Page 135 of Inside the Wicked

I take off my jacket and roll up my black shirtsleeves. I’ve never felt tension like this before, and I’ve been in some huge raids against the city’s most cunning and evil crime lords.

“Go, Rhett. We’ve got this,” Rix coaxes.

I despise having to choose. But there’s nothing more I can assist with here.

“You three get blasted to shit, I’m coming back to fit you together and kill you myself,” I say sharply.

Rix smiles, but it’s heavy, and I fight against every fiber of my being straining to stay. Even though I can’t help, we’re in this mess together no matter what.

All I can repeat in my thoughts as I race to the car is that Rix is right: wedoneed Ana. I don’t think she realizes just how important she is—not just to me, but to all of them and all of this. She’s brought a new light and joy to us all and has been so strong, smart, and so fucking resilient I ache with awe and pride for her every day.

I’m on autopilot as I drive and fit my earpiece in. I flip through channels until I’m listening in to the communication of the team set up to stop Jacob. At the same time, I tap through my phone until I have Ana’s tracker on my car display screen.

“I’m coming, baby,” I mutter, gripping the wheel tighter with my rage to ruin the city for her.

I don’t like where her location is taking me. My blood boils as I press harder on the accelerator. The white gown gave me a riddling bad feeling from the start. He plans to try to marrymy wife.I feel it in my gut with the way he took possession of her tonight.

I haven’t had the chance to give her the ring, wanting it to be perfect, and though she’s agreed to be mine until our bones are dust, I want to keep it as our prize of salvation at the end of all of this.

Getting to the location, I take my gun and an extra loaded magazine before I storm out. Several members of Xoid are nearby, and two of my guys are quick to come out of hiding to flank me.

We bust in there, ready to shoot anything that breathes.

“Whoa, whoa, don’t fucking shoot!”

Adam Sullevan.

“Where the fuck is she?”

It’s just him and a ghostly-pale old priest who holds up his book as if that will stop a bullet passing right through it and into his skull.

“I think we just missed her,” Adam informs me.

Marching down the aisle, I lose my shit, finding Ana’s purse with her phone inside it on the damn seat.

“You might want to see this,” Adam says.

I don’t think I do as I’ll risk detonating. When I glimpse what I expect it to be, my rage is gripped by a moment of confusion when I catch the date on the marriage license. It has to be fake. Forged. Ana would have told me if she’d been forced to make this commitment for whatever reason.

She would have told me, wouldn’t she?

My doubt is cold and cruel. Maybe she thought I would hate her for it.Oh, little bird, a piece of fucking paper means nothing to me.

My foot flies into the desk and it folds. I grip the first chair, slamming it into the wreckage, then the next, until that paper is buried in the fractures of wood. Someone hands me a lighter and a flame catches on the tablecloth, licking along the wood and beginning to devour it. I can’t erase their names side by side onthe marriage license from my mind even as I stare at it going up in flames.

“The priest said they only left a few minutes ago,” Adam says.

I say to one of my guys, “The plan is active. Get our guys to stop their car.”

“On it,” Vixon says.

“I’m coming with you,” Adam calls, jogging up to me as I’m already back outside.

“You’re just another body to worry about,” I snap.

“You got another one of those?” he asks, tipping his chin to my gun.

I pause and raise a brow. “Can you shoot?”

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