Page 97 of The Brutal Arrangement

But he’d said the same thing. My father was telling me—no, instructing me—to kill her?

“What are you talking about?” I demanded it in such a loud roar that it seemed to silence my father like it was a sonic boom blasting through the air.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I shouted, shaking him for good measure to snap him out of this eerie stillness he’d shifted to.

“Damon.”

I whipped my head up to watch my grandmother stagger into the room. With my father facing forward as I held him securely against my chest so he wouldn’t hurt himself in trying to strike me, we both witnessed her enter the room. She was older, but fit. Nothing should explain her staggering like she’d rushed and was out of breath.

The closer she came, the clearer I saw the redness and swelling on her face.

“What the fuck is going on?”

“He…” She shook her head, glancing warily at Father. “He…”

“Did he hit you?” In a brief moment of sickening confusion, I dreaded that Father had meant my grandmother when he accused a woman of being a spying bitch. But that didn’t make sense either.

“Kill that fucking Kozlov spy,” Father growled, his voice so low that I almost missed it. “I am ordering you, son, to kill that spying bitch.”

Lucy!

My instincts were right. He must have somehow heard Anton’s message and he believed it.

“Hold him.” I shoved my father toward the guard, giving him a lethal stare that suggested he not challenge me. It wasn’t easy to witness our former boss so weak and clueless, confused and crazed. But this was a matter of life or death—the life of my love.

“Where is she?” I yelled at my grandmother, having no doubt my father had hit her as well.

“I tried…” She hurried to catch up to me. “I tried to reason with him, and he struck out?—”

“Where is she?” I screamed.

“Downstairs.”

I tensed, sucking in a deep breath at her reply.

Of all the places in this building where Lucy didn’t belong, that was the first one. She never would fit in the basement where I mutilated and tortured our enemies to get intel. Never!

“I couldn’t tell what was going on,” she said, following me toward the stairs. Fuck the elevator. It’d take too long.

“I heard the commotion of him yelling and accusing her and I just, I was just so confused. I didn’t know what was going on!”

“You know she’s my wife!” I didn’t stop rushing for the door that would take me down. “You know she’s my fucking wife!”

“But can you trust her?”

I skidded to a stop only long enough to glower at her, shocked that she’d ask me something so stupid. She could be a blue blood and act like an idiot about letting others into our family, but she was not keeping me from my wife for a second longer.

Just the thought of her in the basement, in the dungeon, sickened me and pissed me off to a degree of fury I’d never experienced before.

Dashing down the stairs, I hurried with all my might, racing so furiously because even one second was too long for her to be down here, scared and alone.

I slammed open the last door to the dungeon area. One look at the guard down there confirmed that he wasn’t going to hurt her. “Damon, thank fuck you’re here. I was so confused and I didn’t know why Grigory was saying?—”

“Where is she?” I growled, striding toward him.

“In the cleanest cell,” he replied.

“In a fucking cell?” I roared. “You put my wife in a motherfucking cell?”

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