6. Chapter Six
The reception was small, intimate. Only the closest of family and friends, and there was absolutely zero press. After the fiasco at the engagement party, I was taking no chances with my wife’s safety.
I doubled the guards on the perimeter of the reception hall, ensuring that every person coming in or out that wasn’t a blood relation was frisked - including random staff.
Yuliya trailed behind Evie at all times. My daughter’s cousins were in the room. The twin assassins hovered in the entrances, their keen eyes flitting back and forth. There were silent security guards hovering around with a single directive - to keep my wife safe.
Their orders were to kill and ask questions later if anyone so much as breathed wrong in Eve’s direction.
Nothing was to mar her radiance on this day.
I looked at her from my seat as she flitted from person to person, smiling and laughing. She and Rose were a striking pair, walking arm in arm as they greeted old friends and family, with Yuliya in her suit, following behind, her icy eyes as sharp as a hawk.
“You’re looking at her like she’s about to disappear,” Corbin said, looking at my smiling bride.
“Something like that,” I said. “You look at my sister like she’s a high value target.”
“Isn’t she?” He turned fully to me, his boyish looks suddenly serious, those hazel eyes piercing. This sobriety on his boyish face was off-putting. “Jericho, I need to talk t—”
A clamor at the door stole our attention. The twins turned their bodies, their hands hovering over the weapons hidden at their hips. The gun at my ankle felt heavy and heated. I strode quickly to my wife’s side, pulling her into my side, as Yuliya stepped forward, ready to catch a bullet for her.
Yuliya went to step between me and the door. When Rose moved to join her, I shouted “Alastair!” and he reached out to put himself in front of his pregnant wife.
My daughter still thought she was a combatant, when she held the most precious lives inside her.
The double doors of the ballroom opened and in walked Eoghan, casual but for the bags under his eyes, his hands up, level with his shoulders in a sign of surrender.
Lea and Leo’s guns came out. Lea aimed a gun at his head. Leo at his heart. I had paid out the nose for Caledonia Security to protect the wedding hall, but the incompetents outside were bratva, not professionals.
“I come in peace!” Eoghan shouted, a smirk teasing at his lips.
I narrowed my eyes. “You weren’t invited.”
“And I will be on my way,” he said, “But I have a gift for the bride.”
My hackles rose, and I wanted to kill him right then and there.
Eoghan snapped his fingers and three of his men, dressed in black fatigues from head to toe, dragged in three wounded men and placed them on their knees in front of their boss.
“Do you recognize them, Aoibheann?” Eoghan asked.
I felt my wife shuffling behind me as she peered around my arm at the men. She audibly gasped and buried her face into my back with a whimper.
“Aye, she recognizes them,” Eoghan said in confirmation. “My father’s guards.”
My heart clenched. The men who had done abominable things for a chance to rape my wife, with the blessing of her late husband. Bile rose in my throat, and I wanted to cocoon my wife and hide her from the world. To protect her from all this.
“Yes.” I heard her low whisper behind me. “That’s them.”
I turned slightly, to look down at her eyes. She peered up at me.
“What do you want to do?” I asked her.
She blinked, slowly. And it was almost as if she was erecting a wall. She was taking my strength as her own, as her eyes hardened. My little witch was coming into her own.
She slowly, purposely turned her head towards the men. Then a small, sly smile curled her purple-colored lips, and I heard that little, melancholy hum. It filled the room, echoing from the walls, and filling my brain. I felt her voice crawling up my back like her sweet hands when she massaged my skin.
The three men flinched. One started to cry. Eoghan tensed at the old, familiar tune, but didn’t remark on it. With a flick of his wrist, he dismissed his black clad guards, and they marched out of the room.
Eoghan cringed, his nose wrinkling as one of the men pissed himself. A dark, wet spot expanding on his trousers.
I followed my bride as she walked toward the men, her tulle skirts billowing behind her. I followed her, my hands clasped behind her back, standing behind her like a general stands behind their queen.
Every scar and mark that crossed her body was now a sentence for the men who whimpered in front of her, their judgment day finally upon them.
Eoghan stepped back from the three men, and without instruction, the twin assassins moved their pistols off of Eoghan, and trailed their sights on the pathetic men.
“We are your judge, jury and executioner now,” I said, below my breath. “You will die. All of you. The question is… how will you die?”
I moved away from my Queen, standing behind the men. I grabbed the first one by his hair, lifting his head toward my wife.
“Did he touch you?” I asked.
Without sparing me a glance, she nodded. I let go of his head, throwing him onto his face and he let out a high-pitched squeal, his head banging on the marble floor.
I went to the next one and repeated the gesture, pulling his hair until his face was in the light.
“Did he touch you?” I asked. The man started to deny it. He shook his head, fighting against the grip of my fingers.
My woman smiled, then with the slightest move, shook her head to deny the accusation.
“What’s your name?” I asked, and he whined.
When he was through, the heaviness of the situation settled, I asked him again, lowering my voice to an almost soothing pitch with a patience I didn’t know I had.
“What. Is. Your. Name?”
“Blaine.” He sobbed, his nose shining with snot and sweat. “Blaine Flanagan.”
Not Ryan then. This was not the guard I was looking for.
“Blaine.” I tasted his name on my lips and looked to Eve. Her eyes were cold. A confirmation that she was not his moonlight. “You’ll be given mercy.”
I drew out a knife and slit his throat. I held him up until the spurting blood ceased, then dropped him into it. The pool of blood blossomed around the corpse, the blood seeming to reach out towards my wife to touch her feet, and plead for her mercy.
No one in our reception of friends uttered a single word. There wasn’t a gasp of disapproval, not a protest of our brand of justice. The room was on my woman’s side.
At the strange look of confusion on the first man’s face, I knelt down beside him and whispered in his ear.
“He gets to die fast, because even if he didn’t hurt her himself, he participated. He was an accomplice in her pain.” I said, allowing my sadism to drip like acid from my tongue. “You will die over days, weeks, maybe even months. We’ll see how merciful she chooses to be. Because you’ll get no sympathy from me. I will relish your screams and drink your pain until you’ve paid her back for every second of horror she experienced.”
The man’s mouth pulled back in panic; his eyes were so wide I could see the whites all the way around his pupils. He let out a silent scream as his body shook, and I relished it. It made my muscles flex like adrenaline, and tasted bitter on my tongue.
“I didn’t do it,” he squeaked like a rat caught in a trap. “I didn’t mean to. He said… he said it was okay… I only did what…”
I punched him on the back of the head, my knuckles knocking at the base of his spine.
“She didn’t give you permission to speak,” I growled. “And it wouldn’t matter anyway. Your dead friend paid for his sins in blood. You will pay for your sins in pain.”
I stood next to the last man, and didn’t even touch him, before Eve inclined her chin, answering the question I was about to ask. He had touched her. By my count, that meant that only one of her late husband’s guards had not participated in her humiliation. Only one.
How would I be able to erase sixteen years of this?
With a slight cough, Eoghan began to speak, “I couldn’t find one of them. Tanner Brock.”
I never took my eyes off the men in front of me, but I turned my head slightly, to show him I was listening.
“If I had to guess, he’d be the ringleader.” Eoghan explained. “He was the smartest, but the cruelest. Of all six of my father’s guards, he probably carries most of the blame.”
I nodded, grinding my teeth so hard that I felt it in my temples.
“We raided his home, but he was gone,” Eoghan said. “I’ll have my man, Rohan, give you all the information I have on him.”
I extended my hand to my side, palm flat. He took it in a grasp and shook it. I didn’t keep my eyes off the three men who were less of a threat but were still my enemy.
“My sister and I will pay you a visit soon,” I said, with a tight smile. “So we can discuss our… alliance.”
We were already allied because my daughter was married to Eoghan’s cousin, but the peace had been unstable at best. Eoghan nodded.
“Best wishes on your new life, Aoibheann,” Eoghan said, giving her the shallowest bow. “I hope that I can make amends for my deficiencies as a stepson.”
He turned away, back the way he came, without a word.
As Eoghan’s footsteps retreated, Eve’s head lifted and she opened her mouth to speak as he reached the reception hall’s doors.
“Eoghan!” she called, and with rapid steps, she fluttered to him, her dress like a mist that followed a storm.
She grabbed his arm, leaned in, and in a hushed voice, whispered something in his ear. His head reared back when she was done, and he examined her face.
With a thunderous voice, he yelled, “Let’s go!”
And his men outside the door hopped up at his command, as if he had pressed the on button and now they were poised for action.
Eoghan was about to run out of the room before his steps stuttered. He looked at Eve and whispered a quick “Thank you” before running off with his men. In that moment, and in their exchange, was forgiveness, gratitude, and the offering of an olive branch.
Eoghan was one less threat against my bride, and my usefulness to her - the number of reasons for why I was allowed in her presence - diminished in count by one.