Crown of Lies (Pretty Ruthless Monsters #2)

2. Killian

2

KILLIAN

All of this is wrong.

I step forward on Nico’s order like I’ve done dozens—hundreds—of times before. It’s not my job to feel one way or another about anything that Nico gets us into.

But this…

Wrong.

Wrong. Wrong . Wrong .

The word is an echo in my mind as I peer down at Quinn. She looks like captured prey to my hunter-predator, and usually, that feeling is welcomed. Wanted. But in this context, it’s all off. It’s broken.

And it’s fucking me up in ways that I never expected when this started. Ways I don’t understand.

My fingers ache to wrap around The Saint’s throat, despite the fact that I’ve never met him in person and have no idea who he is or what he looks like. But if he had never approached us in the first place, Quinn could still be mine—to hunt, crave, to watch from the shadows. Silas would have never gone after her at the clubhouse, and as furious as I am that our home base is gone, I’d rather it be the house destroyed than her.

That’s not something I can say out loud though, especially not in front of my brothers. Not right now.

But the thing that’s fucking me up the most isn’t the fact that Quinn is sitting there glaring daggers at me . It’s the fact that I swear I can feel those daggers twisting in my chest.

That’s what’s the most confusing about all of this—how much I care . How deeply the conscience that I thought I gave up years ago is stirring right now.

Why?

I’ve lied to plenty of people before, and I’ve never felt regret about any of it. People prefer hearing what they want to hear, anyway. The vast majority of the human population doesn’t actually want the truth. If it makes them feel better, makes them feel safer, doesn’t challenge them, they’ll embrace the lie with open arms.

I’ve seen enough of the world to know that the truth doesn’t actually fucking matter.

So I can’t grasp what makes lying to Quinn feel different. Being intrigued by her was one thing. Stalking her, craving her. Seeing the darkness in her that was begging for someone to grab hold and nurture it, and then giving her what she needed? All of that made sense to me.

But caring about her this way is something else entirely.

Something… dangerous in its own right.

I’m so used to observing her that I can pick up the emotions behind even the tiniest shifts in her expression, and I don’t miss the way the corner of her mouth turns down in contempt as her gaze locks with mine. How her eyes narrow infinitesimally, disgust mingled with raw hurt flashing in their depths.

Betrayal . Everything about her drips with it.

“Killian?”

Nico’s voice pulls me out of my chaotic, confused thoughts—just barely. Clearing my throat, I grunt in response and kneel down in front of Quinn to examine her wounds.

Not that I really need to take stock of them.

I already know every. Single. One.

Three scratches on her left cheek and one on her right, all shallow enough to not be an issue but deep enough to bleed. A larger cut on her left forearm and one on her leg that ripped through her pants—probably from when I caught her and we both went down to the ground. Four bruises on her stomach. A cut to her lip.

And of course, her bullet wound.

I know each and every one of these injuries because I cataloged them perfectly when I ripped up her shirt to tie her up. Even now, I still notice everything about her, like how her eyes glint in defiance as I untie the cloth binding her hands so I can examine her wounds further, or the slight hitch in her breath when I graze my thumb beneath one of the nastier cuts.

“First aid kit, Atlas?” I call, keeping my eyes on Quinn.

She stares back at me, her gray eyes stormy, and the rest of the basement seems to fade out of existence.

I hum to myself, an almost curious sound. In my mind, it’s just me and her here. I reach out and grab what’s left of her shirt, working it out from beneath the ropes wrapped around her torso and tearing it down the middle to bare more of her to me. Despite her control, Quinn lets out a hiss, her teeth clenched together like she’s biting down on something.

“Fuck,” she whispers.

“Easier to get to your wounds like this,” I tell her, my voice low.

She twists in her seat a bit, and I’m aware of how her pulse quickens in her throat, her eyes dilating as the movement tugs at her wounds and forces their edges to stretch. It’s got to be painful, but pain has never been a real problem for Quinn.

Atlas drops the first aid kit at my feet a moment later, as well as a tool kit I’m familiar with. I grab the first aid kit first, wetting a cotton pad with alcohol. When I dab it against one of Quinn’s injuries, every muscle in her body tenses.

I flick my eyes up to hers as I clean her wounds.

She never looks away. Even when I press harder into her wounds just to make her react to me. Every muffled sound, gasp, clench of teeth, fiery glare?—

They all belong to me.

Even now. Even after everything. They’re mine.

When I’ve cleaned her minor wounds, I pull out a different instrument. It’s technically one for healing, but in the right circumstances, it can be used for torture.

A stainless steel surgical bullet remover.

I’ve been shot enough times and had enough bullets pulled out of me to know one thing: this shit hurts like a bitch.

I hesitate for a moment, torn by conflicting instincts—to hurt or to protect. My usual impulse would be to dig into the wound with no mercy, to treat her like an enemy and make this as painful as possible. But for some reason, despite the fact that her pain is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen, I can’t quite bring myself to do it.

Wrong, wrong, wrong .

The mantra starts up in my head again as I lean closer and slip the end of the instrument into the slightly singed hole made in her arm. They don’t tell you that part in the movies—how the heat of a bullet can literally cook the meat on your bones, or how much pain it inflicts to push through it.

It’s enough to make grown men cry, but Quinn is built of different stuff. She doesn’t cry, even when I scrape the tool carefully around the edge of her wound.

No. My Quinn, my siren , is better than that.

But that’s not to say she doesn’t react at all.

Her cheeks flush, her breath coming in short puffs of air. I’m certain that if I reached up to run my fingers along her cheeks, I’d find them warm to the touch. And then there’s the thrum in her throat, the fluttering of her pulse beneath her pale skin. I swear I can almost hear the rhythm of it.

She hides her reaction well. She doesn’t make a sound, her gaze fixed on some far-off spot on the wall behind me, but I’m so attuned to her that I don’t miss the way her nipples tighten and perk beneath her bra. There’s nothing sexual about what I’m doing to her, but as if it’s an ingrained response at this point, her body is responding to me anyway. To the rush of sensations I’m causing, the overload of pain—something that I know has always been right at the edge of pleasure for her.

My body responds too, an unexpected spark of arousal burning through my veins. But I keep my face impassive and my hands steady as I focus on my work. No matter how much it might remind me of other moments between us, the most intense moments we’ve shared, this is different.

After several minutes of work, I manage to get the bullet out without too much extra damage. The wound itself isn’t large, and it’s easy enough to stitch back up with tools from the first aid kit. Quinn will have a scar—a reminder of what she did that will never fully fade.

I lick my lips, gazing at the raw, red wound.

I’d say she’s earned that mark.

I clean up and step back, picking up her torn shirt from the floor. But Nico holds his arm out in front of me, stopping me from putting it back on her.

“Leave it. She can freeze down here until she gives us what we need.”

I glance at him, my fingers digging into the soft, dirt-stained fabric. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong .

Slowly, I force my fingers to uncurl, releasing her shirt so that it drops to the floor. Following my leader’s orders, like always.

“Cuffs,” Nico says next, and Atlas grabs a set of handcuffs from the shelf.

Quinn eyes them with a venomous look, scowling as he unties her from the chair and drags her over to the far wall of the basement, where he raises her arms overhead. He hooks the chain of the cuffs over a curved pipe before securing each restraint to her wrists, locking her in place.

“There. Don’t think you’ll be running again any time soon,” Nico says with satisfaction. “Now let’s try this again. What do you know?”

Quinn bares her teeth, leveling a hell of a glare Nico’s way. “I know as much as you know, which is nothing. I already told you, you’re wasting your fucking time asking me questions about what Silas said.”

“And I already told you I don’t trust you. I think you’re a liar.”

She spits on the floor in front of him. “That’s rich, coming from you.”

Nico’s shoulders tighten, and although the unfinished basement is rather large, there’s so much tension in the air that it feels like the walls are squeezing in around us. He takes two steps closer to her, dropping his head a little to find her gaze.

“One way or another, mia cara,” he promises, “you’re going to sing for me. It’s up to you to choose the tune of your song.”

Before she can respond to that, he jerks his head toward me and Atlas.

“We’re done here tonight. We’ll give her some time to think about how she wants to proceed next.”

He turns and strides out of the basement, and Atlas follows him more slowly up the stairs. I leave the room last, lingering for a moment at the bottom of the staircase. When I glance over my shoulder, my eyes lock with Quinn’s.

Defiance burns like fire in her gaze, and the feeling of wrongness twisting inside me ratchets up.

She’s not going to talk. Not easily.

And I don’t know what will happen if she doesn’t.

Taking a deep breath, I turn away from her and head upstairs. Atlas and Nico are already in the kitchen, and the tension filling the room is almost as thick as it was in the basement. Nico is leaning over the kitchen table, his palms braced on the smooth wood as he stares into space. Atlas has his back against the fridge, his tattooed arms folded over his chest.

There’s not a single ounce of satisfaction in this room right now.

But can I really blame my brothers for that? Between Quinn finding out that we were spying on her for The Saint and exacting her revenge, to learning that Silas was not only working for the bastard too, but that he had his own designs on Quinn—nothing that happened tonight is a cause for celebration.

“We just have to break her,” Nico declares, straightening suddenly. “She knows something. How the fuck can she not? We need to make her talk.”

He doesn’t say it, but we all know what he means. There are plenty of ways to loosen a tight tongue, and not many of them involve asking nicely.

“Well, this is kind of what we get, isn’t it?” Atlas speaks up, his tone tight. He’s pissed.

I glance between him and Nico as our club leader narrows his eyes.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” he demands.

“We wouldn’t exactly be in this situation if we hadn’t decided to work for some mysterious client, running around playing a game of double-cross, would we?”

“It was a good enough gig in the beginning,” Nico says stiffly.

“It wasn’t.” Atlas’s lips press into a thin line. “It was shit from the start, and you know it.”

Nico’s fingers curl into fists, and I can practically feel the tension and stress of the night coiling inside him like a spring. “Say that again? I couldn’t hear you.”

“It was a dumb. Fucking. Plan.”

“And you had a better one, did you? You somehow knew how this was all going to play out?”

Atlas shoves away from the fridge. “No! I didn’t know, but it doesn’t take a genius to read the writing on the wall. You got too attached to her, Nico! We all did. Fucking her, living with her, getting to know her—and all the while, telling ourselves she was still the ‘enemy.’ How the hell did you think this was going to end? Did you really think any of us could walk away from this shit unscathed? It was fucked up from the jump, and it only got worse from there.”

Nico shakes his head, his expression hard. “I made a judgment call. It was a sound tactical decision with the information I had at the time. It wasn’t supposed to go down like this.”

“No fucking shit.” Atlas slams his fist against the fridge before pacing across the length of the kitchen. “And now we’ve lost more than we ever stood to gain from this deal with The Saint. So tell me how it wasn’t a dumb goddamn plan?”

Nico steps into Atlas’s path, the two of them squaring off as they continue to argue, voices raised and heated. But their fight turns into white noise in my head as my thoughts drift down to the basement. I checked it out briefly a few days after we moved into her house, noting that the walls and ceiling were thick and heavily insulated, rendering the room basically sound-proof—one of several signs that made it clear what her father must’ve used it for when he was alive.

I wonder how Quinn is holding up down there. The walls and floor are cement, and although it wasn’t freezing, it was cool in the basement when we left her.

Her wrists are eventually going to lose good circulation being handcuffed like she is.

She’ll probably catch a cold without a shirt on.

Her wounds might reopen if she struggles too much.

A flurry of thoughts pinpointing all of the possible bad things that might happen to her flood my mind, and I’m left wondering once again why the fuck I care so much. Why a woman with teal hair is taking over my thoughts while my brothers are right in front of me, locked in an argument I should tie-break with a voice of reason.

How is it that the weight of her betrayal hasn’t broken the attachment I was starting to feel toward her?

How is it that I still think about her, worry about her, the same way I did before any of this happened?

How is that possible?

For better or worse, I’m saved from having to confront that question by a phone call.

The sudden sound of Nico’s phone ringing interrupts his argument with Atlas too. They both go silent immediately, although the tension in the air doesn’t go away. With everything that’s going on, who knows what the call is going to be about? What other bad fucking news could we get tonight?

“Talk to me,” Nico says in a clipped voice as he answers, not bothering with any pleasantries. He listens for a long moment, then nods. “Right. And the clubhouse?” A pause. “I see.” His jaw works as he listens for another moment. “Yeah. Thanks, Hudson. Get everyone clear of the area until the cops are done sniffing around.”

He sounds calm enough when he hangs up, but as soon as he presses the button to end the call, he hurls the phone across the kitchen. It explodes in a shower of screen glass and circuits against the wall.

“Fuck!” he shouts, turning to slams his fists against the top of the table.

“Bad news?”

It’s the first thing I’ve said since we all came upstairs, and I half expect him to throw something at me next just for the question. He doesn’t, but I can see the agitation churning inside him as he answers.

“Firefighters finally showed up at the clubhouse. Put the blaze out.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?” Atlas asks.

“It would be, if there was anything to fucking salvage. The only positive is that our people were able to clear out Silas’s body before the firefighters and cops showed up. Everything else is…”

“Torched,” I finish for him.

“Fucking torched.” Nico concurs savagely. He drags in a breath, letting it out slowly like he’s trying to find some shred of control inside himself. Then he glances from me to Atlas. “But that’s alright. We’ll find a way to rebuild, and we know just where to start. Like I said, we need to make Quinn talk.”

At the mention of her name, an image of Quinn locked in the basement flashes through my mind again, making an uncomfortable sensation prickle beneath my skin.

Hear that siren? You’d better make some noise, and soon .