Play Rough

by Eva Ashwood

  Sloan’s eyes go furious and dark. He grabs my wrists, shoving them away so I’m not pointing the barrel of the gun at him anymore and it’s pointing to the side instead.

  All the anger and fear inside me surges to a head, pushing out anything else. His grip on me is tight, and I struggle against it, trying to get the gun back up and under my control. Baring his teeth, he wrestles me for it, twisting my arm until I’m forced to let go with one hand.

  My chest heaves, and I shove him back down when he tries to roll me over, not letting him win that easily.

  “What the fuck?” he snarls. “Were you—”

  I use my free hand to punch him across the face, landing a solid hit to his jaw that makes my knuckles sting.

  It’s enough to daze him for a second, and I rip my other arm free from his grip, trying to grab for the gun with both hands again before he can stop me.

  Sloan moves faster though, getting a hand in my hair in a way that would have turned me on in a second in a different context, but makes me cry out in pain now. It’s enough to cause me to fumble my grip, and he uses that opening to get the leverage he needs, rolling us over so I’m back under him.

  It’s harder to fight back like this—but that doesn’t mean I won’t fucking try. He’s bigger and stronger than me, but I’m not going to go down so easily. I’m a good fighter, and I’m giving it my all. Judging from the way Sloan is breathing hard and sweating a bit, so is he.

  I do my best to hold on, but his extra leverage makes all the difference. He manages to get a knee down on my chest and wrests the gun away from me, snarling curses as he aims the barrel at my forehead, right between my eyes.

  “Fuck you,” I spit out, glaring up at him through the strands of dark hair that’ve fallen over my face. My throat and chest burn from how hard I’m breathing, and I can taste the fear in the back of my throat. “You’re a fucking monster.”

  “What the fuck are you doing, Mercy?” he demands, and his grip on the gun doesn’t waver.

  “Are you going to kill me?” I snap, my stomach twisting into a knot. I want to fight again, to try to get the gun back, but I know he’d put a bullet in my head before I even touched it. “Take me out, just like you killed my dad? Do you get some kind of sick pleasure from being a fucking murderer?”

  I expect him to laugh or say something shitty, or to go ahead and pull the trigger without speaking a single damn word. What I don’t expect is for him to freeze, uncertainty flickering over his face as he looks down at me, gun still aimed right for my head.

  “How do you know about that?” he asks.

  I stare up at him, glaring past the barrel of the gun. Emotions are rushing to the surface, everything I’ve tried so hard to shove down and ignore for the last few weeks. None of it was ever gone, just biding its time, and now that I don’t have the distraction of my plan or trying to seduce the guys, all I can think about is what happened and how fucking wrecked I feel.

  I can see Sloan standing in that lot, gun aimed for my dad the same way he’s got it aimed at me now. It’s probably the same one, even, which is a sick sort of symmetry.

  “I saw you,” I admit, my voice coming out hollow. There’s no point in pretending anymore. “I saw you kill him. I was there that night, across the street from the parking lot where you met him.”

  Stinging tears well up in my eyes the same way they did when I watched my dad hit the asphalt. It’s grief, but it’s also bitterness and anger in equal measure, all of it finally coming to a head and spilling out. There have been so many sleepless nights, so many hours spent with anxiety churning in my gut. All of that has led to this confrontation, and I want to hit Sloan so badly, but I don’t dare move while he’s aiming that gun at me.

  I know he knows how to use it.

  “I knew you were up to something,” I continue. “So I snuck out that night and followed you. I wanted to see where you were going and what kind of fucked up deals you might be making. My dad was there. He came to you for help! Because he was scared for his fucking life. He trusted you, and you killed him. You pointed your fucking gun at him, just like that, and you ended him right there.”

  My voice breaks on the last few words, and I blink rapidly, trying to swallow down the lump in my throat. I refuse to cry in front of Sloan. He doesn’t deserve to see it, and I will the tears burning my eyes not to fall.

  Sloan just stares at me, and his face is back to being an unreadable mask. I wait for him to say something. Anything. To gloat or tell me I’m an idiot and that my dad was too. To say that anyone who crosses the Black Roses gets what’s coming to them and it’s his job to see their punishment through.

  “I didn’t kill your dad, Mercy,” he says finally.

  Time seems to grind to a halt.

  My mouth drops open, gaping at him.

  That’s the last fucking thing I expected him to say, and it snaps something inside my chest, sending a new and unfamiliar kind of pain rushing through me.

  Gloating or acceptance, I could have handled, but him lying to my face about it? That hurts worse than anything else could.

  “Fuck you,” I snarl, baring my teeth like I’d rip out his jugular if I could. “I just told you I saw you do it! I was there! Don’t fucking lie to me.”

  My voice raises with my agitation, and I want to buck him off my hips and tackle him, take that gun and empty it in his fucking skull.

  “Listen to me.” Sloan lowers his voice, his tone hard and insistent. “I didn’t kill him because he isn’t dead. Your father’s alive.”

  I shake my head furiously, the tears I’ve stubbornly been refusing to shed welling up in my eyes again and then spilling over my cheeks. One hand comes up to swipe them away quickly, but I don’t take my eyes off Sloan.

  “Stop lying to me,” I tell him, and I hate the way it sounds like I’m begging. “I know what I saw. I know what you did. He’s gone, and I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to come to terms with that.”

  Not that it’s been working. Even talking about it this much makes the hole in my heart feel ragged and painful, the loss of the most important person in my life stabbing at me over and over again.

  Sloan sighs and lowers the gun slightly, running his free hand through his hair.

  “We faked his death, Mercy. It was the only way.”

  “The only way for what?”

  “To save him.”

  “From what?” I demand, practically shouting. I’m fucking sick of Sloan’s way of skirting around every damned thing. “You owe me the truth if that’s what this is.”

  He nods, seeming to accept that. “He was going to be killed. He was spying for us within the Jackals. He infiltrated their ranks—that was the task we gave him to make up for not throwing the fight. And the wrong people got suspicious. They would have killed him without a second thought, so we had to make it look like he was killed by our side instead. By the Black Roses.”

  My brow furrows as I try to put all the pieces together, but there’s clearly a lot of shit that I’m missing. Stuff going on behind the scenes that I never even knew about. And of course, it’s dangerous to get my hopes up that Sloan is telling the truth and that my dad is truly still alive. It would be such a blow for him to lie to me about this and then rip the rug out from under my feet later as punishment or something.

  But the look on his face is the most earnest I’ve ever seen it, and he sounds so tired that I think maybe… just maybe, he’s telling me the truth.

  “But why was he involved in the first place?” I want to know. “Why him? Why the fuck would you make him do something like that?”

  He scrubs a hand down his face. “His brother is a Jackal. Your uncle, I guess. That’s why we sent your dad in, and that’s why he double-crossed us with the fight. Your uncle called in a favor, leaned on Oscar to make him back out on throwing the fight like he was supposed to.”

  His face darkens as he explains that, and it’s obvious he doesn’t like my uncle.

  An uncle
that I didn’t even know I had. As far as I’m aware, my dad is an only child, and I’ve never even met this guy Sloan is talking about.

  Then something stirs in my memory, and I blink slowly as a realization passes over me.

  “He was at the restaurant,” I murmur. “That night when we went out.”

  Sloan nods. “Yeah. He was.”

  “I thought…” I swallow, my throat going dry. “I ran into him coming back from the bathroom, and for a second, I thought he was my dad. He looked so much like him. But it wasn’t him. I thought it was just because my mind was on my dad, that it made the resemblance between them seem stronger.”

  It’s hard to wrap my head around all of this. There are too many fucking lies and secrets to keep track of. My dad lied to me for my whole life about not having any siblings, and my uncle was going to get him killed for infiltrating his gang.

  On top of that, my dad isn’t actually dead.

  It’s a lot to take in. It’s too much, and I feel like I’m reeling. Everything I knew to be true just a few moments ago has been turned on its head, and I feel…

  I don’t know.

  Gutted isn’t the right word, because knowing my dad is alive is so incredible that it has my heart leaping, but the marathon to get here has been so fucking exhausting.

  My heart feels like a wrung out rag.

  Dazed and exhausted and numb.

  I sigh and press the heels of my hands against my eyes for a second, forgetting the fact that I’m naked from the waist up because I just need a minute to get my shit together.

  When I look back up, Sloan’s face has gone softer, and he’s gazing right back at me.

  “I didn’t know you were there,” he murmurs. “I didn’t know you saw that. We had to put on a show for the Jackals, to make it seem real. No one else could know but me and my father so that it wouldn’t get out. Especially with how shit has been lately. We were keeping it under wraps until things calmed down a little. That’s the truth, I swear.”

  With that pronouncement, he shifts his weight and crawls off me, unpinning me. I scramble away from him, even though he’s no longer pointing the gun at my head.

  I stare at him from across the bed, and I know I have to look vulnerable as hell. I want to believe him so badly, to think my dad is out there somewhere, probably stressed out and worried as fuck, but alive.

  My dad is alive.

  He’s alive.

  I feel like breaking down into tears, but I hold myself back, breathing through it. It’s been an awful fucking few weeks, and I want to demand that Sloan take me to him or let me talk to him or something. I need to know he’s okay, and for him to know I’m all right and that we can get our lives back soon.

  Everything will be okay now.

  Once things calm down with the Jackals, we can go back to the way things were and hopefully stay out of gang shit for the foreseeable future. It’s probably wishful thinking, especially considering I have an uncle out there who wants him dead, apparently, but it’s nice to cling to that happy version of the future for a moment. It’s nice to have a little ray of hope and light in what has been a very dark and painful stretch of time.

  I’ve spent so long being motivated by revenge and the need to get back at Sloan for what he did that having something else to focus on feels like letting go of a heavy weight I’ve been carrying around.

  But then the full breadth of my situation sinks in, and my heart sinks like a stone as a single word echoes in my head.

  Revenge.

  I wanted revenge. Vengeance for my dead father. And I tried hard as hell to get it. Things have been completely turned upside down in the last twenty minutes or so, but the fact of what I did hasn’t changed.

  Only the consequences of it are different now.

  “Oh fuck.” My heart lurches in my chest, and I scramble up to grab my phone from the floor where it fell. I don’t know what I’m hoping to see when I unlock the screen, but of course the picture with the accountant’s contact information has already gone through. There’s no message back from Paul, but it’s clear he’s seen it and will probably act on it.

  Shit.

  I close my eyes in horror, a sour taste climbing up the back of my throat.

  “What is it?” Sloan asks, and I have to look at him.

  He can plainly see the guilt written all over my face, I’m sure, and his own expression goes dark once more, the tension setting back in.

  “Mercy.” His voice is low and hard. “What the fuck did you do?”

  22

  Sloan glares at me, and I fight the urge to shrink under his heavy stare.

  My mind is a whirl of information, still trying to catch up and process everything that’s happened. I feel like I’m going to be sick, but the elation from knowing my dad isn’t dead is also still there. It’s a confusing as fuck feeling, and my heart is slamming so hard against my ribs that it’s a wonder Sloan can’t hear it.

  His eyes are narrowed, and he advances on me, backing me up against the wall, looming with all his height. My mouth goes dry, but not for the usual reason it does when Sloan is this close. I can admit I’m afraid of what I’ve set into motion here.

  I don’t have a cover story, and there’s no point in trying to come up with one anyway. As soon as Sloan opens his laptop, he’ll see what I was looking at and be able to put two and two together.

  The plan before all this happened was to be gone somewhere by the time he found out, and then for him to be taken down by the Jackals anyway, so he’d never be able to retaliate against me. But that’s all out the window now, and he’s staring a hole through me like he can find out the truth by reading it in my soul or something.

  Since there’s no point in lying, I know I have to admit the truth. Better to do it quick, like ripping off a band-aid.

  “I’ve been double-crossing you,” I tell him, lifting my chin to look him in the eye. “Feeding information to a contact I made in the Jackals.”

  “You’ve been what?” he demands. I can see it the second his temper flares. He breathes out hard through his nose, and his eyes burn with anger. He’s pissed off, staring down at me like he doesn’t know what to say.

  I’m pissed off too though, and I glare right back.

  “What the fuck did you expect me to do?” I shout. “I thought you killed my fucking dad. I thought I’d stood there and watched you murder him and then act like nothing happened. You made it look that way, and you were convincing as fuck, so I acted on the information I had. If you’d just fucking told me what was going on, then I never would have thought of betraying you!”

  He grabs me by the chin and pushes me until my back is flush with the wall.

  “I was trying to keep you out of it,” he growls, his voice low and dangerous. “If you hadn’t put your nose in shit that doesn’t concern you, you’d have been fucking fine. Now you’ve started something you can’t undo.”

  His grip isn’t gentle, and he’s right in my face, growling at me, talking to me like I’m a fucking child.

  “Shit that doesn’t concern me?” I snap back. “Please tell me how my father’s life doesn’t fucking concern me!”

  “It’s Black Rose business,” he spits. “Not yours.”

  “You brought me into it when you fucking kidnapped me! Maybe you don’t give a shit if your dad lives or dies, but I do. I hadn’t heard from him, no one would tell me anything, and I didn’t know what else to do. And then I saw you shoot him with my own damn eyes!”

  We’re practically screaming at each other now, and he still has a grip on me. His anger fills the room, and any happiness I felt just a second ago has melted away into my own fury that I’m being lectured for wanting to get back at someone who I thought murdered my only remaining family in cold blood.

  “You don’t know anything,” Sloan snarls.

  “Yeah, because you never tell me anything.” I grab his wrist and shove him away from me, breaking his hold and giving myself some distance.

&nbs
p; I’m so mad I’m practically seeing red, and I can taste my heartbeat in my mouth as the anger burns through me. I’m about two seconds away from fucking fighting him again, giving him another bruise to match the one blooming on his jaw.

  Sloan steps back into my personal space, and I shove him back again.

  “Don’t try to put this all on me,” I spit out. “If you weren’t keeping fucking secrets and sneaking around—”

  “If you weren’t so damned nosy, you mean!”

  “Fuck off, you asshole. You have no right—”

  Footsteps thunder up the stairs, and a second later, Levi and Rory come charging in, concern on their faces. Clearly, the yelling has easily carried down the stairs for them to hear when they got home.

  They stop just inside the door, freezing in place as they take in the scene in the room.

  I can only imagine what a sight we make. I’m still topless, and Sloan’s glaring down at me while I yell right back in his face. My hands are balled into fists at my side, and I’m ready to deck him at any second.

  Shock registers on both of their faces, and they don’t seem to know how to proceed. Then Rory grabs Sloan, pulling him away from me while Levi steps between us.

  “What the hell is going on?” Levi asks, looking back and forth. His gaze skates down to my toes and then all the way back up my body. “Why are you topless?”

  “She was trying to seduce me,” Sloan mutters.

  I snort and roll my eyes, fury still rolling through me. “You fucking wish.”

  “Not that I’m complaining about the view, Hurricane,” Rory chimes in, sounding as confused as Levi did. “But what the fuck?”

  I let out a rough breath and decide to just cut to the chase. “Did you two know Sloan killed my dad?”

  The question drops into the room like a fucking bomb, and both Levi and Rory go silent and still. They look to each other and then to Sloan, horror clear on their faces.