Sweet Salvation (Ruthless Games 3)

When I step into the bedroom, I find Dominic trying to sit up.

“Don’t.”

I cross to him and push him back down, and to my surprise, he does what I tell him to. He must still be groggy as fuck.

The lump on his head looks worse now. It’s grown in size and turned an ugly purple color, and it brings back unpleasant memories of my own head wound. The concussion I got when Marcus fell on top of me after Carson shot him.

As I think of Dominic’s role in all of that, my jaw clenches. No matter what Ryland says about me being a good person, I’m not a fucking saint. Part of me wants to walk back into the living room, grab my gun, and come back to put a bullet between Dom’s eyes.

The man in front of me lets out a low, pitiful groan, blinking slowly as he looks around the room and then down at himself.

“What happened to my shirt?”

I glance at his unbuttoned dress shirt, stained red with blood. “We had to make sure you weren’t bugged. That you didn’t have a tracker on you.”

He glances over at me, a confused look on his face, and I snort.

“Don’t look so fucking shocked. You put one on me when you kidnapped me, so it’s not that big of a stretch to think you might have one on you.”

He blinks again, his eyelids dragging up and down. His pupils are huge, overtaking the lighter color of his irises, and I know from personal experience how out of it he probably feels.

“I really am sorry,” he murmurs, almost to himself.

The tension in my shoulders doesn’t ease, and my voice is hard when I speak. “Yeah, you mentioned that already. But I don’t really give a fuck. ‘Sorry’ isn’t in short supply. That part is easy. People actually making up for what they did? Doing better? That’s what’s fucking rare.”

Confident that he’s in no position to even struggle against his bonds, much less break them, I sit on the edge of the bed and set down the first aid kit. I grab some disinfecting wipes and start to clean the skin around his goose egg, ignoring the way he winces at my touch.

“Do you remember what happened?” I ask.

He peers up at me through barely cracked eyes. I think he’s having a hard time keeping them open, and I wonder how long he’ll last before he passes out again. “Tonight? Yeah, I remember?”

“Good. Then tell me what the fuck you were doing.”

“What?” His brows pull together a little.

“What were you doing? Why did you hit Michael’s car? Was it an accident?”

He shakes his head slightly, grimacing at the movement. “No.”

I draw my hand back, dropping the blood-stained wipe on the mattress. “Then what the fuck is your angle? What’s your game? Did you not get the fucking hint Luca dropped?”

Dominic groans. The sound is both pained and exhausted, but when he looks up at me again, his eyes are a little sharper than before. “Yeah, I got it. That’s why I did what I did.”

“Trying to take Michael and Gabriel out so you could come after us yourself?”

“No.” He winces, lifting his head a little. “I was trying to help you.”

“Why?” My voice is hard as steel.

Dominic drops his head back down to the mattress, staring up at the ceiling. “I don’t like how he changed the game. It’s not fucking r

ight. He holds all the strings, and the rest of us just dance.” His upper lip curls. “The whole reason someone sent him my adoption papers was to try to get me booted from the game. Paint a target on my back. If Luca changes the rules, there isn’t shit I can do about it. And he’s going to. I fucking know he is. So I figured if I’m dead anyway, I should at least team up with the other dead men walking.” He glances sidelong at me. “And woman. Sorry.”

It strikes me as a little laughable that that’s the part he’s apologizing for. He basically just said he doesn’t expect any of us to live through this.

Still, the selfishness of his motivations makes me almost believe him. If he’d tried to convince me that he helped us out of the goodness of his heart, I’d have told him to go sit on his own dick. But if he thought he was about to become a target anyway, it sort of makes sense that he’d go for the safety in numbers.

He’s already shown himself to be a fucking follower, and severely lacking in backbone too.