Crown of Lies (Pretty Ruthless Monsters #2)

3. Quinn

3

QUINN

I’ve gotten myself into some fucked up situations before. After all, you don’t grow up in a gang without running into trouble at least once or twice.

Or three times, I guess, where the Princes of Carnage are concerned.

I’ve got to get out of here.

It’s kind of insane—needing to escape from my own fucking house. It’s infuriating . If the Princes had another clubhouse to burn down, it’d be my first stop after getting out of here.

If I manage to get out of here. But although I’ve been working on that particular problem ever since the Princes went upstairs, I haven’t gotten far on it yet.

My fingers are starting to go numb. They’ve got that prickly, fuzzy, falling-asleep tingle that’s equal parts annoying and uncomfortably painful. The cuffs Atlas put on me aren’t tight enough to dig into my wrists, but I also can’t seem to wriggle my way out of them, although I’ve scraped my wrists raw trying. All the way down from my elbows to my shoulders, that same numbness is starting to creep in.

I shift my weight a little, going up onto my tiptoes so that I can get a little more bend in my elbows, trying to relieve the ache in my shoulder. Despite the pain of Killian digging out the bullet and stitching me up, my upper arm actually feels a bit better now that the wound has been tended to, but all of this movement is pulling at my stitches.

“Fuckers,” I mutter under my breath, doing my best to ignore the angry screams of protest from my muscles as I shake my arms, trying to see if I can loosen the pipe I’m attached to.

Clang, clang, clang.

Metal against metal echoes through the room, louder than I expected it to be. From above, I think I hear something.

A shout?

I freeze immediately, thinking that they must have heard me. That somehow, despite all of the soundproofing, they know what I’m doing down here.

Like a rabbit alone on a plain scenting for predators, I remain absolutely still, waiting through one skipped heartbeat, and then another. But no one comes down for me. The door at the top of the stairs doesn’t open.

So I get back to it, clang, clang, clang, attempting to loosen that pipe. Time drags on, achingly so, with no real progress made on my escape.

It doesn’t end up mattering, because eventually, after who knows how much time, the door to the basement opens.

I stiffen. Did they hear me after all?

Listening closely, I strain my ears for any hint of what’s to come. It’s just one set of footsteps. Nico, maybe, coming to assert his husbandly authority over me? Or it could be Killian. He may have been silent as stone earlier while he was patching me up, but I know him well enough by now to know that he’s the kind of man who excels at torture. Is he coming back for round two?

It turns out to be neither of them. This time, it’s Atlas who graces me with his silent presence.

Alone.

I grit my teeth and straighten my shoulders as best as I can with the way I’m cuffed up. He doesn’t say a word as he pulls up the chair they had me in earlier, turns it around, and settles onto it in front of me. With his muscled forearms balanced on the back of it, he peers at me intently, his expression unreadable.

“Tell me about Silas,” he says after a long moment.

I groan, rolling my eyes. “This again?”

“Who is The Saint?” he presses, his voice gaining a little more urgency.

“I already told you I don’t know anything about either of them.”

“Did they pay you to work for them? Were you gathering intel on us too?”

“You know, usually if someone wants information out of someone else, they don’t just ask the same questions over and over, as if that’s going to give them a brand spanking new answer,” I mutter. “But if you like wasting your time, be my fucking guest. I’m not going anywhere.”

I rattle my cuffs, emphasizing the point. Atlas just stares at me for a moment longer, a small muscle in his jaw contracting beneath his skin. I can’t tell if the agitation is because he believes me that I don’t know any more than he and the other Princes do, or because he thinks I’m holding out on him.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he says suddenly. “You’re so important that The Saint had us watching you, reporting on you—and so valuable that Silas came after you himself—but you have no idea why?”

I can’t help the dry chuckle that falls from my lips as I shake my head. “Until the other day, I had no idea that my husband and his two best friends were lying to me, so why should I have any clue about this either? What the hell do I know?”

He winces at my cutting words—as if the truth hurts him, somehow.

“Nico already told you that we’d planned on cutting The Saint loose. No more intel, no more spying,” he says, as if that should be some kind of absolution for all of their lies.

“I don’t fucking care.” I look away from him, unable to bear the sight of his once-familiar brown eyes. It feels like looking at a stranger now. “A lie is still a lie. Changing your minds or having an attack of conscience at the last minute doesn’t change the fact that you all entered into this alliance—into this marriage —planning to betray me.”

Atlas laces his tattooed fingers together, shaking his head.

“Come on, vicious. We all came into this alliance hating each other. Don’t tell me you didn’t have it in your head that the moment we found out who was fucking with us, the second we dealt with our unknown attacker, you’d go right back to being our enemy.”

“Maybe at first,” I admit stiffly, because he’s right. “But by the end? No. I didn’t think we’d be enemies. I thought?—”

I stop myself from finishing that sentence, literally biting my tongue to hold the words back. The tang of blood hits my palate, and the sting of tears threatens the corners of my eyes, but I don’t let them fall.

My father didn’t raise a girl who cried over boys, so the woman that I’ve become sure as hell won’t cry over these men.

Silence fills the room for a long moment, and it’s almost as if the words I refused to speak have somehow filtered into the air around us, echoing softly despite never being uttered.

Atlas swallows, and it strikes me suddenly how exhausted he looks. His clothes are smeared with dirt and soot, his shirt torn in a couple of places—probably by stray branches as they chased me through the woods—and there are dark circles under his eyes. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days, a feeling I can relate to, even though all of this has taken place in less than twenty-four hours.

Slowly, he straightens and then stands up from the chair, walking closer to me. The room seems to grow smaller with every step he takes, the space around us seeming to disappear until all that’s left is the few feet separating him from me.

“What if we had told you ourselves?” he asks quietly. “If we’d come to you and confessed everything, would you have understood? Would you have forgiven us? Given us a chance to prove ourselves, to make it up to you? Or would you have hated us just as much?”

There’s an edge to his voice, something raw and almost pained sounding, and it calls to the pain that burns through every inch of my chest.

I don’t know .

That’s the honest truth. I don’t know how I would’ve reacted if the men had admitted they were supposed to be spying on me for their mysterious employer but had decided not to anymore. That they had chosen me over their contract. Would it have been too late, even then?

Atlas’s gaze stays fixed on me, waiting for me to answer, and the weight of everything that’s happened suddenly crashes down on me, leaving me as exhausted as he looks.

“It doesn’t matter what I would have done,” I say, my voice dull. “That’s not what happened, is it?”

His shoulders slump almost imperceptibly, and then he shakes his head as if banishing some internal thought. He takes another step closer, and I steel myself when he reaches for me. But instead of touching me roughly like he did earlier, his hand is almost gentle as it grips my jaw, tilting my chin up and forcing me to meet his gaze.

“You have to talk, vicious,” he says, his voice low and intent. “Nico thinks you know something, that you must have some idea why The Saint thinks you’re valuable. So tell us what you know. Anything you can think of. It will be much better for you if you do.”

There’s something almost like concern in his voice, but instead of softening me toward him, it just hardens the walls around my heart. I know what he’s getting at. He’s trying to play good cop, trying to warn me that if I don’t tell him what he wants to know when he asks nicely, they’ll have to try to get the information from me by other means.

But fuck him.

He doesn’t get to care about my well-being now .

He doesn’t get to play the role of protector or try to be my knight in shining armor.

He already chose his side, and it’s not mine.

So if he and the other Princes plan to torture whatever information they think I have out of me, he’ll just have to face that fact with eyes wide open. I won’t let him pretend to be the noble one here. This is war, after all, and war is never pretty.

I lift my chin, breaking his hold on me as I stand as straight and tall as possible. A cold smile tugs at my lips as I shake my head.

“Even if I did know, I wouldn’t tell you anything.” I arch an eyebrow. “What if I was more valuable dead than alive? Nico would order me killed in a heartbeat, and you and Killian would rise to the occasion without a second thought. Don’t pretend you wouldn’t.”

A dark look passes through Atlas’s eyes at my words. They narrow, and he leans so close that I can feel his breath dusting across my lips. For a second, I think he’s going to try to torture an answer out of me right here and now. My body tenses, my abused limbs bracing for more pain…

But instead of touching me, Atlas lets out a low, furious growl under his breath, then turns and stalks away.

He storms up the stairs, flicking the light switch and plunging me into darkness. Then he slams the door so hard that the sound of it echoes in my ears long after he’s gone.