glimmered with evil glee as he walked back and forth in front of me.
“Can I tell you a funny story, Detective?” That voice, so soothing, so deceptive about the evil it held captured between the melodic tones. I strained against the cuffs to no avail.
“You can go fuck yourself.”
He lifted an eyebrow at me. “How uncouth. Trust me, Detective, this is a story you will want to hear. You see it involves the woman that we both can’t seem to stay away from.”
I didn’t want to hear him say Reeve’s name. I heaved again, muscles flexing and straining, while he just watched me like I was an animal stuck in an exhibit at the zoo.
“When I saw her that day after she turned herself in, I knew I had to have her. Beautiful, soft, but with an edge. She was perfect for me. Revenge, the need to make others pay for the way they had wronged her. It was music to my ears. She was everything I had ever wanted and I thought she hated this place, the things it had done to her. I thought she would stand with me and watch it burn because she understood.”
“She thinks you’re a sociopath. She saw through you, Roark. She’s good like that. She has X-ray vision.”
I heard something dripping in the background and could hear Roark’s men shifting with anxiety to get their shots in. I was a life-size piñata and they couldn’t wait to tear into me. I told myself I had to wait an hour. I could survive an hour before the cavalry showed, that was if Reeve did what I told her to do and didn’t try something foolish like taking matters into her own hands. Realizing that struggling against the cuffs was getting me nowhere, I went lax and instead wrapped my fingers around them and just dangled there. Roark wandered a few steps closer to me.
“Maybe she did, but she never saw through the man that made me. You really believe Novak would be so selfless, or even slightly altruistic enough to take out a man that killed his hooker girlfriend? You think Novak cared about anyone else enough to get involved in their petty drama? The answer is no. He was a businessman and Reeve was a pretty girl. The boyfriend owed him money for a stash he blew by snorting it up his own nose. He wouldn’t pay up, so he got taken care of. It was just coincidence that Reeve showed up begging for retribution. The guy was a dead man before the girlfriend was even in the ground. Novak was a clever man. He knew Reeve might prove useful down the road, so he let her believe for years that she was the catalyst . . . that she had it in her to be a killer. He kept her on a string and it was beautiful. I thought she could be my doll too.”
He leaned closer and I saw my chance. I used the leverage my hands had on the cuffs and wrenched my entire lower body up from the waist. I kicked my legs out so that I could hook them around the Irishman’s smug neck and started to squeeze. He punched at me, struggled, but I just closed my thighs tighter and tighter. I was going to choke the life out of him and I didn’t care if I took a bullet in the back.
“People aren’t toys.” I huffed the words out and just as Roark was turning purple, and really looking like he was going to go down to his knees, something cracked across the back of my skull hard enough that it made me go immediately limp. My head fell forward and I felt blood start to run down the back of my neck in an untamed river.
Something dripped. Something landed with a splat. Something rattled. There was a clank and a whoosh. I faintly heard a thud and all I could do was silently swear and groan as my brain throbbed hot and heavy in my skull. The beating had begun in earnest.
“Fuck you. You’ll kill me before I break.”
“All of this over a girl. Really, Detective King, I thought you would prove to be much more of a challenge. She made you soft. She made you weak. All of the men in this city forgot there was a war going on when they got distracted by their dicks twitching. No girl is worth dying for.”
I