Page 11 of Tainted Blood
I don’t have a damn thing to prove.
Lifting my arm, I aim my gun at his head. “Fire the last,” I say coolly.
As I prepare to pull the trigger and send the East Coast up in flames, Rocco crashes into me from behind, knocking my aim sideways—his hurried movements sending a spray of crimson down the front of my tux.
“Wait!” he hisses.
“For what?” I roar.
“He’s talking!”
“He always talks. Bastard never shuts up.” I aim again, only this time he steps into the line of fire.
“Santi, listen! Listen! He’s saying her name.”
Glancing down, I watch as Sanders’s pale lips mouth a name that, in six days, has branded itself across my heart. Right away, I’m dropping to my knees, my face so close to him I can smell the death on his breath. “Where is she?” I snarl. “Where’s my wife?”
His voice is faint, strangled by blood and weakened by the bullets of an unknown enemy. “Run,” he rasps. “Run, Thalia. Fucking run…”
“Where is she, you son of a bitch?” I yell, grabbing handfuls of his crimson-stained shirt. “What happened to her?”
“Santi…”
I turn to find RJ on his knee beside me, holding out a diamond engagement ring and a gold band.
Both abandoned.
Both stained with blood.
“They were under the car,” he says, with a grim expression.
Mi amada.
Steeling my jaw, I tear my gaze away from my broken wedding vows and back to the dying man in front of me. I’d love to send the asshole who branded his name on my sister to his grave, but as long as his heart still beats, then so does mine.
Rising to my feet, I shove my gun back in its holster. “Take him downstairs.”
Without another word, I head back inside. Thalia is out there somewhere, and I’ll stop at nothing to find her.
And when I do…?
God help the motherfucker who took her from me.
Chapter Two
Thalia
The lark is back again.
It must be nearly dusk.
I watch as the little brown bird hops his usual path along the alabaster stone ledge outside our prison cell. With no clocks in this room, he’s all we have to stop time sliding into a black hole.
He’s here at daybreak.
He’s here at the end of the day when it’s our hope that is breaking.
The lark pauses suddenly, cocking his head to listen to the blood-curdling screams rising up from the castle’s grounds below us. It’s an ugly sound that not even his sweet lullaby can remedy—a sound that has haunted me, ever since we arrived at this hellhole yesterday.