Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 91438 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 457(@200wpm)___ 366(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91438 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 457(@200wpm)___ 366(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
He’d done it before.
Many, many times.
“Then you kept ruining my life by cleaning up my club, making me lose all that money. My gambling debts got out of hand, man, and every fucking day, every day, I worried about how I would pay those fuckers back. You did kind of solve that for me by sending me to prison, though. And I thought it wouldn’t be half bad, except my parole was denied time after time, and I finally realized that something wasn’t quite right. So I had some people start to dig for me. And what do I find when my people started digging into my club? I found you…the fucking president… living the high life while I suffered day in and day out,” Shovel hissed, pushing his face into mine.
My body locked, and I didn’t move a single millimeter back.
I had no room to move back from him. But mainly, it was because I wasn’t going to flinch away from him. I didn’t flinch.
Not from him, not from anyone.
“You ruined your own life, you piece of shit. You could’ve stayed just like the rest of us, but you chose to make a fucking mess out of everything. I cleaned your shit up. What I didn’t do, but should’ve done, was fucking kill you. Then I wouldn’t be in this predicament right now,” I growled.
Shovel smiled.
“You know, I watched you drive to Huntsville,” he said lightly. “Followed behind you the entire way.”
I froze, eyes lifting up to look directly into his eyes.
“Yeah?” I asked, voice steady.
It didn’t reveal outwardly what I was feeling, which was anything but calm internally.
“Yep. So I did some research into why you were there. Found four men that are fucking pissed as hell that they lost their jobs over a stupid piece of ass,” he said lightly. “So I invited them back with me.”
Then the doors behind Shovel opened, four men walking into the room.
Each one had a box in their hands.
“And they’ve got some entertainment for you. Each time you fail to show a reaction to what they’re showing you,” Shovel said, pulling out a lead pipe. “I’m going to introduce you to this lead pipe. And we’re going to make you talk even if we have to kill you.”
I doubted that.
It’d take a divine intervention to get me to react to anything.
Because as long as I knew they didn’t have Sawyer, then they had nothing.
She was safe and that was all that mattered.
“This is the picture I took of our first encounter,” the first man said.
He had blonde shaggy hair that fell over his head in a fucking mop of messiness. He had brown eyes that were dark, but not cold. Not nearly cold enough to get past my defenses.
The picture, however, wasn’t anything I wanted to see.
“We took pictures of her every day for eight years,” the man continued.
I clenched my jaw tightly as he showed me the first picture.
And I literally tasted blood as I bit into my tongue to keep from giving this creep a piece of my mind.
“Well, if that one doesn’t move you…how about this one?”
Guess I didn’t have the iron-willed control like I thought was the last thing I thought before a seething blind rage clouded over my eyes, and the only thing I saw was a broken Sawyer being violated by the pervert in front of me.
And although I went down hard as Shovel’s lead pipe came down on the temple of my head, arms still tied above my head, I took pride in the fact that the man standing in front of me now had a knife wound in his heart courtesy of the one that slid out of my boot.
“Ohh,” Shovel said, shaking his head. “That was very, very stupid.”
Head pounding and the only thing holding me up was the rope around my wrists, I said, “Yeah, yeah, motherfucker.”
The last thing I heard before I succumbed to unconsciousness was, “Tie his fuckin’ feet.”
***
Sawyer
“I have this note…” I said, handing Sebastian the note.
His brother Sam was in the room with him, and they were both staring at Silas’ table with all of Silas’ open cases laid out in front of them.
Sam and Sebastian looked up, their eyes so much like their father’s that my heart ached a little bit.
“What note?” Sam snapped.
I held it out to him.
“What is it?” He asked, eyes scanning it quickly.
“Well, the other day when Silas and I were in bed…”
“Is what you’re saying pertinent to what we’re going through right now, or can we skip the life story?” Sam snapped.
I narrowed my eyes at him, but it was Cheyenne who set him straight.
“Sam, I realize you’re worried, but being a dick to the woman isn’t going to help. Get the fuck over it and let her speak,” Cheyenne growled at her husband.
Sam’s eyes closed, and when they opened again I realized that he really was worried, and covering his worry up with a bad attitude.
Just like his father did.
“Go on. I’m sorry,” he said gruffly.
I shrugged. “Anyway, we were talking about gambling for some reason, and it kind of escalated to whether we actually had any ‘bookies’ in the area. When he said yes, I asked him to tell me where I could find one, jokingly, in case I ever needed one. And he told me all I would have to do was to look forlorn while gambling at the poker table at The Horseshoe.”
Sebastian nodded. “Okay.”
“So it kept going from there, but I finally got a serious answer out of him that a bookie’s name in the area was ‘Black Jack.’ How a lot of people still owed him a ton of money and that he was a not man to cross. He said he’d seen Shovel nearly beaten to death over his gambling debts while he was cleaning up the club,” I explained. “When I asked him whether or not Shovel still owed this man money, he said that he did. And if Shovel was smart, he’d never come back here. Because this ‘Black Jack’ guy knows every low life in the city, and if he ever got wind that he was back, Black Jack would let his underground army know, and they’d find him in a heartbeat. And that’s what the note says.”