Primal Pursuit - Page 173

“Frank? Put your fucking gun down. I will kill you before you even start to pull the trigger. No. I’ll fucking blow off your hand before you start to pull the trigger, and then I’ll torture you. I’ll feed you your wife. I’ll make you fuck her dead body. I’ll make you wish you’d never been born.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

I revel in the pain in his voice, the pain he’s barely keeping in, because his fucking wife is lying in a pool of blood and brain matter.

“Who?” Frank demands, actually demands. “I don’t know you.”

“But I know you. Remember when you set your brother up?”

“How—”

“Antonio, R.I.P. by the way, hired a hitman. Me. Davian Stark. I’m exceptionally good at my job. Killed them both knowing their daughter watched. Isn’t that right,Rabbit? Took them into the room I knew you were in and shot them in front of you, right, Poppy?”

“No!” The horror in her voice wounds me, and I lean into it.

“Rabbit, you don’t think I took them in there for a tea party, do you?” I don’t look at her, and I keep my gun on Frank. Unlike hers, it’s very steady. “I’m the assassin everyone wants to hire. No one ever walks away. Unless I choose for that to happen. Put your fucking gun down.” He pales and lowers his gun. “Kick it over.”

Frank drops the gun and kicks it. “He killed your parents.”

“She knows,” I say. I’m not sure what I’m doing, but the anger in me is so big, so overwhelming it’s ripping at me, because I know if I look at her, I’ll see the pain and the hurt and the thing she thinks is love for me, all mixed up.

Poppy needs all this to end.

One way or another, she needs to make this end.

Frank’s eyes dart between us, and he says, “He did it, not me. He did, Poppy, honey.”

“Don’t call me honey.”

“Don’t call her fucking honey.” I narrow my eyes at him. “In fact, don’t speak to her at all.”

Now I turn to Poppy, who still has the gun on me. Rage is all over her. She drips in it. Sparks. The gun still shakes, and it’s zero-hour time.

Him or me.

“It could be both of us you decide to shoot, but I’m not sure you have that in you right now, Rabbit.”

“You know fuck all.”

“I know you.”

“Shoot him, Poppy!” Frank says.

“You are testing my patience like your wife did. So I probably would do what I said and shut the fuck up.” I keep my gaze now on Poppy, but gun on Frank. He’s very much in my peripheral.

Rabbit meets my gaze.

“You got the ball, Poppy. Your turn. Who are you going to shoot dead? Him or me?”

Chapter

Thirty-Four

POPPY

I’mboth hot and cold, and I can’t take my eyes off Davian.

How can love and hate be so tightly entwined with him?