Chapter 12
With a small wave of my hand, the guards continued.
They broke the rest of Damon’s nails one by one.
Then I looked around at everyone watching and said calmly, “If anyone here dares breathe a single word of tonight outside this room, don’t expect to survive in this circle again.”
Adrian stepped closer to Damon and said, with a faint smile, “Thank you. If you hadn’t failed to cherish Serena, I wouldn’t have had the chance to step in.”
His tone turned colder.
“You didn’t know how good she was. I do. And since I returned to this country, there was never any chance I would let Locke Group keep standing in peace.”
The day Damon and Yvette were thrown out, I moved fast.
I stripped away every resource the Locke family still had access to.
The Quinn family publicly announced that anyone who helped the Lockes would become an enemy of both the Quinn family and the Hale family.
My father stood fully behind me.
When the old Locke estate was finally repossessed, Damon came to see me.
He no longer looked spirited. His hands were wrapped in thick bandages, and his eyes stared at me like a dead man’s.
“Serena,” he said, “we need to talk.”
I kept my distance from him.
I had no interest in wasting words, so I turned to leave.
He called after me urgently. “If you won’t talk to me, you’ll regret it.”
I didn’t stop.
Then he shouted something that froze me in place.
“Don’t you want to know where Ranger was buried?”
He saw instantly that he had found my weakness.
“If you talk to me properly,” he said, “I’ll tell you. Otherwise, I’ll dig him up and grind his bones to dust.”
That was when the memory came back in full.
The day Ranger was skinned, Yvette had come to find me.
“Aren’t you supposed to love your dog more than anything?” she had said.
At the time, I was arranging flowers. I didn’t want to hear about Damon’s filth and I ignored her. But she kept talking.
Then she opened a video.
“Your dog is dead,” she said sweetly. “Look.”
The moment Ranger’s agonized cries came through the phone, the bottle in my hand slipped and shattered.
Then Yvette pulled a bloody piece of skin from her bag.
It was Ranger’s skin.
“Damon said he wanted to keep it and make me a wallet,” she said, smiling brightly. “I’ve heard of using fur for scarves, but dog skin for a bag? That’s a first.”
The blood had already dried to a dark purplish black.
I lunged at her, but Damon’s guards held me down and smashed me into the mud, pinning my face to the ground.
Yvette crouched beside me and laughed.
“Angry? You should be. Today it was your dog. Tomorrow it might be you. I only said I was afraid of dogs and didn’t like them. Damon tortured him all night for me. You slept so soundly, didn’t you? Meanwhile your dog died right outside your bedroom.”
Then she leaned close and whispered, “Didn’t you notice anything was wrong with the milk you drank?”
That night, Damon had stood over me and forced me to finish a glass of milk. He said if I drank it obediently, he would let me see Ranger.
I never knew that glass of milk would cost me my final chance to see him alive.