Page 4 of The King's Pawn

There was a lot of wrong in his grumbling sentence, but one part of it had laughter bubbling inside. I shouldn’t laugh, but it seemed as good a reaction as any.

I dropped my ass on my heels and chuckled. Of all the shit I had done, Killian was going to kill me for something Ihadn’t. Story of my life. I should have gotten higher, partied harder, I should have fucked the Southies girl, even if that would have been impossible. But he didn’t know that. None of them did. If I’d told my father I was gay, this whole scene would have played out years ago.

“You think this is funny?” Killian asked, his cruel mouth half sneering. Maybe he didn’t have nice eyes after all. Maybe that was the coke I’d taken earlier screwing with how I saw him. “You understand what’s happening here, right?”

I snorted. “Oh sure, I understand.”

His face scrunched up. “I’ve never had someone laugh at a gun in their face before.”

I might have laughed harder, but panic began to ruin the hilarity. I reallywasgoing to die here. “How long have you wanted to do this? You’ve always hated me. I saw it in your eyes every time you looked through me.”

“Stop talking.”

“Is it me you hate or the fact my father always sent you to clean up my shit?”

He pushed in, and the end of the gun nudged between my lips.

“Stop. Talking.”

I swallowed, tasting metal. It would be quick, if he tilted the gun’s angle. Not so quick if he shot me through the throat. I didn’t have words now anyway. What else was there to say? Breathing hard through my nose, I tried to keep the pieces of myself together, but the longer I stared at his face, the more I trembled, and the more I wanted to beg. I didn’t even blame him. How fucked up was that? Killian didn’t want me dead; this wasn’t personal. It never was with him.

I wished we’d known each other, wished he’d seen more of me than the drunken, high, boss’s son he kept pulling from the fire every Friday night.

He pulled the gun free. “Fuck.”

I gasped and swallowed again. He’d lowered the gun at his side. Wait… was he…

He jerked the gun up again, pointed at my face.

“Wait!” I raised my hands and ducked my head, expecting the shot, expecting these to be my last seconds. But it didn’t come. I peeked through my fingers and found Killian’s glare on me, as cold as ever, but when my gaze caught his, a flicker of something softened his hard eyes.

Wait, what was this?

He lowered the gun, and with a snarl, he swooped in, grabbed my arm, hauled me to my feet, and shoved me back along the tracks we’d made in the snow. “Move.”

I kept my hands up and stumbled on. What was happening? Was he going to shoot me in the back? No, or he’d have done it already. Was he taking me somewhere else? “What’s happening?”

“Do not say another fucking word.”

“Yeah, but?—”

“Get in the car!”

I fumbled with the door handle and dropped inside, shivering—only now noticing how cold it was. Killian threwhis muscular bulk behind the wheel, gunned the engine, and twisting to glare through the rear window, he launched the car backwards down the road. Okay, so he wasfurious. But in an unexpected turn of events, I was alive. So there was that. Maybe all this had been a warning? Make it seem as though he was going to kill me so I quit causing trouble for the family?

He fishtailed the car onto the paved road, rammed it into gear, and roared the car onward. We weren’t going back the way we’d come. So we weren’t going home, to Boston. That wasn’t so good. If it had been a warning, he’d be taking me home. Maybe something spooked him about that spot in the woods. Maybe I was still about to die, but somewhere else?

Thirty minutes later, he pulled the car off the main road, down a snow-dusted dirt road, hit theSNOWbutton on the Lexus, and bumped us another ten minutes into the woods until the headlights swept over a grim-looking cabin.

I peered through the windshield. “What the fuck is this?”

He threw me a warning glare. “Get out.” He left the car and marched through the headlight beams, coming around to my side.

I wasn’t getting out. No way. If he wanted to kill me, he’d have to do it in the car. No way was I going into that murder cabin.

He yanked open the door. “Out.”

“No.”