54. Bishop
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
BISHOP
A confusing cocktail of anger and fear beats through me as I help Caleb through the gravestones, but my eyes never leave Camilla.
She’s doing her best to appear unaffected. Her back is straight, her shoulders back, and her head is held high, but every time the stormy gray falls on one of us, I see everything she’s hiding.
The fear. The pain. The resignation.
The idea of allowing Caleb to leave the cemetery alive doesn’t sit well with me, but the fact that I’m the one helping him leave makes my stomach roll. This motherfucker deserves to die for what he’s done to all of us, not walk away scot-free.
Just because he’s walking away tonight, doesn’t mean he won’t die, I remind myself. Because once we get home, once we have Camilla safe and sound behind the walls of the compound, we’re throwing everything we have at killing Caleb and taking Davenport down.
I don’t give a fuck about the bylaws.
I couldn’t care less about keeping the Syndicate intact.
I’ll burn it all to the ground if it means keeping Camilla safe.
Before we met her, I lived for the business and for everything we spent our lives working toward, but now that I have her, now that I know what it means to be loved by her, I’d give it all up without hesitation.
“You know she’ll be your demise.” Caleb coughs, and just the sound of his voice makes me want to finish what Kovu started. “Did Bianca teach you nothing?”
I glare over at him. Even slumped, he’s only a couple of inches shorter than I am. I drop my shoulder slightly, causing him to stumble and release a grunt of pain. “What Bianca taught me is that when you meet a good woman, you do anything to keep her. And if you come for Camilla again, prepare to face a fucking reckoning.” The last words pass from my lips as we reach the car, and the masked man nods toward the back door.
I don’t hesitate to open the door and shove Caleb inside, desperate to get Camilla out of this asshole’s hold, but as soon as the car door slams shut behind him, he drags her around the other side of the car, keeping the gun trained to her head as he gets himself situated.
I follow them, keeping my hands up in surrender, so he doesn’t see me as a threat because I don’t want him to react. If he thinks I’m going to attack, he might do something rash, and I refuse to let that happen.
It’s not until the car starts that he shoves Camilla in my direction, and I catch her before she can hit the ground.
Her arms wrap around my waist as a quiet sob escapes her throat, which only makes me hold her against me tighter.
When I look up at where they were holding us, I find the few masked men who were left have either fled with their tails between their legs or they have a gun trained on them as they lower themselves to the ground.
Kovu finishes untying Kaos and Crew, and they sprint for us without hesitation.
Kaos reaches us first and wraps his huge body around us as he buries his face in Camilla’s hair.
Then it’s Kovu, wrapping himself around one side of us as his entire body trembles.
And then it’s Crew. He’s slower to join us, and I can see the wariness in his eyes. Something Caleb said got to him, and I can see his need to flee in his eyes.
The question is, will he do it?
He meets my eyes, and I nod down at Camilla, silently telling him that she needs him. She needs all of us, and that breaks him out of his thoughts.
When he wraps his arms around our other side, a torrent of sobs escape Camilla, and my chest aches at the sound. Her tears do something to me. They have the power to bring me to my knees, and the only thing that keeps us standing is the other three bodies holding us up.
It takes two hours to get the cemetery cleaned up enough to call in the cleanup crew, and Camilla has made one too many halfhearted jokes about the moms that clean the house before their cleaner arrives.
But we’re all tense.
Her eyes are haunted as she helps Wyatt drag a body from the tree line, but it’s not the dead bodies that did it.
It’s the man who is still very much alive.
Not for long, I think to myself.
“You should head out,” Noah says, his blue eyes softer than I’ve seen them for a long time. He’s been training to take over his family for almost as long as Camilla has hers, and there comes a time when that much weight takes over your life.
“There’s still more to do.” Crew shakes his head from where he’s tapping furiously on his phone. He’s been leaning against that tree almost since we finally dragged ourselves away from Camilla, but every now and then, I notice him look up, and his eyes flick to each of us to make sure we’re safe.
This is the closest we’ve ever come to losing everything we’ve worked for, and I have a feeling we’ll all be extra wary for a while.
“You’re all dead on your feet, and Camilla looks about ready to drop. You know she won’t stop until you all do,” Noah argues. When he walked through those trees, I wasn’t surprised to see him. Before Camilla crashed into our lives, Noah was as close to a friend as we had in the families, and the fact he showed up is more than enough to prove his loyalty to us.
Crew’s eyes move to Camilla immediately, and his brows tug together. She and Wyatt drop the body, and she leans against a headstone to catch her breath. We’ve decimated this resting place in every possible way already, so leaning against some stranger’s grave seems like a small offense at this point.
He looks toward the hill where Kaos is talking to the cleanup crew, explaining exactly what we need done and within what time frame. The sun will be rising in an hour, and we need to have all traces of this mess cleared by then.
Kovu is where he’s been since we broke away from the hug, watching every single move Camilla makes. The reminder of the past he’s tried so desperately to forget has ghosts I haven’t seen in years in his eyes.
Nightmares always plagued him until his little lamb came along, but I’m not sure even she’s going to be able to keep them at bay after seeing Joel again. He’s never spoken much about what his parents and that asshole did to him as a kid, but the scars that litter his skin are more than enough evidence, as well as the broken bones that never fully healed.
When Crew first brought him home covered in their blood, the wild look in his eyes even scared me. I was twelve at the time and had been around criminals my whole life, but the look in this kid’s eyes was the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen.
Crew took him to this tiny doctor’s clinic and used the little money we had spare at the time to get him properly looked at. He was so cagey he didn’t sleep for the first week he was with us, and when he finally did, he would wake up from nightmares I never wanted to understand.
It took years to get to a point where he wasn’t a threat to me or Kaos at night, and it’s only been since Camilla came along that we’ve seen a huge change in him, and I just hope he’s not going to let this setback ruin everything he’s worked so hard for.
“Let’s go home,” Crew finally says, and I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. We all need some sleep so we can regroup in the morning.