Fracture (Blood & Roses #3-4) - Callie Hart Page 0,52

compound and slam the thing into park beside the Camaro. The others haven’t made their way to the car yet, but they’re only a few seconds away.

“I’m fucking serious, Sloane. You want either of us to get out of here alive, you’ll do as I tell you.”

“I’m not some whore—” she starts.

“Yes, you are. Right now you’re worse than a whore because you’re not even getting paid for this. You’re doing it for the thrill alone. You hear me? If you don’t do this, we’re both fucking dead.”

Her cheeks turn a pasty grey color. “Alright.”

I barely get a chance to breathe a sigh of relief. The doors to the car open from the outside and Julio stands waiting for me on the driver’s side, mouth drawn into a tight line. Andreas grabs hold of Sloane, digging his fingers roughly into the skin of her arm, pulling her forcefully out of the passenger side. His dirty fucking hands are all over her as she straightens up. Legs, hips, stomach, arms. He pats her down, palms purposefully grazing her breasts. A red light descends over my vision. Oh hell, no, he did not just…

He did. He fucking did!

That.

Is.

Fucking.

It.

I leap out and charge around the other side of the car, finally boiling over. “You did not just fucking drag that girl out of the car!” I roar. Andreas’s hand reaches for his gun, but he doesn’t move quick enough. My fist makes a satisfying crunch as it impacts with his cheekbone. Shouts in Spanish go up all around us as bodies crowd in. No good though; Andreas drops like a sack of rocks and I’m on top of him, fists raining down left, right, left, right, hitting him as hard as I can. I’m gripped by an urge so powerful that I’m fucked if I care to do anything other than obey it. Hands tear at me, but they don’t do any good. I’m too intent on pounding Andreas’s head into the dirt.

“Zeth!” The outraged yell finally stays my hands. Julio waits beside Sloane, eyes wide with disbelief. “The woman is fine! You’re fucking gonna kill one of my best men over a fucking bruise?”

“I’ll kill him for daring to breathe the same air as her,” I gasp, my chest heaving. “I’ll kill him just for looking at her wrong.”

Julio just shakes his head, astonished. He gestures one of his other men toward Andreas, still reeling from what I’ve done. “Get him to the basement.” He turns and walks slowly back inside the villa, leaving me and Sloane outside. Alone with fourteen armed and very angry Mexicans.

We didn’t speak with Julio last night. The man seemed totally shell-shocked from my arrival, the gunshots, and then Zeth nearly bludgeoning someone to death with his bare hands. He’d immediately vanished, leaving Zeth to drag me through the sporadically lit hallways of the Spanish-style villa, toward a bedroom that smelled distinctly like him. He’d shoved me inside, followed after, locked the door and then placed a chair beneath the handle like in the movies. Following that he’d ripped off his clothes down to his boxers, angrily throwing them onto the ground, climbed into the huge king-sized bed in the center of the room and promptly fallen straight to sleep.

Turns out he was mad at me.

I’d slept in the wingback chair by the window, although barely, and woken way earlier than Zeth due to the piercing shafts of sunlight spearing over the top of the compound wall and directly into the bedroom. Since then I’ve been waiting, stiff and cold, for the dark shape of a man to wake. Dreading it. With his eyes closed and hand softly flexed inwards as he breathes deeply in and then out, he looks so vulnerable and harmless. The lines of him don’t soften in the slightest with his unconsciousness; his muscles are still strongly carved out of his belly and chest, arms and back, but they aren’t primed to damage anyone right now, which makes him seem less dangerous. I’m too scared to wake him. I just sit, waiting, hoping that he wakes up in a better mood than he fell asleep in.

I’m also hoping Lacey is okay. She knew I wasn’t going to take her with me. God knows how, but she didn’t bat an eyelash when I said she was going to stay with my folks for the night. Two at the most. The relief on her face had actually been very obvious when I said it wasn’t