Page 85 of Chaos Crown

A grin teased my lips. “Don’t we all?”

“Come on, Quinn,” Legend said. “I know you’re dying to monologue. Get it off your chest.”

“Nice try, but I won’t tell you anything about them. You can find out who they are when we pay you a visit in the middle of the night.”

Blank faced, Cairo drifted off me to Legend.

“Two minutes.”

“Two minutes,” Cairo repeated. “Who talks first?”

I didn’t speak, but Davidson did. The Bedlam Boys were treated to all the ways they were exactly like the Men of Honor—if we were as gutless and pathetic. He explained in detail that Cairo’s father was a lousy, useless drunk, and his mother was a gold-digging whore. Josephine Banks was a man-eating, dry-cunt bitch who dropped Roan out of her womb like a sow in a field, then continue climbing the ambitions ladder without giving him another thought.

Marjorie Creed, the fake mayor of a town that wasn’t a town, was even more corrupt than Davidson said he could ever be. And she was a good lay.

“—no wonder your father crossed an ocean to get back to that pussy,” Davidson taunted. “And don’t get me started on Eileen Stone. She puts on a good show—the prim and proper judge. But the lady has a nasty kink for outdoor sex. I’ve caught her and Jack—”

The phone chimed. “Time’s up,” Jacques announced.

Roan dropped the rope. Without pause, breath, or hesitation, Cairo kicked Davidson square in the chest.

“Ooof!” Davidson flew back... and plummeted.

“Ahhhh!”

Davidson and my screams echoed through the canyon.

“What the fuck did you do?!”

“I said you had until his screams faded to talk,” Cairo snarled. He bore down on me. “Want to test if I’m bluffing again?”

“No, no, no.” I thrashed, flinging my body away from him. Bruised and broken, I flopped helplessly on the ground—getting nowhere. He wasn’t supposed to kill him. He wasn’t supposed to! Who were these guys? We thought we had to kidnap his father to force them to kill, but no. They weren’t just enforcers and thugs.

Looked like they too let their dark side out to play a long time ago.

“No! Stay away from me!”

“Names, Quinn.” His boot dropped on my hip. “Or down you go.”

White blotted out my mind. The words flew so quickly from my mouth, they tumbled over each other. “Ja-Jackson Hyde! Thea W-Wood! Lincoln Roberts! Everett Cooper! Including me, that’s everyone, I swear. I swear!”

Cairo crouched next to me. I curled in on myself, trembling. I joined the Men of Honor to be around people like me. Have a little fun. Make a lot of money. Take back what once belonged to my family. I did not join to die.

Every other sheep in this cow-dung town could be sacrificed, but not me.

He reached for me.

“No. No!”

“Shh,” Cairo crooned. “I believe you, Quinn. Hyde, Wood, Roberts, and Cooper. Which one of them goes by Dante?”

“It’s Lincoln. He took over after he killed Zoe. She was changing our purpose,” I rushed. “Said why not make a little money on the side by selling our services? But then she took a job from the Crows to kill the Bedlam Boys, even though we still needed you. She had to go.”

“Do you still need us? To kill Steven Ellis and his sons?”

I tossed my head against the dirt. “We could do that whenever. No, we need you because you are your mothers’ only vulnerability, and hers,” I said, glaring at Ivy. “It always comes back toher.”

Cairo just nodded, accepting this. “How exactly are they going to use us to make our mothers vulnerable? Are they going to get a black letter on their doorstep like my father did?”

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