Chapter 40 #2
I visually devour his inked bare chest while he stands at the counter island, chopping bell peppers. It’s sexy as fuck to watch him cook shirtless. Food porn, I once told Raquelle. She wholeheartedly agreed.
“Where are the cookies?” As soon as I say it, I instantly spy the covered platter of chocolate chip cookies sitting next to the stove and make grabby hands.
“You’re as bad as T. Those are for after dinner. FYI, as soon as we put it up, our son has been trying to scale the Christmas tree. We need to put a barrier around it.”
Our son. It doesn’t matter who Fénix belongs to biologically, he’s ours. And exhausting as it is having a baby while going to school, I want more kids. A house full of little hellions. How often I’m fucked within an inch of my life, I’m surprised I’m not knocked up again.
“We literally just had that same conversation,” Tristan replies.
My butt hits the countertop when he sets me down. He pushes between the vee of my thighs and brushes his nose across mine. He disarms me with sweetness, and I melt under his soft kiss.
Hendrix throws a spring onion at his head. “Don’t fuck on my prep space.”
Tristan scowls at him. “Fénix is in the other room, jackass.”
“Hasn’t stopped you before.” Hendrix reaches across the island and offers me a julienne of pepper before turning back around and dumping the chopped veggies into a large wok. Grabbing the handle, he gives the contents a toss with a flick of his wrist.
I stop the bickering I see coming by popping the other half of my pepper into Tristan’s mouth. “Have you heard from Aleksander today?”
Hendrix grunts his reply, which I take as a no.
“No,” Tristan says as he chews.
I glance out the window where Cocky B and his hens are hunkered down for the night in their coop. The red glow of the heat lamp we installed to keep them warm casts an eerie glow in the darkness, like demon eyes watching from the shadows.
“What’s that frown for?” Tristan asks, rubbing the worry line from my brow.
I shake off the apprehension that has taken up residence in my subconscious. Hoping my smile doesn’t look as fake as it feels, I gently push on his chest and hop off the counter. “Nothing. Let me go wash up and get out of these clothes.”
Hendrix snatches my long ponytail and roughly yanks me to him. Like a Pavlovian response, desire pools between my legs at his indelicate touch, just like it did last night. Which is something we need to discuss with Tristan and Constantine. Tonight. No putting it off.
“I think you forgot something, Firefly,” he says in that seductive British inflection that immediately turns me on.
“And what would that be, Mister Knight?”
Hendrix’s blue eyes heat. “I’m going to fuck that sassy mouth later.”
This beautiful man and his filthy promises.
I hope this aspect of us never changes. Childhood best friends to lovers.
Marriage and parenthood. Even after all the years we’ve known each other, our love has only intensified.
I did have my doubts along the way. Those old worries would stumble into my thoughts and tap dance inside my brain.
One damaged woman, three possessive men.
How could I ever be enough? How could our relationship, our marriage, sustain itself?
We are in our mid-twenties, still young, even if the life we were born into hardened us at an early age.
I’m not na?ve enough to think things will stay exactly as they are.
People change. They grow apart, take different paths, want different things as they get older.
Turns out, all Tristan, Hendrix, and Constantine ever wanted was me. And through their love, I learned something important. Soulmate love is a forever love. Unbreakable, undeniable, and everlasting. I am enough. They show me every day that I am.
And I need to do the same. So whatever feelings I harbor for Aleksander need to dig a hole and bury themselves. What happened last night will never happen again.
Grabbing my throat, Hendrix tilts my chin, and my lips eagerly part for him, his tongue dipping inside my mouth as he tastes and takes. “Love you, wife.”
I cup his cheek, and he lilts into my palm. “Tá mé i ngrá leat…my ass is vibrating.”
A quick grin of interest flashes across his handsome face. “Did you put—”
“My phone,” I interject, pulling it out of my back jeans pocket.
Last year, Hendrix bought me vibrating beads and takes great delight in making me come in front of people. It’s difficult as hell to hide an orgasm in the middle of a crowded restaurant or during a video call with Alana.
I’m puzzled when I see Pyotr’s name flash on my screen. “Hey.”
Loud static buzzes in the background, making it impossible to hear him. “…get…house…”
I hold my finger to my other ear and step out of the kitchen. “What?”
“…fucking house…”
“Our connection is bad. Let me call you back.”
Four phones go off at the same time, including mine, alerting us to someone outside, just as a shadow of a man’s silhouette moves past the glazed glass side panes of the front door.
“Syn, get out of the fucking house!” Pyotr’s voice comes through on a panicked shout.
But his warning comes too late.
Splinters of wood explode inward when the door flies off its hinges, and two men come barging inside, automatic weapons raised in front of them.
“I have her!” one of the men yells.
The phone slips from my hand and clatters quietly onto the runner rug. I blink, unable to move, even as the house erupts into chaos around me. Shouts, the sound of glass shattering, the voices of strangers who shouldn’t be here. Fénix’s terrified wails.
I stumble back when the masked man presses the cold barrel of his semiautomatic to my chest. “Get on your fucking knees!”
Darkness snakes its way through my blood, stripping away my humanity like a wildfire burns through dry kindling, leaving nothing in its wake but scorched earth and ash. The darkness beckons her to come. Entices her with visions of blood and death. Aoife, it seductively whispers.
I didn’t want this ugliness to ever touch my child.
I never wanted him to ever witness the monster that lurks inside his mother.
Nor did I want the Society to ever stake a claim on his innocent soul.
We’ve worked hard to keep that part of our lives away from him, so he could grow up without fear or hatred or brutality.
As soon as I found out I was pregnant, I gave my proxy to Andie and stepped away from the Society, letting her and the guys handle things because I wanted to be a mother and a wife and a student who was free to pursue her dreams of medical school. Free to be Syn, not Aoife.
These motherfuckers are about to painfully learn their mistake in bringing that part of me back.
Hate and rage coalesce, burning me from within.
A breath. A moment. A silence.
I close my eyes. Give in.
And set the monster loose.
Kill them all.
The man’s shouted threats abruptly cease when my hand punches forward, crushing his windpipe.
His finger reflexively squeezes the trigger, and I grab the muzzle, forcing it upward.
I’m oblivious to the heat that scalds my palm raw as bullets discharge in rapid succession, dotting a line of perfect circles across the vaulted ceiling.
With a snarl, I kick out his legs, take his weapon, and unload the magazine’s contents into his head until the floor resembles a gruesome Jackson Pollock painting.
“Syn!” Hendrix’s sharp bellow is quickly followed by a brisk breeze that kisses my cheek as a knife slices the air, inches from my head, and embeds itself in the left eye of the second man.
He drops to the floor in a contorted heap, his good eye wide with disbelief and death behind the black mask covering his face.
I run into the living room, my sights set on the third man Tristan is fighting under the archway that leads from the back hallway to the kitchen. Where’s Fénix and Constantine?
Tristan’s heel kick knocks the man in my direction. I leap onto his back and grab either side of his head, twisting sharply and severing his spinal cord. He collapses onto the rug in front of the Christmas tree, taking me with him.
I blindly rip the Santa from its tether, tipping the tree over in the process, and shove the pointed candle into the man’s carotid artery. Blood gushes from the wound like a firehose, painting the beige patterned rug a bright crimson. I stab him again, and again, and again, not able to stop.
“Red.” Tristan lowers in front of me and gently, but firmly, stops my hand. “Baby, focus on my voice. Come back to us.”
Like a light switch being flicked, reality comes crashing in, but my first concern is my child. “Where’s Fénix?”
“Con got him to the basement. They’re safe. Let me take a look at your hand.”
“I’m fine,” I reply as I repeat Tristan’s promise like a mantra. Fénix is safe. They’re safe.
One of the panic rooms is in the basement. We have a smaller one upstairs in the walk-in closet of our bedroom. We had them built after what happened with Evan.
Hendrix runs in, breathless. “I did a sweep of the house and checked the cameras. Just those three.” He lifts me off the man’s prone body and wraps me tightly to his warm chest.
The adrenaline dump comes quickly, and my muscles vibrate uncontrollably as he holds me up on shaky legs.
My fingernails score into his back. “He can’t see me like this.”
Hendrix presses his lips to my temple, smearing droplets of blood across my cheek. “He won’t.”
Sirens wail in the far distance. We don’t have neighbors jutting up next to us, but maybe someone heard the gunshots. Luckily, the Society owns the Darlington police, so we’ll be able to sweep what happened here under the figurative rug if anyone does show up.
Tristan bends over the dead man and searches his pockets but doesn’t find anything. He pulls off the man’s face covering. Brown eyes, brown hair, clean-shaven. Late twenties, maybe. Nothing remarkable or familiar.
“Do you recognize him?” Hendrix asks.
“No.” Tristan examines his neck, then pulls up his sleeves. “No affiliate tattoos.”
Hendrix holds me back when I try to look for myself. “There’s been no chatter. No threats made since last year,” he says.
Running a frustrated hand through his hair, Tristan exhales. “Whoever sent them just started a war.”
I stare at the carnage. At the blood and bodies and the broken window. Anger rises swiftly. This shit touched my child. What he saw today will burrow itself in his subconscious and change him forever. With one cruel act of violence, his innocence was stolen from him.
“Until we know what we’re dealing with, I want Fénix to stay with Alana and Cillian.” Cillian’s house outside of Boston is like a fortress. No one will be able to get to him there. I’d send him to stay with Andie and her guys, but they’re spending the next couple of weeks on their private island.
Getting no argument from them, Tristan sweeps his shoe at some broken glass on the floor. “I’ll get someone here to board up the windows and door. I’ll call Aleks. He’s going to be pissed.”
That niggle of dread comes back full force. “I couldn’t find him today, and he won’t answer his phone.”
“Syn!” Pyotr’s voice shouts from outside, his footfalls pounding up the porch steps. “Syn! Tristan! Jesus,” we hear from the foyer. He comes around the corner and lowers his weapon as soon as he sees us. “You okay?”
Hendrix’s temper flashes hot. “Of course we’re not fucking okay! Three men just shot up our fucking house!”
Instead of stepping over him, Tristan kicks the dead body out of his way. “What the fuck is going on?”
“Viktor has Aleks.” Pyotr’s worried eyes meet mine. “But he wants you.”