27. Riley
My eyebrows shootup as Sienna locks eyes with Maddoc, as if daring him to believe her. I’m not sure whether or not I do, but I do know I don’t trust her.
Or, for that matter, like her.
Around me, I can feel each of my men reacting with surprise too. None of us expected Sienna to say that, and even if their body language doesn’t give them away, I can tell that they’re just as shocked—and just as distrustful—as I am.
“Why?” Maddoc finally demands.
Dante snorts. “You really all that surprised she’d betray him too, Madd? We know her true colors.”
“Fuck you, Dante,” Sienna snaps. “He’s gonna take you Reapers out, and I’m the one who walked in here to do something about that.”
“He’s not taking us out,” Logan says flatly.
Sienna laughs, sounding a little manic. “Do you even know how much money this bitch gave him?” She flings an arm in my direction, and I hear Dante’s gun cock under the table.
We all hear it… and Sienna’s eyes go wide.
“You wanna rephrase that?” Dante suggests quietly.
She swallows hard, shooting daggers at me with her eyes, then quickly looks away, taking a deep breath like she’s trying to center herself.
“I just mean that getting his hands on all that money has got him getting a little too big for his britches now,” she finally goes on, a little more subdued. “He’s been making all these plans, like, ever since I threw in with him, but now he can actually move on them.”
“We noticed,” Maddoc says dryly.
“Yeah, well did you also notice that he’s a power hungry psycho?” she snaps. “And the more power he gets, the more of an ego maniac that fucker becomes.”
“Of course we’ve noticed,” Maddoc says, starting to sound a little impatient. “None of this is fucking news, Sienna. Are you just here to whine, or do you actually want to take him down?”
“Of course I fucking want it.”
He waits her out, and after a minute, she quits glaring, her shoulders slumping in defeat. “We had a fight.”
“Okay,” Maddoc says flatly.
“Look at me,” Sienna demands, waving her hands in front of herself. “This wasn’t just some minor argument. I told him I didn’t agree with some of the shit he’s planning, and he fucking snapped! He was supposed to marry me before that bi—”
All three men go rigid, and Sienna freezes like a deer in the headlights for a moment, then pivots quickly, wrapping her arms around herself and darting a quick look at me before staring down at the top of the table as she goes on.
“Before he got his hands on all that money, everything was good between us. He actually listened to me. Then everything changed. He’s got big plans for his gang, and when I told him I thought he was moving too fast and taking too many risks, he just told me I needed to shut up and learn my place.”
Dante snorts. “Well, your place sure as shit ain’t here.”
“I never said it was,” she snaps, then quickly covers her mouth when her eyes well up with tears.
I legit don’t know if she’s playing us or having some kind of breakdown, but I’m pretty sure it would be hard to fake the way her voice cracks as she continues telling her story in a broken whisper.
“I pushed back when he said that shit, because hell no, you know? But he… he hit me. Not just a regular slap or something. The fucker beat me.” Her eyes dart up to mine again, then away. “He wouldn’t stop. Wouldn’t let me get away from him. He tried to kill me, just for disagreeing with him.”
“If he’d wanted you dead, you would be,” Logan says flatly. “If he wanted you to come to us with a sob story, he’d give you a few bruises and send you in to win our trust.”
“Oh, fuck you, Logan,” she says, rocking back. “He knows none of you dickheads are ever gonna trust me. And he did try to kill me. I lost consciousness while he was hitting me, and when I came to, I was in the river.”
“What?” I blurt out, an involuntary shiver of terror rocking through me.
I had way too much time to think about how Austin would get rid of me after I signed over my inheritance while I sat in that prison cell of a room, and I blamed Sienna for putting those thoughts in my head in the first place. But none of that changes my horror at hearing that he went and actually did it.
She nods, twisting her hands together in front of her on the table. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure he threw me in there while I was unconscious. Or I mean, he probably had Tony or Jackson do it, the sick fucks. But Austin definitely never meant for me to make it back out.”
She stops talking, and after a couple of minutes of silence, Maddoc asks, “Does he know you’re alive?”
When Sienna blinks, looking up with a lost expression that shows just how hurt and traumatized she is, it hits me harder than I’m ready for.
She’s really not faking this. And I’ll never like her, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a little bit sorry for her too. She’ll always be the bitch who betrayed Maddoc, and since she made that bed, she definitely deserves to lie in it… but not to be fucking dumped in a river and left to die for it.
No one deserves that.
Maddoc doesn’t seem to be softening much toward her, though, and she definitely deserves that.
“Well?” he presses, his voice hard. “Does McKenna know that you’re…” He stops and shakes his head. “You know what? I don’t actually give a shit. I also don’t see why you think this is gonna help us stop him or take West Point down.”
“Oh, really? You don’t think anything I’ve picked up over there might be useful?” Sienna asks, her snark killing off most of my sympathy.
“Doubtful,” Dante mutters, leaning back in his seat… but not so far that he can’t keep his weapon trained on her under the table.
She glares at him for a moment, then deflates, slumping against the back of the booth as if exhaustion has finally caught up with her.
“Fuck you too, Dante,” she says tiredly, tucking some of her limp hair behind her ears before looking back up at Maddoc. “Austin may never have seen me as his partner, but that didn’t mean he didn’t talk about shit in front of me. I thought we were in it together, and I gave him some damn good ideas over the years that he took fucking credit for, but his current plan is suicide.”
“Suicide?” Maddoc shares a skeptical look with his brothers. “You just said you wanted to destroy him. If that’s true, you’d let him burn.”
“Yeah, except what if it’s not? Do you have any idea what you can buy with the kind of money she handed over to him? Fucking anything. Maybe even this.”
“Maybe even what?” Maddoc asks. “Quit fucking around if you really want to take him down, Sienna. What’s McKenna planning?”
Her eyes flash for a second, like she wants to snap back at him with something else nasty, but then, to her credit, she sucks it up and just nods, straightening her spine. “Austin hates you, but this is bigger than you.” She swallows hard, looking at each of us. “He isn’t just planning to decimate the Reapers. He’s set his sights as high as they can go here in Halston.”
It takes me a minute to realize what she means.
It takes Maddoc a lot less.
“McKenna’s planning to take down The Six,” he says grimly.
I blink. “He… can’t though, right?”
I wish I felt more confident about that, but there’s too much I don’t know. I can tell the Reapers are shocked to hear that McKenna is planning on it, though, so maybe I’m not too far off.
And maybe, maybe, this information is actually worth dealing with Sienna for too.
“Fuck,” Maddoc mutters after a moment, scrubbing a hand over his face. Then he gestures to Logan, who guides me into a seat on the far side of the booth from Sienna before sitting next to me. Maddoc takes the seat across from her. “Fine. Talk. How does he think he can manage to take down The Six?”
Sienna hesitates, then shrugs. “I don’t actually know.”
“What?” Maddoc asks, his face darkening.
She winces. “I mean, I don’t actually know all the details, but I’m sure that’s his plan. It’s all he’s talked about ever since the first time they called the two of you in front of them.”
“Okay, so we’re done here,” he says flatly.
“No,” Sienna blurts, reaching for Maddoc across the table.
He pulls back so that her fingers don’t do anything more than skim his sleeve. “Why? What else have you got to offer?”
“Really, Maddoc?” She looks up at him through her lashes. “You like a lot that I have to offer. I know you haven’t forgotten.”
The only thing stopping me from punching the sultry look off her face is the flat, uninterested stare Maddoc gives her.
“It sounds like that’s just one more thing you’re wrong about then,” he tells her. “There’s nothing memorable between you and me. There never was.”
The bitch actually pouts. “I know you don’t really mean that. I shouldn’t have left you. I can see that now. You treated me better than Austin ever did, and—”
“And fucking nothing,” he says, standing up abruptly. “I don’t give a shit that he beat you, and the only problem I have with him dumping you in that river is that you crawled back out.”
“Asshole,” she hisses, glaring up at him. “I came to you.”
“And now that you have, I should finish what McKenna started,” Maddoc says coldly, pinning her with a look that has all the blood draining out of her face. “He’s already gonna die for kidnapping Riley and forcing her to marry him, but you went along with it. You were there. You were a part of that shit, Sienna. Make no mistake, there’s only one woman I care about here, and it’s gonna be up to her whether you live or die today.” He looks at me, his eyes full of simmering rage, barely held in check. “Butterfly?”
Sienna’s eyes dart toward me too, true fear flashing across her face.
Maybe I’m the monster here, because I like it. Seeing it feeds the darkness in me, and I hope like hell that she’s remembering the way she treated me, the way she taunted me, because I sure as fuck am.
“You can’t be serious, Maddoc,” Sienna says, her voice trembling a little.
He doesn’t even bother to answer her. He’s waiting on me. And I know just as well as Sienna does that if I give him the word, he’ll do it in a heartbeat. Any one of these men will kill for me, no questions asked.
But the fact that they did ask, that Maddoc’s giving all the power to me after that bastard, McKenna, took it all away, it’s… enough. I hate Sienna, and I hate what she did, but I don’t want more blood on my hands, and I don’t need it. Not when I’m the one who fucking won here. She’s a shitty person, but she already lost everything that matters. She lost one of the best men I know, and now she’s lost everything she left Maddoc for too.
“I don’t want you to kill her,” I tell him.
He holds my gaze for a moment, and I can’t tell if he’s disappointed or proud, but there’s definitely a lot of emotion in his eyes. Then he turns back to her. “You heard Riley.”
“Okay, yeah,” Sienna says, nodding quickly and scooting toward the edge of the bench seat, clearly ready to bolt.
Maddoc nods toward Logan, and Logan blocks her.
“The fuck?” Sienna spits out, glaring up at him.
Logan doesn’t react, and Maddoc leans across the table, getting right in her face. “Right now, it’s Riley’s choice, and she’s made it,” he says, his gray eyes burning into hers, “but if you ever show your face in Reaper territory again, if you ever fucking look at Riley again, I’ll end you, do you understand?”
She swallows hard, shrinking back. “I understand.”
“Logan,” Maddoc says without looking away from her.
Logan nods and steps back, letting Sienna out of the booth, then he taps something into his phone as she slinks away.
“I’ve got Greg and Vic on it,” he tells Maddoc after a moment. “They’ll escort her to the border.”
Maddoc nods, then tugs me against him, practically pulling me onto his lap. He buries his face against my neck, taking a few breaths as his hands dig into my hips.
After a moment, he looks up at his brothers, not addressing the fact that he’s still holding me so tightly that I’m guaranteed a few new bruises. “What do you think about that bitch’s intel? Have either of you heard any word on the street about this shit with The Six?”
“Fuck no,” Dante says, snorting. “Sienna’s right about one thing. That would be fucking suicide.”
“And not good for the city,” Logan adds, his eyes flat.
Maddoc sighs, then pinches the bridge of his nose. “But since McKenna’s a narcissistic fucktwit, none of that shit’s gonna hold him back, and like Sienna said, he’s got the money to actually make a go at it.”
“Fuck,” Dante says. “We’re all gonna suffer if he does, win or lose.”
Maddoc nods. “But none of that means Sienna’s wrong.” He pauses, then curses. “She’s a lot of things, but I don’t think she’s that. Not about this.”
Dante and Logan nod, and even if I don’t know all the factors they’re probably taking into consideration, my gut agrees. Austin really is going to come gunning for The Six.
“That could change things,” Maddoc says grimly. “If they see McKenna as an actual threat to their power, they’ll have to step in.”
Dante drums his fingers on the table. “That could help us.”
“They still won’t take sides though, right?” I ask.
“That’s right, wildcat,” Logan says, giving me one of those small smiles that make me feel so damn in love with him. “But the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
“I think they could become very good friends to us,” Maddoc says slowly, like he’s contemplating strategy. “But we’ll need to get proof of what Sienna said if we want to take this information to The Six and make that happen.”
Dante nods. “They won’t act on rumor or hearsay alone, that’s for damn sure. Especially not when it means starting some shit that could destabilize Halston’s entire underground.”
“The Six exist to keep order, right?” I ask, looking between the three of them.
“That’s right, butterfly,” Maddoc says, turning to press a thigh-melting kiss behind my ear. “They do, and they’re ruthless about it.”
“I like ruthless,” I say, earning three matching looks, each hot enough to curl my toes.
“We know you do, princess,” Dante says, those vibrant green eyes of his promising me that they’ll give me exactly what we like once we get home.
“But first,” Maddoc says, pinning us each with a look. “We need to get some actual evidence of McKenna’s plans. How are we gonna do that?”
None of them have a quick answer to that, and I bite my lip as they start throwing around ideas, realizing that the information Sienna brought was both good and bad. On the one hand, she’s finally given us the first real chance we have to fight back with something concrete; to really find a way to stop that motherfucker once and for all.
But on the other hand, the Reapers don’t have anyone on the inside in Austin’s organization, and with no reliable allies or informants to lean on for this, in some ways, being able to finally end this thing feels farther away than ever… especially if we don’t figure it out fast enough.
Because if Austin actually starts something that pulls Halston’s underground into an all-out war that involves The Six? Everyone’s gonna suffer, and I can tell by the serious looks on my men’s faces that even they aren’t sure the Reapers could survive that.