me in.”
I step into her, punching a hole in the wall beside her head. “Lila!” I scream. “Tell me fucking why!”
“Why not?” she coughs out, flinching at my fist pulling back from the broken plaster by her face. “She was nothing to me. Nothing but a fucking snitch that could get me and Marcus killed. I weighed it up for about point-one of a second and decided my life was worth more.”
I step into her body, my hand lifting her up the wall to bring her eyes in line with mine. “You were fuckin’ wrong,” I seethe. “See, if you died right here, no one would avenge you. Fucking no one. Not your husband, who sent me here to collect you and deliver you to death. Not your kids who begged me to make you pay. Not your dead little fuck buddy that is far better off bein’ eaten by worms than he ever was breathin’. Your life ain’t worth shit and you know it.”
She rolls her eyes. “You think I care.” She struggles, her legs kicking, hands pulling at mine to loosen my grip. “You think I give two shits about that asshole my parents forced me to marry,” she croaks out, her words barely audible. “Or the fucking spawn I was forced to raise for him. I had hopes for Codi once upon a time, but she proved to be as useless as her sister.”
My body zaps at the mention of Camryn, of how dismissive this bitch is about the life of her own flesh and blood.
“I don’t fear death, asshole. This world didn’t give two fucking shits about me and I’ve paid it the same respect. You think you’re some hero for playing vigilante for your dead mother.” She laughs and I step away from her, no longer trusting my own restraint.
She massages the thick red welts marked along her skin. “You’re exactly like me,” she spits. “Life is worthless; both yours and that of those around you. I could put a bullet in you right now, and you wouldn’t regret your life. Your stupid brother would mourn you for as long as it took for him to lodge his cock in my daughter and you’d be forgotten. You’re no one special, Rocco Shay. Never were. Marcus told me how you were your father’s greatest failure. Too much heart in you to be useful in any way, but not enough to make you a decent human being. He knew your brother was like his cunt of a wife; all feelings and emotion. You, on the other hand, had potential. It’s a shame really that you’ll never reach it. You’re too weak to even kill me,” she whispers. “You’re gonna take me back to Dominic like a good little soldier. Let him take the one thing you fought all your life for. Pathetic.”
I point my gun at her face and she steps into it, a fierceness in her eyes that reminds me so much of Camryn, my arm shakes.
They’re so alike. A mirror on fast forward, features aged on Sarah, but scarily similar to her unwanted daughter. Their long brown hair, the soft tan of their skin, the distinct blue of their eyes.
It gives me pause. Another moment of uncertainty.
“See.” She moves, the blood-red of her lips a breath away from my ear. “Weak.”
My fists clench with the need to pound against flesh, to break skin and see the gush of red decorate my hands.
She might look like her daughter, but where death haunts the shade of Sarah’s eyes, Camryn’s shine with a scared need to hope.
Consumed by my rage, I don’t see her move.
A taser being fired sounds like a thousand cicadas swarming around my ears, or like that irritating static of a radio or TV that hasn’t been tuned. Small and pestering, but fuck does it hurt.
My entire body tenses involuntarily, locking me in place. Pain slices through my body like a bolt of lightning striking through me from the very top of my head to the very tips of my toes. Within seconds my body drops to the ground without warning.
Tivoli moves in my peripheral, having stayed quiet up until this point. But she’s faster, picking up the gun I’d dropped when I hit the ground, aiming it in Tivoli’s direction in silent warning.
His feet stop.
“I’ll fucking kill you,” he warns.
“Not if I get you first,” she taunts, one hand held tightly to my gun, the other on the taser she dropped me with.
Lowering the