37. Maddoc
I kiss Riley,hard and fast, then force myself to put her out of my mind. Logan will keep her close, and with everyone moving into their positions I need to find a way into McKenna’s house so I’m ready when they signal.
I move quickly and stealthily around to the back, staying behind cover as much as I can. McKenna’s security is for shit, and I’ve got no doubt at all that his arrogance makes him think he doesn’t need as much since this place is in the very center of his territory.
If I ever had any respect for him, that level of stupidity would have lost it right there.
Of course, I never did, so it’s not an issue.
I finally spot a promising window near the back. From what I can see, it leads into a utility room or some shit. Even better for me, some fuckhead has it cracked open, and periodic plumes of cigarette smoke escape. It means I’ll have to take him out when I go in, but if he’s stupid enough to screw with security measures just to sneak in a smoke, then it’s safe to say that isn’t going to be much of a problem.
We didn’t have long to plan, but I’m not worried, because the plan is really fucking simple. My people will attack the house from every fucking angle, and once that shit starts, I’ll go in and get my brother.
My phone vibrates with the signal to start the attack, and all hell breaks loose in the quiet residential neighborhood McKenna’s holed himself up in.
I move the moment the chaos starts, shoving the cracked window open and taking the smoker out in the blink of an eye. Then I’m in, and my focus sharpens.
We don’t know the layout of this place.
We have no idea how many men McKenna has here.
We don’t even know if Dante fucking is here, but I can’t worry about any of that shit, and I sure as hell can’t let my fears for my family cripple me. The only way forward is to close my mind off from worrying about each of them. I can’t change what’s happening to Dante until I find him, and I can’t afford a single thought for Riley or Logan right now. All I can do is what I came to: push forward, step by step, and do what needs to be done.
I was right that this is some kind of utility room, and I crack the door open to find utter chaos.
My lips pull back. Not quite a grin, just an expression of feral satisfaction born of primal rage.
All through the house, Reapers are wreaking havoc, but shouts in the distance let me know that more mercs are on the way for backup, so the tide’s gonna turn on us fast.
I can’t let that happen.
I need to get this shit done before McKenna’s mercenaries flank my people and outnumber us.
I pull out my trench knife, fitting my fingers through the brass knuckles and ignoring the ache as the final hole rubs against the stump of my missing one, then pick a direction and move, rounding a corner to find two of McKenna’s people in a firefight with mine.
I duck low, coming up behind them, and take the one on the left out just as one of my Reapers finally drops the other.
But not before the fucking weasel clips his shoulder with a bullet.
“Fuck,” he grunts, spinning backward from the force of it.
It’s Isaac.
He slaps a hand over the wound, blood seeping out between his fingers, and meets my eyes.
“Don’t fucking die,” I growl at him, getting a tight-lipped nod in return. Then he jerks his chin back in the direction he was coming from.
“Saw a door through the kitchen,” he pants. “Could be the basement.”
I nod my thanks and sprint past him. We all know it’s the most likely place for any wet work, but before I can find the door he mentioned, I run into another one of McKenna’s men.
Not a mercenary, thank fuck. This one is just a fucking kid.
He’s facing the wrong way and holding his weapon like he’s got no fucking clue how to use it. I slam him into the wall before he even realizes I’m there, disarming him quickly, then delivering two quick strikes with the brass knuckles before I force his head back with the blade of my knife.
“Where’s Dante Channing?”
The kid’s eyes roll with terror, the whites visible all around his irises, and he fucking pisses himself.
I ignore the stench and rock the blade over his throat, digging the tip in just under his ear. “Last chance. One push and this goes into your brain. Is he here?”
“Yeah,” he finally croaks, his eyes flicking to my left, toward that door. He swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “B-B-Boss had him taken downstairs.”
Relief slams through me. There’s no time for even that, though. The mercs are coming, and I need to get Dante the fuck out.
I hesitate for a split second, then slam my augmented fist into the kid’s temple, dropping him like a stone. I probably should have just gutted him, but Jesus. He still has fucking acne and peach fuzz over his lip.
I shove his body aside and get to the door, then slip down to the basement, my rage threatening to boil over when I smell the distinct tang of copper and steel overriding the earthy odor of wet cement.
West Point will pay for every drop of Dante’s blood they spilled here.
I make my way through the total fucking maze of rooms the area is cut up into, heading for the only one that has light spilling out from its door.
Lights, but no sounds.
No thuds or grunts or screams.
I ruthlessly shut down the knowledge that silence is what’s left behind if they’ve killed him, and quickly duck my head around the door frame to assess the situation.
Two guards. No sign of McKenna. And my brother, tied up, bruised and bloody, but fucking breathing.
Neither of the West Point shitheads saw me, and I keep the trench knife on my left hand through the brass knuckles, but pull two weapons, taking the safety off both. Then I barrel through the door and catch them completely unawares, gutting the one closest to the door with the knife and then ripping upward before finishing him with a bullet to the chest, the gunshot muffled against his body.
His partner knows what he’s fucking doing, rushing me while I’m taking the first guard down and fighting dirty enough that my plan to keep this shit quiet to avoid drawing attention goes out the window.
He manages to knock one of my guns out of my hand, then makes the mistake of lunging for it.
I’m on him fast, rabbit punching his kidneys with the trench knife to slow him down before finally managing to get the other weapon up under his chin.
He rears back with a wet gasp, trying to buck me off. “Motherf—”
I pull the trigger, then kick his body out of the way and roll back to my feet and rush over to Dante.
He’s unconscious. A fucking mess of blood, sweat, and other shit I don’t want to contemplate.
“Jesus, brother,” I mutter, quickly checking his pulse.
It’s there.
I pull his head up and lift one of his eyelids. No response.
I know what it is to work someone over. I know a dozen fucking ways to do it, and I know what the aftermath looks like when it’s been done to extract information, and what it looks like when the purpose is to send a fucking message.
This isn’t either.
McKenna, that piece of shit, straight-up tortured him.
I slap his face a few times and get nothing, then quickly cut through his bindings, catching him when his body lists to the side.
He’s completely out, and I drop the trench knife so I can lower him to the floor… then grit my teeth to hold in my rage when my arms come back covered in his blood.
But I’ve seen worse. Dante’s breathing. That’s enough.
And if I’m lucky, the chaos upstairs will have masked the sound of me taking out the guards here, because Dante’s no fucking lightweight. It’s gonna take some work to get him out of here if he can’t do it under his own steam.
I’m not that fucking lucky.
I whirl around when I hear someone burst into the room behind me, reaching for my weapon a second too late. It’s McKenna, a gun already leveled at my head and pure fury distorting his face.
“The fuck? Maddoc Gray… you’re supposed to be fucking dead. He said you were.”
He’s practically spitting with rage, and when his attention veers to Dante for a second, the rage intensifying as if he actually thought my brother would break under torture, I move.
McKenna moves faster, jerking the gun back up and freezing me in my tracks when he clicks the safety off. “No,” he says, a manic gleam appearing in his eyes. “I am fucking sick of this shit. I’m going to rule Halston. You fucking Reapers have been standing in my way, but once you’re totally stamped out, the city is mine.”
“It’s never gonna happen,” I growl, adrenaline surging through me as I balance on the balls of my feet, ready for an opening. All my senses are focused on the bastard, alert to every twitch, every breath, as I watch for it.
“It’s already happening,” he sneers. “And it starts right here.”
He starts to curl his trigger finger, and I bum rush him, ducking low to avoid the bullet and catching him off guard enough that I’m able to knock the gun away. He twists like a fucking eel, cursing up a storm as we grapple.
“I took your woman,” he spits as he drives his elbow into my gut. “I’ll take fucking everything.”
“You didn’t… take… the woman who matters,” I grunt, head butting him hard enough to get the upper hand for a moment.
McKenna fights just as dirty as his men do, but I grew up sucking at the teat of Halston’s criminal underground. Pain and violence are in my blood, and I don’t just fight dirty. I fight to fucking win.
I put McKenna in a headlock, my muscles straining as I try for an angle that will let me snap his neck.
“It’s fucking over,” I growl as he jerks against me, thrashing to get free. Grabbing for my arms like he thinks he has a fucking chance in hell of breaking loose after what he’s done to my family.
I forget about my fucking finger, though.
McKenna doesn’t. Instead of trying to yank my arms away, he goes right for my hand, driving his thumb into the partially healed stump, then using the shock of pain to twist around and gain the upper hand.
“You sacrificed this for nothing,” he hisses, digging his blunt nails into the stump as he pins me down. “I’m still going to win. I’m going to take you apart, piece by fucking piece. Your finger was just the first. And once I’m done with you, I’ll do the same thing to the Reapers.”
“The fuck you will,” I grit out.
His knee is in the center of my back, my arm twisted behind me as he rants.
“You’re already dead,” he says, lunging for his gun.
I buck hard, managing to keep him away from it even though it means he slams me back against the concrete, sticky and rank with mingled Reaper and West Point blood.
I grunt, reaching deep to block out the pain, and try to throw him off me again.
I fail, but when McKenna grinds my cheek into the rough concrete, I realize that my brother is awake.
Dante lies where I left him, his face swollen from the beating but his eyes cracked open now as he groggily tracks the fight. I hold his gaze, willing him to push through the disorientation a beating like that will have left him with. He blinks slowly, his breath quickening when he finally manages to focus on me.
I flick my eyes toward the trench knife I dropped near him, and the twitch I see as he readies himself is all the confirmation I need.
I coil my muscles under me and shove off hard, rolling toward my brother.
McKenna drops my maimed hand and drives a vicious punch into my ribs as I knock him in Dante’s direction, but as if we’d fucking choreographed it, Dante surges up the moment I start the roll and knocks McKenna off me with a brutal jab to his throat.
I bounce to my feet, and before McKenna can recover, Dante snatches up the trench knife and follows his attack up by driving it into McKenna’s side.
McKenna jerks back, hissing with pain but so amped up on adrenaline and rage that he doesn’t let it slow him down. Instead, he grabs the chair Dante was tied to and swings it around, slamming it down onto the gory red lines he carved into Dante’s shoulders.
Dante lets out a choked shout of pain, the blow taking him to his knees, and I see fucking red, ripping the chair out of McKenna’s hands and giving him a roundhouse to the jaw that has blood spraying out of his mouth and his body spinning back in Dante’s direction.
Dante lost the knife when he got knocked down, but he’s already back on his feet, pale as fuck under all the blood and bruising, but all-in the way he always fucking is, beating McKenna back with a rapid-fire series of strikes that has McKenna retreating toward me and finally going down.
I drive my knee up into his face as he falls, knocking him backward, onto his ass, but when I surge forward to stomp his chest and put him down for good, the fucker scrambles backward, managing to gain his feet before we can get to him and then rush back at me with a primal yell.
He grabs my head, ignoring the blows I drive into his stomach, and digs his thumbs into my eyes, doing his fucking damnedest to twist my head all the way off.
I tighten my traps and squeeze my eyes closed as pain shoots to the center of my skull. I don’t give a shit. I refuse to let him have the satisfaction of either snapping my fucking neck or blinding me, and I drive my fist up, clipping McKenna’s chin.
He retaliates by twisting my head around hard enough that I have to spin to avoid breakage, and McKenna cackles like the sadistic bastard he is.
“That’s right, I’ll take you apart one fucking body part at a time, you worthless piece of—”
His threat ends in a pained grunt when Dante pulls the motherfucker off me with a hoarse shout, throwing himself into the fray again despite his injuries.
“Oh, fuck no,” I grit out when McKenna digs his fingers right into my brother’s flesh, trying to pull it apart where he already sliced into it.
I slam into him, knocking him away, and it turns into an all-out brawl between the three of us. With Dante already fucked up from the beating he took and McKenna just as ferocious when cornered as he is power hungry, it gets far fucking uglier than it should for two-on-one.
“Fucking end him,” I grunt, when I finally get McKenna into a headlock. “Get that fucking knife, Dante. Find a goddamn weapon!”
The weapon I brought is on the other side of the room, too fucking far away, but I catch sight of McKenna’s, the butt of the gun half buried under the remains of the broken chair.
“There.” I jerk my chin toward it, and Dante lunges for it.
McKenna turns into a live wire, thrashing hard in my hold and managing to hook his foot behind my knee. It throws me off balance, and when he follows it up with a brutal jab to my ribs, it’s enough for him to rip out of my hold and scramble toward the gun.
He shoves Dante out of the way a split second before Dante can snatchit up, and Dante goes down hard, a tide of red soaking the side of his shirt as if some of those pieces of flesh McKenna carved out of him have decided to offer up even more of his life’s blood on the altar of McKenna’s manic quest for power.
“Fuck,” Dante grits out, trying to lever himself back up but collapsing with a pained grunt.
McKenna dives right over him and gets the gun, raising it in a smooth, practiced move as he rolls and comes up on his back with a crazed grin on his face and the promise of death in his eyes.
Too fucking bad for him, their scuffle bought me some time, and I used it to get to my weapon first.
“You’re both dead,” McKenna spits out as he rises to his feet, swinging the barrel between Dante and me. “You’re both fucking de—”
I lift my weapon and shoot.
McKenna’s body drops, a bullet between his eyes.
The sharp retort of the gunshot echoes off the concrete walls, leaving Dante and I in a ringing silence broken only by the ragged sound of our breathing. It’s over.
Austin McKenna is dead.