Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
GRAYSON
My entire body jolts at the sight that greets me.
This fucking piece of shit actually FaceTimed me so he can assault my woman and try to force me to watch.
The absolute nerve of this man.
He truly believes he is, without a doubt, untouchable.
What an absolute goddamn whole piece of shit.
He’s beyond a piece of shit.
I don’t know what the fuck he thinks he is, but anger bubbles inside of me and threatens to spill out.
The abuse of power is something he gets off on, and he’s going to show me just how he likes to do just that.
I’m going to find him, and I’m going to take care of him, for good.
Obviously, the government doesn’t do its job well enough.
They just put him under investigation but haven’t done fuck all about his bullshit.
As pissed off as I am, I can’t look away from the screen, and that pisses me off even more.
I should not look at this.
I should be there, stopping it.
I can hear the men loading up with guns, getting everything ready to go to the house where we think this is taking place, but I’m frozen.
Frozen completely solid.
Unable to think, to move, to even breathe.
Nadine drops to her knees.
Anger floods me at the sight of her willingly falling to her knees for this absolute weak-ass human.
Then I realize that it’s an automatic response.
She’s not willingly doing anything.
Ignoring her body and its movements, I find her eyes.
She’s a fucking zombie.
She’s shut off every part of herself.
Every part of her face and expression is completely blank.
It’s like she can disassociate herself completely from what’s not only happening around her, but what is about to happen to her—she’s just trying to survive it.
I don’t want her to ever have to survive anything again.
When Landon reaches out, wrapping his fingers around the front of her throat, his fingers gripping her bruises…
my bruises, my feet suddenly become unfrozen.
Turning around, I find the man, Broker, who said he knew where Landon’s home was located.
He’s standing by the door of the bar, slipping a gun into his shoulder holster.
My feet swiftly carry me straight to him.
“Are we leaving?” I demand.
He lifts his head and tilts it to the side, his gaze searching mine for a moment.
He must sense my urgency because his brows snap together and he nods once but doesn’t answer immediately.
My eyes widen, and I tilt my head to the side as if to ask him again.
“We’re getting everyone loaded up, then we’ll be headed out.”
That is not a good enough answer.
Flicking my gaze down to the phone in my hand, I mistakenly watch the images on the screen.
It’s a colossal fucking mistake.
Because what assaults my eyes is the woman I’m falling for with her mouth open while Landon Tate fucks her face.
And not gingerly, either.
The sight makes me sick.
It fills me with rage, and I shift my attention to him.
I don’t know why the fuck these guys are dragging their feet, but I really fucking need to leave.
I need that address.
I need to get the fuck out of here and to Nadine.
“We need to leave right fucking now.”
My words come out on a growl, my shoulders square, and my chest puffs.
I am seconds away from losing my goddamn shit on every single person in this bar if I don’t start getting somewhere, like to Nadine.
“It takes time to gather everything. Not only do we have to get guns, which I think we all have, but your guy is working on how we’re going to get in without being seen.”
Shaking my head, I lean in closer.
“It’ll be too fucking late. We need to leave now.”
Instead of just demanding that we leave, I lift my phone and show him the screen.
His eyes widen as he watches what is happening.
I don’t know if I can stomach seeing it again, so I don’t look down.
I have it on mute, and I know that Landon isn’t looking to see if I’m watching.
He’s doing whatever the fuck he’s doing with Nadine.
He’s going to die for it, too.
I can’t deny that I’m excited about the prospect of his death.
I want to be the one to watch the life drain from his eyes.
I want to be the one who does it.
I have never wanted anything more in my entire life.
Maybe I’m not meant to be a man who lives life on the up and up.
I sure as shit didn’t live that way as a teenager, and as much as we’ve tried to have a legitimate business, we keep getting dragged back into the underworld, and I think maybe we just need to accept that this is who we all are.
I’m craving death.
I want to kill this man more than I’ve ever wanted to kill anyone.
More than I wanted to kill Ravet.
Reaching into my pocket, I palm the thumb drive before I release it, and it falls back inside.
I have a feeling that the thumb drive holds more sick information than I ever wanted to know in my life.
This man would not go to these lengths if it didn’t.
The legitimate part of me wants to call ATF and turn it over to them, along with Landon himself.
The part of me that is going to win, though, is the darkness.
Because Landon Tate won’t be alive long enough for me to turn him in.
That fucker is going to die tonight, and it’s going to be by my hand.
“Let’s fucking go,” Broker growls.
And thankfully, that lights a fire under their asses, and we are on the road within five minutes.
Which is still much fucking longer than I would have preferred.
Now is not the time to bitch about that shit.
Now is the time to get Nadine and bring my woman home.
And with me is exactly where she belongs.
Where she’s always belonged.
She walked into Securus looking for protection and work.
She’s getting that and more from me.
She is getting everything that I have to give.
As the car moves down the street, I realize that I have no clue where we’re going, and I’m thankful that I’m not driving, because I’m spun the fuck up, and I would without a fucking doubt not be able to concentrate on the road in front of me.
NADINE
I thought I could just blank out, and all of this would be the way it was before I left.
Like I could slip into another place in my head and just do what I needed to do.
That’s how I was always able to cope, but I can’t do that, no matter how hard I try.
I feel every single moment of violation from this man in my bones.
I’m not the same person I was five years ago.
I can’t turn them off—my feelings, my heart, my brain.
None of them.
Brody makes a noise from his chair in the background, but I can’t even chance looking over to him.
I don’t think I could stomach it, honestly.
I never wanted my brother to see me like this.
Ever.
And now he’s seeing it all.
Every ugly moment of it just makes me feel even more disgusted.
In my mind, I envision ripping Landon’s balls off with my bare hands.
I hope I get the opportunity.
I just might feed them to him as well.
I want him to be as humiliated as he is making me feel right now.
A hard slap across my face brings me back to this moment—to my unfortunate reality.
He’s still choking me with his fingers around the front of my throat, so my head doesn’t even move with the force of his palm against my cheek.
I flick my eyes upward.
He scowls down at me.
“You don’t get to zone out on this, Nadine. You need to be present for every second of me fucking your face. I want that asshole to see just how much you fucking love it.”
I don’t.
At all.
In fact, I would probably love anything other than this right now.
But when he lifts his hand, the same one that slapped me again, he is holding a gun in it and touches the cool barrel against my temple.
Brody makes a noise again in the distance, but I am now completely focused on this man.
On Landon Tate and the absolute abhorrent hate I feel for him.
He is the most disgusting human to ever have existed.
And I’ve known a lot of monsters, but this one is the worst.
“Be a good girl and take everything, Nadine. Your life depends on it,” he says right before he bursts out into laughter.
I do what I always do— what I need to survive .
It’s who I am and who I was raised to be.
It doesn’t matter that my parents’ corpses are just a few feet beside me or that my brother is tied to a chair a few feet in the opposite direction.
I just do what I need to do.
I’ll worry about the aftereffects if I survive this, just like I did when I was forced to marry him and live in a nightmare for years.
He thinks I’m weak, that he’s going to break me.
But he doesn’t know me, never even bothered to try, because if he knew even the slightest thing about me, he would know that I cannot be broken.
Sure, I come from complete and total trash, but if anyone were going to break me, it would have been those people lying dead on the floor when I was a child.
I am unbreakable, just like Brody.
Landon will have to kill me to break me because as long as I breathe, I will not be broken.
Not by him and his sick and twisted shit.
He doesn’t stop his assault.
With the barrel of the gun pressed against my temple, he continues.
I look into his eyes, trying not to give him anything, but I know that my hate and disgust show, which only fuels him to do more, to go further.
And he does.
His fingers flex around my throat, squeezing harder.
Then stars begin to burst, and darkness begins to consume my vision all at the same time.
As much as I want to believe that I am physically strong enough to withstand whatever this man dishes out to me, I am not.
Everything around me begins to go dark, and I know from past experience that I’m about to black out.
I also know from past experience that this man is going to use my body in ways unimaginable after I am unconscious, too.
He’s going to wake me up and do it all over again as punishment for passing out in the first place.