Play Rough (Black Rose Kisses 2)

“I didn’t kill your dad, Mercy,” he says finally.

Time seems to grind to a halt.

My mouth drops open, gaping at him.

That’s the last fucking thing I expected him to say, and it snaps something inside my chest, sending a new and unfamiliar kind of pain rushing through me.

Gloating or acceptance, I could have handled, but him lying to my face about it? That hurts worse than anything else could.

“Fuck you,” I snarl, baring my teeth like I’d rip out his jugular if I could. “I just told you I saw you do it! I was there! Don’t fucking lie to me.”

My voice raises with my agitation, and I want to buck him off my hips and tackle him, take that gun and empty it in his fucking skull.

“Listen to me.” Sloan lowers his voice, his tone hard and insistent. “I didn’t kill him because he isn’t dead. Your father’s alive.”

I shake my head furiously, the tears I’ve stubbornly been refusing to shed welling up in my eyes again and then spilling over my cheeks. One hand comes up to swipe them away quickly, but I don’t take my eyes off Sloan.

“Stop lying to me,” I tell him, and I hate the way it sounds like I’m begging. “I know what I saw. I know what you did. He’s gone, and I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to come to terms with that.”

Not that it’s been working. Even talking about it this much makes the hole in my heart feel ragged and painful, the loss of the most important person in my life stabbing at me over and over again.

Sloan sighs and lowers the gun slightly, running his free hand through his hair.

“We faked his death, Mercy. It was the only way.”

“The only way for what?”

“To save him.”

“From what?” I demand, practically shouting. I’m fucking sick of Sloan’s way of skirting around every damned thing. “You owe me the truth if that’s what this is.”

He nods, seeming to accept that. “He was going to be killed. He was spying for us within the Jackals. He infiltrated their ranks—that was the task we gave him to make up for not throwing the fight. And the wrong people got suspicious. They would have killed him without a second thought, so we had to make it look like he was killed by our side instead. By the Black Roses.”

My brow furrows as I try to put all the pieces together, but there’s clearly a lot of shit that I’m missing. Stuff going on behind the scenes that I never even knew about. And of course, it’s dangerous to get my hopes up that Sloan is telling the truth and that my dad is truly still alive. It would be such a blow for him to lie to me about this and then rip the rug out from under my feet later as punishment or something.

But the look on his face is the most earnest I’ve ever seen it, and he sounds so tired that I think maybe… just maybe, he’s telling me the truth.

“But why was he involved in the first place?” I want to know. “Why him? Why the fuck would you make him do something like that?”

He scrubs a hand down his face. “His brother is a Jackal. Your uncle, I guess. That’s why we sent your dad in, and that’s why he double-crossed us with the fight. Your uncle called in a favor, leaned on Oscar to make him back out on throwing the fight like he was supposed to.”

His face darkens as he explains that, and it’s obvious he doesn’t like my uncle.

An uncle

that I didn’t even know I had. As far as I’m aware, my dad is an only child, and I’ve never even met this guy Sloan is talking about.

Then something stirs in my memory, and I blink slowly as a realization passes over me.

“He was at the restaurant,” I murmur. “That night when we went out.”

Sloan nods. “Yeah. He was.”

“I thought…” I swallow, my throat going dry. “I ran into him coming back from the bathroom, and for a second, I thought he was my dad. He looked so much like him. But it wasn’t him. I thought it was just because my mind was on my dad, that it made the resemblance between them seem stronger.”

It’s hard to wrap my head around all of this. There are too many fucking lies and secrets to keep track of. My dad lied to me for my whole life about not having any siblings, and my uncle was going to get him killed for infiltrating his gang.

On top of that, my dad isn’t actually dead.