Page 115 of Breaking Rosalind
Roman’s welcome home party was supposed to mark the end of our family’s run of bad luck. Galliano and the Moirai assassins ruined Sofia’s joy.
“You okay?” I ask.
Her gaze roves up and down my leather apron, her lips tightening with disapproval. “You’re too skinny. You should eat more.”
“There.” I grab a pastry, take a huge bite, and offer her a smile that makes her eyes soften.
She gives me a pat on the cheek before wheeling the trolley toward the surveillance room, where I imagine everyone is still scouring how the hell the Moirai Group could get past our security.
I continue to the room where I left my treacherous pet. Four naked people sit huddled together, trying not to make eye contact with the six armed men.
As though outcast from her group, Rosalind lies unmoving on her side, bound with an excessive amount of zip-ties.
Adrenaline surges through my arteries, making my eyes bulge. My heart pounds hard enough to trigger a myocardial rupture. When I carried her upstairs, she was only mildly concussed. Now, her beautiful face is marred with a contusion around her eye and a laceration on her lip.
This isn’t the work of a barrel falling on her head. Someone punched her in the face. Some filthy bastard damaged my pet.
“Rosalind,” I say, my words hardening. “Who did this to you?”
FORTY-FIVE
ROSALIND
I sit up, but my skull ignites with white-hot agony, and I collapse onto my side. That sets off an explosion of pain across my shoulder, which pales compared to the shattering of my illusions. Each jagged fragment slices through my heart like shards of glass.
After four years of intense training and a decade working in the field, I finally understand the truth about the Moirai Group. The time I spent in the academy was just an indoctrination into a death cult.
It’s easy to skulk about in the shadows with a gun. Even easier to slip poison in a person’s drink or hide in a remote location to detonate bombs. We do this for the promise of power, wealth, and strength, yet all of us joined when we were too young to understand we’d sold our souls.
I thought assassins were the underworld elites.
We’re not. We are cowards.
I believed the Moirai Group operated on teamwork, but it’s survival of the fittest. The only authentic person there is Britt. Everyone else only cares about themselves, even if it means setting up their colleagues to die.
That’s why when Roman Montesano came in earlier, I cooperated with him through nods and silent gestures. Ingratiating myself to him is my only chance of surviving to see Miranda.
He might be the only man capable of saving me from Cesare, who probably wants to make me die slowly for shooting him in the chest.
Someone clears their throat, making me flinch.
“You looking at me?” a man growls.
This is the other reason I’m lying on my side with my eyes shut. The guards are getting bored and are trying to pick fights. After forcing the entire room of hostages to strip, they soon weeded out the Moirai from our little tattoos. The blonde woman from earlier was allowed out with the others, leaving the Montesano lackeys with us assassins.
Someone threads his fingers into my hair and yanks me off the stone floor. “I was talking to you.”
Get fucked.
That’s what I want to say, but I won’t risk getting any more injuries.
“Joe,” another voice hisses.
The man holding me releases my hair, and I fall on my side with a painful thud. Someone needs to remind Joe that beating up an injured woman doesn’t make him a badass. It just makes him pathetic.
Joe’s lumbering footsteps retreat just as another set approaches. This tread is lighter, and the person walks with power, purpose, and poise. My head throbs in sync with my shoulder wound, and I swallow hard.
It’s Cesare. He’s finally returned for his revenge.