Page 114 of Lesson In Forgiveness

The walls were going back up.

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Grit

An hour later than he intended, Grit slipped his key into the hotel room door and unlocked it. Stepping into the room, he was distracted by the highlights of the interminably long meeting he’d just come from, so it took him a little longer than it should have to realize how still the room felt.

Four hours of deliberation, planning, assignments, and arguments.

Elias and Evander had joined him on his side of the video conference, while Atticus, Jasper, and Anarchy pitched in from Phoenix. Ashford and Darius had tossed in their two cents from wherever the hell they were holed up.

Lots of cooks stirring the fucking pot with differing opinions.

Grit shut and locked the door behind him. “Sorry I’m late, little tiger. How about we order room service and I’ll make it up to you?”

Silence.

“Tabitha?” Concern laced the word as he searched the living room with his eyes, a frown creasing his brow as he found nothing out of place but an older model iPhone on the coffee table. “Tabby?”

He crossed over and picked up the phone, turning it over in his hand before activating it. No security required, the screen lit up on a video ready to play. Perching on the edge of the couch, he reached for his own phone, knowing he was going to be making a call that made a lot of people very unhappy, including himself.

Tabitha wasn’t here. The quiet emptiness spoke fucking volumes.

He pressed the play button and held his breath.

The love of his life appeared on the screen, sitting right about where he was now. A bevy of knives were laid out on the coffee table, along with the Beretta 80X Cheetah she’d bought in Phoenix and a box of ammunition. A coil of wire, brass knuckledusters, and a Taser were among her stash of weapons.

Tabitha herself looked prepared for war. Dressed in black from the neck down, the softness in her face and eyes he’d gotten used to seeing had returned to the stone cold hardness of her killer façade. The blue of her eyes were glacial as they stared balefully into the camera. “Bad, bad boy, Rory. Bad fucking boy.”

Oh shit. The entirety of her had reverted back to the Tabitha who’d confronted him at the construction site so many weeks ago. The rhythm of her speech, the insanity shimmering around her like an aura.

He watched as she absently sharpened one of her blades with slow, loverlike glides of metal along a whetting stone.

Where the hell had she kept all those weapons hidden? He’d locked several away as and when he found them, but there were considerably more than what he’d discovered.

“Did you think I wouldn’t find out?” she asked in a sing-song voice. “Did you and my brothers actually believe I would let the matter drop?” Fury began to gather around her eyes. “Did your little boys’ club really fucking think they could stop me doing my motherfucking job?”

The pass of the blade on the stone grew slightly faster, more irritated.

“I have sources of my own, you know. Perhaps I was stupid enough to let you cloud my mind with sex, but lesson learned. I know who engaged the contracts on Elias, and me. I know he’s here and why he’s come.” Murder flashed in her smile. “He’s going to meet with a big surprise. If you or anyone else gets in my way, you’ll meet the same end. That fucker’s mine.”

“Jesus Christ, Tabitha,” he muttered, swiping his hand over his face.

“Elias needs protecting at all costs. The ramifications of him dying are greater than anything you can imagine. I’m going to be busy hunting, so that falls to you and your little clique of macho buddies.” Deliberately, she drew the freshly sharpened blade across the pad of her thumb. Blood immediately welled and spilled until she stuck it in her mouth and sucked.

When she grinned, her teeth were bloodied, giving her a monstrous look. “Don’t get in my way, Rory. Donaghue deserves everything he gets, and I intend to give him my full attention. A message needs to be sent, and he’s the only one I want to be the messenger. A few extra bodies won’t go amiss, though, so consider this a warning.”

Yeah, he understood that, even as he cursed her seven ways to Sunday.

For a moment, she seemed to struggle with what to say next. “I don’t like secrets, I don’t like people who keep them from me.” Was that sadness in her eyes, lurking beneath the madness? “If I had a heart to break, I think this would do it. Goodbye, Rory.”

She set the knife down and reached over to switch the camera off, but not before he heard the familiar rhyming mutters she couldn’t stop herself from using when she was overwhelmed. “Goodbye, goodbye, said the rabbit as she died. Never once had she lied, but the betrayal gutted her all the same. Now all that’s left is her name—”

The rest of it cut off as her hand filled the screen and pressed the stop button.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” There were so many ways to interpret the rhyme, he didn’t know where to start. Was she indicating she would die trying to stop the Irish mobster, or that Grit was killing her through the perceived betrayal?

Regardless, she’d just thrown a massive goddamn wrench into hours’ worth of carefully laid plans designed to protect both her and Elias, and time was not running in their favor; Donaghue was reported to already be in Denver, keeping his head down while he and the few henchmen he’d picked up in New York and Chicago scoped out the situation and their targets’ locations.

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