My mouth flattened into a hard line. I needed to get this shit over with as fast as possible. Sitting there discussing my club was not fucking helpful.
Before I could reply, Joseph stepped in. “No, I did that to him.” Leaning his arms on the table, he added, “This is what happens when I’m not happy.”
Eric’s brows lifted and I took in his nervousness. I hoped to hell he was reconsidering his involvement with Joseph. With a shaky laugh, he said, “Remind me never to piss you off.”
“You will do well to remember this,” Joseph said. “Now, can we get down to business?”
Eric tapped his fingers on the table, jittery. “Umm, yeah, about that….”
“Yes?” Joseph’s voice was low. Dangerous.
William leant forward. “You haven’t changed your mind, have you, Eric? That wouldn’t make Joseph very happy.” There was no mistaking his threat. William had a presence that shrieked danger.
Eric stared at him. The fear rolled off him as he assessed William who had been silent up until that point. Swallowing hard, he said, “I just need a little more time to get some shit worked out.”
“This happens today or not at all,” Joseph said.
Eric’s indecision was blatantly obvious in the way he said he wanted in on the deal while his body language said the complete opposite.
Raking his fingers through his hair, he said, “Man, honestly, I just need a few more days and then we’re sweet. I don’t have the cash for the guns yet.”
Joseph fumed next to me. I watched as he splayed his hand out on the table in the way he did when his urge was actually to punch someone. It was one of his control mechanisms.
Silence filled the air for a minute while Joseph considered what Eric had said. Finally, he stood. “Three days, Eric. If you’re not ready then, you’re dead.”
As William and I stood to leave with Joseph, I took in Eric’s expression. He looked like he was about to shit his pants.
Greed was a dirty fucking thing. It made you do shit you thought you’d never do. I’d watched countless men fall after a relationship with it. I hoped that Eric gave up on this deal, but something told me that the threat of death wasn’t something a man like him would be willing to risk. Men like him would rather sleep with the devil than give everything up for some peace.
I wasn’t like Eric Bones.
I’d choose death over the devil every time.
* * *
I slept on the cement floor again that night. Not that I got many hours of actual sleep in. Probably two at the most. My body hurt too damn much on the floor. On top of that, I couldn’t shut my mind off. I spent most of the night worrying about Tatum. I wasn’t a praying man, but I prayed like fuck that she’d received the medical attention she needed. I also prayed that Marilyn was okay and that Renee and Dustin were dealing with it all.
When the sun rose, I paced the room while I waited for Joseph to arrive. He hadn’t said anything to me when we’d returned from the meeting with Eric Bones. He’d been furious with Bones, and because I knew Joseph’s evil mind well, I knew some of that fury stemmed from the fact my hand hadn’t been forced to declare my loyalty to him over Storm. I’d been given a reprieve, and all I could hope was that three days was enough time to show Joseph where my true loyalty lay.
He didn’t show his face that morning, but William did. He turned up wearing his cargo pants, black tee, and combat boots, which told me what kind of day it was going to be.
Throwing clean clothes at me, he fired his orders. “You’ve got five minutes for a shower and then I want you waiting outside dressed in these. You and me are gonna spend the day together getting reacquainted.”
I followed him to the shower and did what he’d said. The day was going to be tough enough as it was, I didn’t need to start arguing with him early on.
When I was done, he led me to a Jeep that was parked in the large open area of the warehouse and indicated for me to get in the back. He joined me there while another man slid into the driver seat. We were then driven about an hour away to what I guessed was Joseph’s base camp for soldier training. William blindfolded me at the beginning of the journey so I had no sense of where they’d taken me. When the blindfold was removed, we were parked in the middle of the bush.
“Out,” William barked.
He then proceeded to put me through my paces. Their land was dense with trees, but they’d cleared a section that held the shit I knew was designed to break a man. Trenches of muddy water, pits of mud, steel cages over deep troughs of water that could drown a man, dangling wires designed to shock, and a bath of ice were some of William’s favourite things. He could spend hours doing this part of his training. Brutalisation was designed to start the process of ripping a man’s sense of self-worth from him. It was just one aspect of what William did. And he did it well.
I spent the next five hours following his orders. I ran his fucking obstacle course and didn’t back down from any of it, even though my body was in excruciating pain the whole time. Hell, it had already been in a world full of hurt before I started. William’s goal was clearly to kick that up a notch, and he succeeded.
At the end of the five hours, he came to me and grabbed me around the throat. “You think you can beat me, soldier?” I knew from the way he spat his words out that he was pissed at me.
I held his gaze triumphantly. What he didn’t realise was that the day was exactly what I’d needed. My conditioned response to him was still there, but my mind was in a whole new place. They didn’t understand that by hurting Tatum they’d splintered my mind and screwed with the wiring they’d put in place years ago. So while I still felt that stirring of fear when I looked at William, I was able to mentally withstand it. The five hours spent with him doing his training, and surviving those hours mentally strong as fuck at the end, only solidified my ability to ignore the fear he tried to draw out.
“I know I fucking can. I might have agreed to work with Joseph again, but it’ll be a cold fucking day in hell before I fall at your feet,” I gritted out. “Your power over me is dead.”
His lips curled up into a snarl. “We’ll see about that.”
He dragged me to the ice bath and forced me into it. I wanted to fight him off and force him into it, but I knew I had to be smart. If I had any chance at saving myself and my family, I needed to wait for the perfect moment to kill both him and Joseph together.