𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐩𝐢𝐭𝐲

Chapter 58

— Chapter 58 —
Ropes and Rubber Bands

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N O A H

A few minutes, a few hours... whenever I finally regained consciousness, it was to find a migraine hammering away in my skull and the black hood still over my head.

"I don't get why we couldn't just kill him," someone's voice echoed shapelessly in the darkness. "He can dance with the ghosts for all we care."

I wish you would have.

"Do you want that old man to have us all shot? Just shut up and follow your orders, Smash."

Finally, a voice I recognized—Marcus Danes.

I tried to move—to make some sense of my surroundings. What I found was the very simple fact that I was strapped down to a chair, wooden maybe, with my hands and feet tied to it in chunky ropes. Some kind of murky stench burned my eyes. A stench of smoke—stale smoke—sitting thick in my lungs.

Another person in the room picked up on all my struggling. "Fuck," he said, "I think he's awake."

I grumbled, "No shit, Sherlock."

"I still think we should kill him," Smash echoed from somewhere nearby.

I heard Marcus sigh. His footfalls reverberated through the space around us in a way that made the room sound like a metal cage. "We're not killing him."

Boo. "Why not?"

The redhead stepped closer to me and hissed, "Because you're worth nothing to us dead, that's why."

This was what I got whenever I tried to do a nice thing. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson by now, not to put faith in people who could be bought by money. The root of all evil. Midas must have found Marcus at the police station on the night we'd been arrested. He waved around his money and paid Marcus's bail, surely, buying his obedience in the process. For whatever that was worth.

Marcus knew plenty about the Stray Dogs, and all that information was now in Midas's hands.

"Been a while since someone's had me in ropes," I confessed, doing my best to see through the threads in the mesh. "You know, people usually buy me a drink before getting down to the kinky stuff."

"Oh, haven't you heard?" Marcus snorted. "Chivalry is dead."

My cheeks strained into a grimace once the black hood was finally pulled off my head. Squinting against the light, I caught myself seated before the three other men—Smash, leaning against the wall to my left; another goon hunched over lazily in the corner, and Marcus standing at my feet, whose flame-red hair made him stand out like a goddamn traffic cone.

"Ugh," I groaned. "Can you put the sack back over my head? I liked it better when I wasn't looking at his face." Passing Marcus a flat glance, I added, "No offense."

The room was brought to life as the redhead pulled a gun from the back of his pants and cocked it at my head. Shit.

Smash started, "Boss, you just said—"

"Shut up," Marcus hissed.

"You're not going to kill me." While the glare on his face solidified, I tilted my head away from the gun. "Why don't you put the big kid toys away, yeah? Wouldn't want you to hurt yourself."