Page 33 of Pucking Unhinged
She tips her head back against the cedar wall, letting the steam bead in her short hair. I follow her lead, leaning back until the heat seeps into my bones. For a moment, it almost feels like I’m relaxing.
Then a male voice slices through it. “Who do you like?”
The question shatters the bubble.
My entire body goes rigid. Just as planned, four men stand in the doorway of the private sauna, their shapes distorted through the thin veil of steam. They step inside, and I instantly recognize three of them. The other one makes my stomach coil. It’s the man who forced Tristan to hurt me.
The Moretti triplets are staring at me in my sweaty robe, and I know one thing in this moment.
Tristan didn’t think about the fact that I’d be undressed for this, and he’s going to be pissed.
TRISTAN
The door to the sauna cracks against the wall as I shove it open, steam spilling out like smoke. My father stumbles ahead of me, his polished shoes slipping on wet wood, and I drive the barrel of the gun I borrowed from Elijah harder into his back. He jerks when I do it, but he doesn’t resist. He knows better. I’m sure in his deluded brain he thinks there’s a way out of this, but there’s not. It’s a done deal, and I’m ready to move on now that I know the truth. I think that I thought I’d be angrier, but really I’m just relieved.
The Moretti triplets are already in the room, and Elijah’s grip is tight on the bastard who carjacked us. He’s bloody, lips split, staggering to stay on his feet, but he’s alive. Conscious. Afraid. That’s all I asked for.
Revenge is going to be bitter for him and sweet for my angel, Winter.
My gaze snags on her, just checking to make sure she’s okay. I didn’t want to let her out of my sight for a moment, but I also didn’t want to risk my father grabbing her or shooting her in order to get me to back off. He knows she’s my only weak spot, and that I would do literally anything for her.
Winter’s wrapped in a robe, thank God, not one of those thin towels that barely cover anything. Relief slices through me, jagged, because if she’d been standing here exposed, I’d have had no choice but to slaughter everyone in this room…friends or not. No one gets to see her like that.
Bianca is delayed in her shrieking, but she’s demanding to know why I’ve got my father at gunpoint, and I have half a mind to just shoot her in the head too. All of this unnecessary shit is keeping me from being alone with Winter, and that’s pissing me off. She’s shrill and useless, just like her mother and brother.
“Let him go, Tristan. What are you doing? This is such a violation,” Bianca says in an indignant tone like we’ve somehow inconvenienced her instead of the other way around.
“We know you’re fucking Vale, and no one cares especially not him,” Elijah cuts her down with a snapping tone. “Shut the fuck up.”
“What is happening?” She asks in this tiny, whiny voice while she looks at my father with big doe eyes. I guess that’s the tone she used when she thought she was manipulating him. He won’t even look at her, which is typical of him. He has no use for her now. He was using her for sex, but I know exactly what he planned on doing with her when the time was right.
Bianca opens her mouth to scream, and Noah doesn’t waste a word on her. He walks over and grabs her face, pressing his fingers into the sweet spot on her neck and incapacitates her with such ease that I think I need to get him to teach me how to do that. I’d obviously never use that skill on Winter. I love when she talks, she fascinates me. Hayden and Callum, on the other hand, I’d love to have an off switch for them. Bianca folds instantly, limp as a ragdoll, and Noah props her against the cedar bench and steps back, calm as if he’d just tied his shoes.
I shove my father into the far corner. He grips the wood, trying to stand tall, but he knows I have the upper hand, and thatkeeps him small. “Come here,” I bark at Winter, and she comes without hesitation. I unzip my hoodie with one hand and toss it to her without lowering the gun. She pulls it over her robe, whispering, “I didn’t think of it either.”
My scowl deepens. Ninety percent of it is rage that she’s here at all in front of men and not covered from head to toe in fabric. The other ten percent is the fact that I have to breathe the same air as my father and the man he paid to traffic her.
We didn’t put all the pieces to the puzzle together until an extensive call with all three of the Moretti brothers this morning, and Sebastian even joined for a little while in between his busy schedule of rugby and stalking that poor girl.
My father finally turns his head, sneering, his voice thick with disdain. “You couldn’t let it go, could you?”
I jut the gun out, indicating that I have no issue with just shooting him dead right now. “Talk if you want to, but this ends one way. I already know everything. I know about Mom, I know about the debt. I know about the businesses that you’re trying to sell off. And I certainly know about this little gopher and why he’s so fucking hard to track down.” I point my other hand at the man who laughed when I chose to hurt Winter myself instead of letting him and his lackeys take her with them. Thank fuck I didn’t risk it. She’d never be found, not when the Black Crown Society is involved. “He’s a fucking nobody. He’s not important to anyone, and that’s why they use him to run their little schemes.”
“You couldn’t think past your dick,” Dad snarls, voice rising with every word. “And that’s going to be your downfall. Winter was nothing more than a pawn. She was meant for the Onyx Dominion, and in return, they would kill your mother. I would get the payout from her life insurance. I’d have the cash to dig myself out of the mess I was in. But you couldn’t let it happen, could you? You wouldn’t just let her go. Every time I thoughtI had an opening, you were there. Protecting her like she was yours. And even in the end, when the plan was fucking foolproof you still wouldn’t let her go. You fucking rap–”
“Your son saved my life!” Winter screams at him, and I glance at her. She rarely loses her cool ever. She’s strong, resilient, and I’m so fucking proud of her. “You’re not going to live past the next few minutes, but I want you to know that despite how awful you are, and probably always have been, I don’t hate you. Because of your twisted plan and the reason you fostered me, I met Tristan. He’s my entire life, and I’d go through all of it again just to be able to know him and love him the way I do.”
It’s clear to anyone who knows Winter or me how much we care about each other, how much we cling to one another, how bonded we are. But neither one of us has ever said that we love each other. I am in love with her in an earth-shattering way that someone like my father couldn’t comprehend. This is just the first step in proving that to her, and I’ll spend the rest of my life making sure she knows that.
All three Moretti brothers’ heads snap toward my girl, and my father doesn’t speak. He’s just glaring at her. He hates her because she was kind, and sweet, and just what I needed. If she had been someone else, if she had been like Bianca, his plan would have worked because I wouldn’t have given a fuck about her. He wouldn’t have had to plan a carjacking simply because I would have never been around to protect her. But she was mine the moment I saw her, and he never had a chance to take her from me.
I would move mountains to keep her safe, and he never thought that would have been a possibility.
“She’ll ruin your life, son. She already has if you’re willing to kill your own father for her. What will Sebastian think?” He’s grasping at straws here.
My vision tilts with red at his words. I already knew everything he’s just said, but that doesn’t make me any less livid. I see Winter tense beside me, and that makes rage tear through me. “She is mine,” I roar, my voice is loud enough it feels like it should be shaking the goddamn walls. “She’s always been mine. You never had a shot. And for the record, Sebastian gave me his blessing to torture you and kill you slowly. He knows what a piece of utter shit you are.”
My father’s lips curl into something like a smile, smug and ugly even on the floor with a gun in his spine. “You think you understand, but you don’t. The Dominion agreed to take her as payment, and I didn’t deliver. Do you know what kind of backlash that got me? And you killed two of their men on top of it.” He huffs at me like he isn’t about to be eating a fucking bullet. “Do you know what they do to the girls? They strip them down. Break them. Degrade them until they’re crawling. And if she hadn’t performed after all of that…” He shrugs, like I’m going to see his point. “She would’ve been discarded. Killed. All for nothing. That’s what she was meant for. But instead you wanted to drag her around like a fucking safety blanket.”
