Page 108 of A Captive Situation

If her hands hadn’t been tied to the chair, I had a feeling she would’ve been giving the phone a middle finger. She retorted, “Yeah. You do that.”

“Worthing.” His voice dipped, showing some of his anger.

There it was. It was a brief glimpse, but there was the monster everyone had been talking about. In just that word, I could hear how he was capable of ordering our deaths even though he had no clue who one of those people was.

Jake met my gaze, frowning, before he took the phone off speaker and took it into the other room. I heard before he closed the door, “Let’s talk.”

“Don’t let it fool you,” Blake said.

All the stress lines in her face, the bags under her eyes, the shadows and ghosts, all of it suddenly was on full display. She wasn’t hiding from me at all. Her shoulders sagged and her head fell down. She didn’t have the energy to keep her mask up.

She added, grimacing, “He’s being all smooth now because he doesn’t want your man to know how pissed he is, but trust me. When you see him, he’ll let you see the evil inside of him. He is furious. I know what you said, but let it go. I’ll survive. I always do. You need to focus on yourself. Run. Right now.” She nodded to the door. “Your man did this. I’ll cover for you, tell Creighton you tried to help me. He’ll take you off the contract, but it’s over for your man. Creighton won’t forget this. No matter what, your man is toast. Glad you got dicked down good last night because you need to save yourself.”

That impending doom just exploded inside of me.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Jake

“You have my attention, Worthing. What do you want?”

“Done with the niceties?”

“You have something of mine. I want it back.”

It.

I smirked. “A nice way to think of your girl.”

“She’s mine. Whatthe fuckdo you want, Jacob?”

Fine. He was showing his cards. I would too. “I want my name and Sawyer’s off your website. I want the contract dissolved.” He was quiet on his end and I laughed over it, harshly. “Yeah. I’m fully fucking aware that you own that website and your team runs the operations. Get my name off that list, and Sawyer’s. Then we’ll talk when you get your ‘it.’”

“Sawyer’s your woman now?”

I stilled, not liking the smugness coming from him. “She’s a civilian. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She got caught up in all of this and none of this is her doing. You kill innocent people? All the hype about you and that was one thing I hadn’t heard about you, you and your fucking modern-day Robin Hood type of reputation? It’s allbullshit. That’s nice to hear. You let her go down with a bullet and I will make it my last mission in life to destroy your ass. I have a feeling there’s a whole cult following that might rethink their brainwashed beliefs about you. I won’t get through to all of them, but I’ll make a dent. I’m sure of it.”

He said her name and I went red. The rage took over.

Of course he knew her. Of course he knew her name. But Sawyer was mine.

I said briskly, “Our names are off the list with a promise tokeepthem off the list and I’ll hand your girl over to you. It’s as simple as that.”

“Except it’s not.”

Fuck.

He was too smooth in his retort. Too smooth. Too confident.

My hand tightened around the phone. This wasn’t going to be good, whatever he was going to say.

“I have no problem removing your Sawyer’s name from the list. In fact, it’s done. You can check yourself. I won’t add her name again, but what I’ll do instead is wipe out her family. Every single one of them. All her aunts. All her cousins. Every last person she calls family, including the new cousin she met on her romp around the city. Even the fiancé who dumped her, the best friend who married him in her place, and the child in that woman’s belly. I have a policy where innocents are left out of my business, but the second you took your woman from that police station, you brought her into this world. You made her my business. She’s your weakness and if you don’t bring Blake to me, I will burn the world down around your woman and let her live in its ashes. It’s your choice.”

I glanced at the closed door before turning away, my gut shifting.

When I spoke, I didn’t hesitate and I didn’t let emotion slip through because my cousin was a ruthless fucker.

Got it. I was too. “Do it.”

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