Chapter 51
CHAPTER 51
B EAST
“There had better be a good reason for dragging me out of bed,” I grumble to Bram when I walk into the security room.
The morphine has worn off and the bullet hole in my shoulder is screaming for attention.
When I see Lars sitting in one of the chairs, I frown. Bram must’ve called him first. Which means I’m about to find out something bad. The kind of bad that will blow my last fuse, and Lars is here as a means to control me.
“What is it?” My voice is sharp because I know something bad is coming. Something to kill the buzz of the two orgasms my insatiable wife gave me.
Bram looks uncomfortable. “The owner of The Emporium reached out to me. We play poker a few times a month and he knew we’d want to see this.”
I glance at Lars but his poker face gives me nothing. I turn back to Bram. “What is it?”
The tension in the room is in the red zone. Everyone is on edge, which makes me fucking nervous.
“Don’t make me ask twice,” I growl.
He taps a couple of buttons on his keypad and the CCTV footage from The Emporium appears on one of the screens in front of him.
Straight away I recognize Belle and Annika on the screen. They’re looking at something in the box Annika is holding when someone walks into frame.
The hairs on my neck stand on end.
Because that someone is Gaston.
My jaw tenses.
Things are about to change. I can feel it. The world is about to shift on its axis, because I know what I am about to see is going to change everything.
The moment he punches Annika in the cheek sends a rush of rage across my body.
Then it’s an out of body experience as I watch him press Belle against the counter with his body.
The roar that leaves me is primal.
Vicious and frightening.
I have never felt so maddened in my life. Like the rage is going to take a life of its own.
I vibrate with hate.
And I see red. So much red.
I watch with raging eyes, and the moment Gaston reaches for Belle and twirls her hair around his finger, I feel it in my core. A cold rage. The kind that’s out of this world.
Barely containing it, I watch as she smashes the bottle of wine against the counter to protect herself and jabs it into his neck.
Shove it hard into his jugular.
Bram and Lars are watching me.
But it barely registers.
I have to fix this.
I have to… Make. Him. Pay.
“Think about this,” Lars says, stepping between me and the door.
I grit my teeth. “Get out of my way.”
“Gaston can wait. We need you on the right side of the jail walls,” Lars pleads. “Besides, do I need to remind you that you still have a bullet hole in your shoulder?”
“I said get out of my way.”
I storm through the clubhouse and down to the parking garage where my bike is. Damn the consequences, Gaston has to pay for touching my wife.
I find him in a dive bar in Devil’s Kitchen. The kind of place that leaves you needing a shower after you leave.
Lars, Viking and Bear hang back at the entrance to stop anyone from entering, while I enter the cesspit .
Inside the bar is empty.
Except for Gaston.
He’s at the bar drinking whiskey when I walk in and pick him up off his stool by his Unhinged Psycho’s cut and throw him against the wall.
My brother has always thought he was smarter than me. Because I was bigger, stronger, and better, he needed something to make himself feel better. So he convinced himself he was the smart one.
Unfortunately for him, he proved he wasn’t smart at all the moment he put his hands on Belle.
A smart man would never put his hand on the very thing that gives me life .
I should have put a bullet between his eyes that morning in the dungeon when I sliced his cut from his body. But I gave him a chance because he is my brother.
I won’t make that same mistake twice.
I reach for him and ram him into the wall, over and over and over again.
The force of his skull against the brickwork should kill him.
But it doesn’t.
The fucker is still breathing.
When he falls to the floor, I straddle him and start slamming my fist into his face. The bullet wound in my shoulder hurts like a bitch but I can barely feel it over the adrenaline coursing through me. Or the rage vibrating in every cell of my body.
That’s when the bar owner tries to intervene with a baseball bat, but I reach out and stop it mid swing.
“I suggest you leave while you can,” I say, yanking it from him and snapping the bat in two.
“I can’t let you do this,” he says.
So I grab him by the throat and send him out the plate glass window and onto the street.
He’s safer out there.
Because in here, I mean business.
I return my focus to Gaston. The man who dared put his hands on my wife.
“You should have walked away when I told you to,” I tell him as I smash my fist into his face again.
He looks up at me from swollen eyes and laughs. Because I’m the one wailing on him, but he’s the psychopath.
“This is where it ends.” I wrap my hand around his throat as the other one grabs a bottle of whisky from the floor.
“Do it,” he taunts, looking up at me and laughing. “Fucking do it.”
He thinks I’m going to hit him with it. But I have a better plan. One more suited to his level of depravity.
I throw the whiskey bottle, and it smashes into a million pieces against the wall, sending whiskey spraying across the floor and furniture like a geyser.
Reaching inside my cut for my lighter, I lean down so I am eye level with my brother, and I flick the flint so the flame glows between us.
His laughter stops when our eyes meet.
“You wouldn’t,” he says through his bloody and bruised lips.
“Watch me.”
I throw the lighter onto the spilled whiskey and it erupts.
Flames roar into the air and spread across the floor and up the wall.
I lean down so I can whisper into his ear. “This isn’t for all the evil shit you’ve done in your miserable life. This is because you touched her.”
There is a moment when the revenge you seek comes to you, and mine is in those few seconds when he looks up at me and I can see the fear in his eyes. He knows he is about to die. He knows he has lost.
The bar catches alight like a tinderbox, and within seconds, flames dance all around us. Liquor bottles catch alight and explode like fireworks, and I watch with a quickening in my chest as the flames grab onto everything.
Somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind, I acknowledge the owner had this coming too. We all know where Seamus Doyle got the money to open this bar. He might have set it right in his mind. But selling arms to street thugs so they can kill each other, as well as the innocent people who get caught in the crossfire, is always going to bring you karma from a higher power. When he comes crying to the club about it, I’ll remind him about the seven-year-old girl who was killed when she was caught in a shootout between The Psychos and another gang. Using the guns he put in their hands.
Then I’ll remind him about the girls of a questionable age he liked to ply with drinks before introducing them to his bedroom upstairs. That was until he did a short stint in prison for it. He’s only been out a matter of weeks. But given time, there is no doubt he’ll return to his old ways. Because that type of poison runs deep.
But right now he isn’t my concern.
I climb to my feet and look down at Gaston slumped on the floor.
This is the last time I will see him. Because in minutes, the fire will eat up this bar and everything in it, and he’s too injured to escape outside.
Our eyes connect for the last time. “I will always choose her. Over everything and everyone. Most of all you.”
And then, turning away, I escape the burning bar and disappear into a night lit up by flames and sirens.