Prisoner (Criminals & Captives #1)(65)

The guys have been with me, of course, but it’s different with her, and suddenly—yeah, I want her there, need her there. I look into her brown eyes, but I’m talking to Stone. “She comes. You said he’s mine. That the job is mine. That means I say how it goes.”





Chapter Thirty-One




Grayson


We’re in main room, putting the final touches on our plan.

It’s funny; we’ve been wanting vengeance for so long, but now that it’s near, I don’t feel happy. I look around at these guys I’ve gone through so much with, guys I’d lay down my life for, and I know none of them are happy either. Abby’s sitting in the corner, reading. I smooth a strand of hair that escaped her bun, and I feel happy about that.

I’ve been spending the last few days recovering, sleeping a lot. I made the guys go out and buy Abby some nice clothes and underwear she picked out of a catalog and a crapload of books, and she’s been by my side nearly the whole time, except while my guys and I were scheming.

Stone’s polishing bullets at the table. He’s already tasting the governor’s death. Hearing him cry out in pain. Stone will hurt him, and then I get to do the honors. It means a lot that he gave it to me, because I know he wants it bad.

“Come on.” I pull her hand.

“Just a sec,” she says. Always wanting to finish a chapter. Always another chapter.

I pick her up and haul her over my back.

“Hey!” She struggles, and the book thuds to the floor. I’m always doing that—losing her place. I have her on my good shoulder, but it’s killing my bad shoulder all the same.

“We’re outta here,” I growl the way that she recognizes. Primal. A little mean. The way a male lion would subdue his female.

I can feel the eyes of my guys on me as I spin around with her and walk off.

She squirms, but it’s just for show now. “Grayson.”

I hear the breathlessness in her voice, the arousal. She gets off on this treatment, like I do. I head down the hall, letting her struggle. I walk into my room and lay her down onto my bed. She looks up, waiting. Mine. So much mine it scares me.

“How together you guys are,” she says, her eyes intense, “It’s amazing. The way you survived and pulled each other through.”

I don’t know what to do with that, so I just shove her over and nestle in beside her. She watches my face; then she settles on her side right next to me, tracing the ridges of the scarification symbol on my arm. We lie there like two plants, soaking up the darkness like sunshine.

There’s this way where I can sometimes sense the direction of her thoughts, and I know she’s going to ask about it before she does.

“You all have these,” she says, tracing it up and down.

“Yeah,” I whisper.

“Two-sided axes in an X. You did them yourselves?”

I push a bit of hair out of her eyes with my other hand. “How can you tell?”

A faint smile brushes her lips. Because they’re pretty crude.

“Battle-axes,” I say. “We found the picture in one of the moldy encyclopedias we used to read out of in the basement.”

She nods.

“Through the years, when we’d get in fights down there, they’d put makeup on our bruises and withhold food. We would get in a lot of trouble for getting scraped up or bruised, you know, messing up the merchandise. They had a lot of ways to control us, but we gave each other these a few days before the end. Scraped the hell out of each other’s arms with sharpened nails. We were older—Stone was fifteen and strong as f*ck. We’d work out down there. We were going to get out or die at that point.”

“So that’s what this is? A kind of war paint?”

I pause, because this isn’t something we tell people outside the group, but then I realize she’s not outside. To me, she’s as inside as you can get. “It’s part of a vow we made up: One blade to protect my brothers, one blade for vengeance.”

“That’s your vow?”

“That’s our vow.”

She traces the lines of the axes with her finger. “If I look back at the newspaper reports for fifteen years ago, will I find a bloody unsolved crime?”

“Yes,” I say.

She just traces it. I hold my breath, wondering what she’s going to say. The moonlight streams in from the high window, adding a glow to her dark hair, splaying around her head, and her cheekbones, so strong and somehow fragile at the same time. “I think it’s beautiful,” she says finally.

The breath shudders out of me, and I’m filled with relief. Maybe a kind of peace, even.

She narrows her gaze. “You lived in this hotel for fifteen years?”

“Give or take. We took it right after we got out. Except Nate. He bought a guy’s identity and tried to make a straight life. I guess he did.”

She points up at the dingy, pockmarked ceiling where the lightbulb hangs from a cord. “You put in that light?”

“Yup. This place wasn’t exactly functioning then, but… It was right after we escaped. I needed to fight with something. We all did. So we made this place into a home.”

She nods as if that makes sense.

We couldn’t do everything ourselves though. We took a lot of money with us from the basement, and we paid a lot of money on the black market to wire this place off the city grid. The guy probably retired on what we paid him, but the place is still humming.