Free Walk on the Striped Side by Jessie Lane Page A

told you that he’d never hurt you,
implying physically, it was written all over his face that he meant it? He
looked almost as heartbroken as you have these past two years. Are you sure he
doesn’t care for you Elena?”
    Confused, she stared unseeingly
towards the bar’s entrance. Her sister’s questions caused some of her inner joy
to fizzle. Could Delta be right? Had Gage really meant what he said? She’d
taken in the look on his face when he’d spoken those words, but had chalked it
up to him lying because he thought he had to save his worthless furry ass. Not
that Elena would have ever pulled that trigger anyways. She’d put that gun
against his forehead to send a message. To warn him that she wouldn’t let
him hurt her in anyway ever again. But the thought of actually pulling the
trigger and ending the life of the man she’d once loved… well, something inside
of her just wouldn’t let her do it. She’d spent half of that intense situation
silently pleading in her head for him to back off so she wouldn’t have to test
the theory on whether she could pull that trigger or not.
    Yet, when he’d said those words ‘ I
would never hurt you ’, any second guessing she’d had went out the window.
All of the pain she’d felt when she had overheard him telling his brother Alec
on the phone that she was just ‘ a hot piece of ass ’ and that she wasn’t
‘ worth going through all of that trouble to make this something more than
that ’ had overwhelmed her all over again. It was a fabulous reminder to her
heart that this man never cared one iota for her. So she’d buried all of that
pain again and went back to business.
    Delta was wrong. Gage Ivanov wasn’t
capable of an emotion such as love. And hell would probably freeze over before
he ever felt sorry for what he’d said about her. That’s why she was determined
to hurt him anyway she could. Right now that meant going after his sister for
this murder. If Lulu turned out to be innocent after all, well at least Elena
had been a pain in his ass for a while. But if Gage’s sister was guilty, what better
way to cause him the level of pain that he had cause her than to hand over his
beloved sister of the Ninth Circle for execution? From what she’d heard of the
Demon’s ruling Council, they would torture her in ways that would make her
eventual death seem like a reward.
    Looking back to Delta she forced a
smile she no longer really felt. “Don’t let him fool you little sister. Gage
Ivanov wouldn’t know how to care for someone other than himself or his siblings
if his life depended on it. Now let’s go home. We need to go over this case
file again to see what our next move should be.”
    Elena climbed into the vehicle,
buckled up, and looked back to the bar entrance one last time before her Aunt
drove them away. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end and she felt
like someone was staring at her from the other side of that tinted glass, but
it was probably just her raw nerves making her paranoid.
    Gage
    He watched as the SUV drove away.
His mate was staring right at him through the door and she didn’t even know it.
In that small moment of time, that mask of hers had dropped, and everything she
refused to let him see before was there plain as day. He hadn’t just hurt her
feelings when he’d ended things between them two years before, he’d broken her.
That gutted him. The woman who had awed him with her feisty personality and
inner strength while they were together seemed a shell of what she once was.
He’d done that to her. And if he didn’t somehow fix this between the two of
them, he would never forgive himself for it.
    An irritated Alec snarled from
behind the bar. “You want to tell me what that was about brother?”
    Stalking back to the bar Gage
grabbed a bottle of high dollar whisky and a clean glass. “Not really.” As he
poured himself a generous amount he added, “Besides, we have bigger problems
than Elena right