Page 14 of A Trap So Flawless

“I don’t know,” he moans. “I don’t know!”

“Oh, hush now,” I say, the words a vicious caress. “You can think harder, can’t you, Jimmy?”

I close the distance between us in one step, pressing the point of my knife to the base of his left pinky finger. It’s like the knife is live with an electric current. Shaw’s whole body reacts, spasming so hard against the bindings that the chair bucks a couple of centimetres across the grey floor.

“I used to sleep on the floor of a warehouse just like this,” I say to no one in particular. “It’s where my grandda found me.”

Getting no sleep is making me fucking chatty, I guess. Sentimental.

Or maybe it’s Ireland that’s making me sentimental.

I experience a sudden, choking throb of feeling, so forceful I literally don’t breathe for a second. It’s not nostalgia. It’s not grief for my grandda.

It’s longing.

Jesus fucking Christ. Darragh Gowan. Fucking longing.

I want to touch her skin. Want to bury my face in her hair. Her pussy.

I want to know what she’s doing right now.

“Rowan,” I growl, withdrawing my knife and giving Shaw a brief moment of reprieve. “Check if there have been any updates from Tommy.”

My soldier Tommy is still in Montréal, sending me updates on Valentina’s activities. So far, she’s mostly been accompanying her parents and cousin around town, alternating between dress fittings and schmoozing with some mafia bozo named Salvatore Di Mauro.

Rowan nods and strides to the corner of the dark space. Unzipping the bag there, he sifts through ropes and plastic and cleaning supplies and pulls out his phone. He unlocks it, raises the screen to his face…

And quietly swears.

“What is it?” Hot urgency scrapes in my throat. I’m already moving towards him, my pulse more a thrum than a beat.

Rowan doesn’t speak. He merely turns his phone around so that I can see the screen.

At first, I want to ask him why he’s wasting his time showing me a picture of some bride with blonde hair, walking down the steps of a church on a street I don’t recognize. Why the ever-loving fuck would this warrant my attention right now?

But Rowan doesn’t move. His stoic silence makes me take a second look.

And then?

Then I see her eyes.

Eyes that have fought me, begged me, searched for me, hated me. Eyes that punctured something in me, just like her pretty fingernails, the first time they met my own.

But it doesn’t make sense that those are Valentina’s eyes, in Valentina’s face. Because the body they’re attached to is in a wedding dress, not for a fitting appointment at a shop, but for the actual fucking wedding.

A wedding that looks like it’s already happened, judging by the fact she’s leaving the church…

On the arm of another man.

My fiancée has gone and married someone else. Waited until I was out of the country, waited until I was distracted dealing with the one thing important enough to temporarily take me away from her. And it isn’t just her. I know she can’t marry anyone without her dear daddy organizing the entire shebang. There’s Vinny just behind her in the photo, now that I look closer.

I got him Halifax. I offered him my support against the bikers and the bratva. I gave him exactly what he asked for, exactly what he needed, all while I lost sleep and money and time. I made myself his fucking dog.

For her. All for her.

If this was a trap, it was a damn good one. I walked right into it and happily left all my weapons at the door.

No, I didn’t walk. I was dragged. By those long, beautiful, bloodied fingernails. She dug them in and that was it. I was snared. It was too late.

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