Page 6 of Diary from an Inked Throne

But we were never going to be that again.

All we were, was dead.

I shoved him away, glaring at him. “She can’t fucking marry him, Lynx! He’ll take the baby, sell her, and we’ll never see her again.”

The fear rose inside me so thick and swift it was choking. I couldn’t breathe. All I could think about was the hundreds of women we’d sold. My father, my uncle, their friends…

Me.

All of us were guilty. It didn’t matter I’d been born into this life. That I’d been groomed and raised to know no different.

I did. I had known all along that what we were doing was wrong, and yet I’d gone along with it because it was normal. Because I’d never had to get my own hands dirty. Because it had been so easy to distance myself from it and pretend none of it was happening when I had others to deal with the women for me.

There had always been that barrier. A go-between. Leech-like men who wanted to be on the good side of the Guerra family name. Men easily convinced with money to do despicable things I would have never had the stomach for. I had no sympathy for the cretins I’d paid to carry out the dirty work.

But all along I’d been paying them money so I could pretend my hands were clean.

They never had been. I deserved every punishment for what I’d done.

But Nyah didn’t. Nyah and that baby had done nothing wrong, and now they were paying for the sins of men like me and her father.

It didn’t matter if I was dead. She would be better off without me. But she wasn’t going to have any sort of life at all if she walked down the aisle with my father.

He’d take what he wanted from her, legitimize the baby she carried, and then toss her away like she didn’t matter.

She did fucking matter.

She mattered so very much.

“Let us out—”

A gunshot silenced me.

I waited for the pain, but it didn’t come. Dax didn’t fall to the floor, gripping his chest. Lynx didn’t have a sickening pool of blood spreading around him.

Three more shots came in quick succession.

I flinched with each one, but this time I was more aware the shots didn’t come from inside our prison.

But from above it.

The screams confirmed it. We hadn’t been able to hear much of all from upstairs the entire time we’d been here, and we were sure nobody could hear us either.

But there was no denying the sounds of fear that erupted through the church above our heads.

No denying the thumping on the stairs or the out-of-breath voice that told the guards, “Carlos is dead! He fucking shot him! Right in the back while he stood at the altar!”

The room spun around me.

Lynx and Dax shouted along with me, them both screaming Nyah’s name, like if they shouted it loud and desperately enough she might hear them.

If she was even still alive.

Four gunshots.

More than enough to kill them both.

My chest grew so fucking tight I could no longer breathe. “Who?” I choked out, standing at the door, closing my eyes and resting my forehead against it.