Page 34 of Risky Passion

“What do we do?” My pulse hammered in my ears as the weight of fear pressed down on me.

“Keep ahead of them,” he said, scanning the dense underbrush. “I’ve only got two bullets left. Unless I have a clean shot, I’m not wasting them.”

“Two?” Panic crept into my voice. “Do you have backup?”

“Nope. Just me and Onyx.”

“But . . . but—” A dozen questions raced through my mind, tangling together in a frantic mess. Before I could decide which one to ask, he grabbed my good hand, his grip firm but not rough.

“Stay close,” he growled. “We need to find our way back to my car.”

“Oh, good. You have a car.” I nodded, though my heart pounded so hard it threatened to drown out my thoughts. “Which way?”

He hesitated, glancing around the swamp like he was trying to piece together an invisible map.

Then, with a wry, almost apologetic smile, he said, “That’s what we need to figure out.”

CHAPTER 11

B

Grant's facetwisted with fear as his bandaged stumps shifted against the chair. Unlike Peter, the last man to die in that seat, I hadn't bothered with chains. After all, Grant couldn't run anywhere without his legs or a wheelchair. Peter had taken his final breaths here. Fucking dickhead had thought a simple "sorry" could make up for his ludicrous decision to use Whisper's brother to move that drug shipment last month.

His fuckup had cost us the corn farm. That land had been the perfect façade to hide our manufacturing operation. Years of careful planning had been destroyed because some testosterone-addled idiot thought he knew better than me. I despised men like that, the ones who went rogue, thinking they could outsmart the woman who'd kept this wharf running since Frank Morgan forced me to work here.

Every creaking board, every rusted crane, every salt-worn building: this place pumped through my veins like a second bloodstream. I knew the rarely walked passages, knew which security guards could be bought with a hundred bucks, and where the camera blind spots were. I'd learned every secret while the assholes around me dismissed me as just another paper-pusher in a dingy office.

Come Monday, when my desk would be empty, my boss and every other loser who worked here would realize how much theyneeded me. By then, I would be sipping coconut rum in Fiji, or lounging on a Bali beach, or settled into any one of the dozen units I'd bought over the years and planned to live in until I clocked out for good.

They thought this wharf owned me, but I'd owned them all along.

Pity I wasn’t going to be here to watch the fallout. Let them try to rebuild from the ashes. Without me, they wouldn't even know where to start.

"B, please." Grant's whimper cut through my thoughts, dragging me back from the mental abyss that seemed to swallow me more often lately. Revenge was like that . . . insidious. It crept in, corrupting every memory, crushing the few good ones and replacing them with darkness. With rage. With the endless parade of men who'd tried to break me since I was old enough to remember.

At least twenty men had died by my hand. When today's plan played out, because it would, that number would reach thirty. There was something poetic about ending on such a clean number.

"You know what you have to do." I glared at Grant, taking a long drag on my last cigarette. The smoke streamed out slowly, its familiar burn doing little to calm the irritation under my skin. My last cigarette. Because I hadn't bought another pack before snatching Grant from the hospital. Alice would've laughed, that perfect mix of teasing and scolding reserved just for me and my stubborn habit that began when I was eleven years old.

"Those cancer sticks will be the death of you," she would say as if fate didn't already have me in its crosshairs.

Only fate had taken her instead. My sweet Alice. The woman who had never hurt a soul.

Fucking hell. I exhaled sharply, watching the smoke twist into the dim air.

This was going to be a long day, and the hiccups I’d already hit were lining up to make it stretch even longer.

"Yes. I know what to say,” Grant stammered, his voice trembling. “I’ll do anything you ask."

"I know you will." I pressed the silencer against the bandaged stump of his left leg, watching him squirm. His amputations were a permanentreminder of what he'd already lost. The aim of my gun was a silent warning of how much more he could lose.

"I will. I promise," he whispered, his words barely holding together.

I took one final drag before flicking the cigarette through the large opening in the floorboards, and it hit the dark water below with a brief hiss, like a dying breath. Strange that Grant hadn't asked about that opening yet. Every other man who'd died in that chair had fixated on it as if drowning terrified them more than the bullet I'd promised them.

Funny what men feared in their final moments.

The warehouse was an old relic, built right over the water. Back when this place still had a soul, boats would drift in from the ocean to that opening and get hoisted up for repairs by massive cranes that had long since rusted silent. Now the only things that passed through the floorboards to that dark rectangle of water were the bodies I fed to the sharks.

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