… looked like a better option than y’all.”

Ace moved fast, grabbing Marco by the front of his shirt and dragging him up despite the damage to his thigh.

“You think I’m the problem?” Ace growled in his face.

His voice dropped lower, more dangerous, as the betrayal set in.

“I gave you a seat at my table and all it takes is one nigga getting in your ear and you ready to murk me.”

Ace shoved him back to the ground.

“Remy, are we able to get the messages and calls from his phone?” Ace asked.