Trey - Shandi Boyes Page 0,83

My plan was working. The putrid smell I was swarmed by was slowly weakening. However, I had amassed more scars after I was freed than I had when I was imprisoned.

I hated them. They weren’t just a reminder of what I had lost because I couldn’t keep my dick in my pants, they showed I had failed, that I’d been played for a fool.

Nikolai didn’t suggest I use tattoos to cover the marks I loathed. He merely suggested for me to join him at his favorite tattoo haunt when he was getting a mottling of scars covered by a dragon’s head.

My addiction switched from drugs to tattooing shortly after. Piercings closely followed them. Although I have as many piercings as I do tattoos, my visible scars still outnumber their combined total. Some I’ll never be able to conceal. They’re not on my body. They are on my heart, in my head, and burned into my soul.

And my newest nick is compliments to her—K. I can’t see her face as she stares at nothing, but I know who she is, I can feel it in my bones, hear it thudding in my chest. She’s healthier than she was in the surveillance image Nikolai showed me. Her hair is glossy and hanging loosely down her back. A light blue floral printed dress hugs her svelte yet still enticing frame, and she’s wearing a pair of shoes no amount of heel could hide the foreignness of it. Her feet are too cracked, flat, and grubby underneath to pretend she wears footwear often.

When K lifts an antique-looking brush into the air, I grab Eight by the scruff of his shirt and pin him to the rock wall beside me. The brush has a mirror on the back of it. It’s only small, but the angle of its reflection would give away our stake in an instant.

Despite the screams of the voice inside me, I can’t move for K until I get word from Nikolai. He’s several floors above us attending the auction as if his face is too hideous for a woman to warm his sheets without handing over a bundle of cash. He gave me the option of taking down Achim myself or freeing K.

I chose K.

I should have always chosen K.

A familiar thud, thud, thud booms into my ears when for the quickest second, my eyes collide with K’s in the mirror. Although she appears to be staring straight at me, she doesn’t blink, move, or gasp in a shocked breath. She does nothing but peer at me blankly.

I can’t say I’m experiencing the same thing. The memories I lost crash back into me in an instant. K’s gallop down the stairs on the heels of a woman with oddly similar features. Her inability to light a match to send Vladimir to hell. Me burning her wounds when I slid into the jacuzzi with her on my lap. They all come flooding back in, and they maim me as much as the expression on K’s face a second before she lowers her mirrored brush to smash it against a set of drawers she’s seated in front of.

“Oh fuck,” Eight mutters at the same time I say the exact words in my head.

K is clutching a shard of glass in her hand. It’s only tiny, but it isn’t the size of her weapon I’m worried about. It is what she intends to do with it.

“Give me an orange.” I yank down the backpack on Eight’s back before digging my hand inside for an orange. I ribbed him when he packed oranges, disgusted he’d even consider eating a snack during the middle of a raid.

Now I get where he was going.

Now I understand.

“Come on, K,” I quietly beg when I roll the orange across the filthy floor, praying like fuck she spots it before any of the sorrow radiating out of her cell can transpire. “Look at the orange.”

I realize my error when my prayers fall on deaf ears.

K doesn’t trust anyone.

Not even me.

Ignoring the tightness of my jaw, I dig a second orange out of Eight’s backpack, rip out a big chunk of it with my teeth, swallow down the citrusy clump, then roll it toward K’s cell again. My heart launches into my throat when she peers down at the bitten orange within a second of it tapping her shoe. She gathers it up, almost trance-like before she swivels in her seat to face the direction the orange rolled from.

Although she stares