Chapter 4 #3
Aisling holstered her gun and tried to evaluate Maisie’s injuries, but there were too many wounds, too much blood. Hell, it looked like she’d practically been disemboweled by the knife that now lay on the floor, dropped by the bastard when Aisling had shot him.
Aisling took the dying girl’s hand. “Did they say anything, Maisie?”
“No,” she gasped. “It was one of Tam’s brothers. Where’s Rupert?”
Aisling shook her head. “He’s gone, love. I’m so sorry.”
“Tam?”
“She ran,” Aisling assured her. “Got clean away. I don’t smell her blood so I think she’s uninjured. We’ll find her and bring her in, I promise you. We’ll protect her.”
A soft sigh escaped her. “Tell her… Tell her I love her. And the baby. Tell her I want her to go on and be happy. Both of them.”
“Tell her yourself, girlie,” Aisling said. “We got help coming in—”
A car pulled up out front. “Aisling!” a man screamed.
“In here!” she yelled back. “Get a medic in here now!”
Maisie wouldn’t release Aisling’s hand. “Get that fucking bastard,” Maisie said, coughing up more blood. “Faegan. Take his fucking head.”
“We will,” Aisling swore. “I’ll make sure it’s painful, too.”
“Good.” And with that she fell still, eyes open, as three men ran through the front door.
Aisling fell back on her ass, staring at Maisie’s sightless gaze while the men spread out through the house. One knelt with a medic pack on Maisie’s other side and started to search for a pulse.
“It’s no use,” Aisling choked out. “She’s gone.” She’d seen too much death in her life not to recognize it when it struck.
Still, he checked her, started CPR.
“Fucking hell,” the Head Enforcer said when he ran in and pulled up short at the sight of Maisie’s body.
“Rupert’s dead,” Aisling numbly said.
“Fuck! Where’s Tamsin?”
Aisling pointed toward the back door. “Scarpered. I called for her, but no answer. We need trackers and an exfil team. Call Trevor and get a helo inbound. Now.”
“On it.”
Aisling couldn’t move, frozen, while also fighting the urge to shove the goddamned medic out of the way because she knew Maisie was gone. There was too much blood.
Too, too much.
And the poor girl had already suffered enough. It was time to let her lie in peace.
Aisling closed her eyes, threw back her head, and let out an enraged, mournful howl.
Ten hours later, Aisling, with her clothes still soaked with Maisie and Rupert’s blood, sat at a table with four of Trevor’s Enforcers and the Head Enforcer. Trevor appeared on a tablet on video chat.
The man looked like Aisling felt—gut-punched, heartsick…
And full of murderous rage.
Aisling had helped put Maisie’s and Rupert’s bodies into body bags and onto gurneys that were then loaded into a plain black lorry driven by two grim-faced men.
She’d directed the equally grim-faced cleaning crew on erasing all traces of the events.
Then she’d personally supervised dismembering and burning the three attackers’ bodies in a fire pit in the backyard.
They were still burning when she left. Two of Trevor’s men were stationed there to complete the task, break up any remaining bones, scoop what was left of the ashes, and then dispose of them in a river.
“Tamsin’s safe and uninjured,” Trevor said. He sounded ragged, hoarse. “She’s with me. I’ll personally move her to an undisclosed location outside of the country. How the fuck did they locate them?”
“We don’t know, sir,” Garrison said. “We found a piece of paper with the address on it in the car they drove. They didn’t have mobiles on them. I have people searching their residences now. They have orders to detain everyone and interrogate them until we get Primes on-site to question them.”
“Someone must have told Faegan,” Aisling said. “He didn’t meet with his sons, so someone must have passed word to him. Norton is the one who died at the safe house. What about Tamsin’s other brother, Alastair? Do we have him in custody yet?”
“Not yet,” one of the other Enforcers said.
Aisling thought his name was Kenneth, but she wasn’t sure.
“We tracked his car—good job placing the tracking device, by the way—but he parked it at a train station four hours ago. Still working out where he went from there, if he even got on a train, or if he met someone and left with them. Combing through CCTV footage now.”
“Why weren’t there more Enforcers at the safe house?” she asked Garrison. “Why the fucking hell was there only one Enforcer?”
The man looked haunted. Aisling didn’t feel a bit of sympathy for him over it because he deserved to carry the weight of this failure with him for the rest of his life.
“We received a tip that one of Faegan Lewis’ men was on the move nearby, and I ordered men at the safe house to intercept him. We were en route when you called.”
Aisling groaned. “Fer fuck’s sake, man, it was a diversion.
” She slumped in her chair. “Fer starters, I shoulda been yer first call about that. Because I woulda told ye as much. I told ye I was followin’ his son an’ they were too close to the safe house fer my liking. Who knew about the safe house?”
“I vouch for all my people,” Garrison said.
“As do I,” Trevor added. “I had Primes vet all of them. They aren’t the source of the leak. At least, not deliberately or directly.”
Aisling scrubbed her face with her hands. “We need a Prime to interrogate every mate or spouse, children, friends—all of that. Make sure it’s not one of them who’s compromised. It could be something as simple as a phone hack, directly or indirectly, with a family finder kind of app loaded.”
“Bloody hell,” Kenneth muttered. “In that case, it could be any of our people who’ve been at the safe house since Tamsin and Maisie were moved there. Deliveries from shops, the post, maintenance—anything.”
“Is there any way it might have accidentally been Tamsin?” Aisling asked. “Through her mobile?”
“No,” Garrison said. “She doesn’t have one. She destroyed the one she had years ago when she married Maisie because she knew her father would try to track her. She uses one of Maisie’s burners and she doesn’t have any contact with family.”
“Social media?” Aisling asked. “Friends?”
“No friends from back then because she cut them all off, too,” Garrison said. “Not that she had many to start with. Too afraid of her father finding her. Nearly all of them were pack members. No social media for either of them, or Rupert.”
“Could it have been through Rupert?” Aisling said.
Garrison once again shook his head. “No. If anything, he was even stricter about adhering to the rules than Maisie and Tamsin, and they were damned sharp.”
Trevor spoke up. “I’m putting a public bounty on Faegan’s head.
I hereby declare a pack edict for blood, and I don’t care how many of his people we have to eliminate to get him.
He’s a dead man. Anyone caught giving him material aid will also be killed.
” Murderous rage radiated from the grief-stricken father.
“I want his fucking head, and I don’t care how many others are delivered along with it. ”
Aisling didn’t comment. She agreed with the edict, and while she wasn’t happy it needed to be issued in the first place, it meant she’d have even more cover if she was the one who caught up with Faegan first and killed him without bringing him in alive.
Because she damned sure wasn’t letting him live if she got her paws on him.
Unfortunately, having grown up during the Troubles and seeing first-hand what devastation tit-for-tat violence wrought on innocent people, she wasn’t looking forward to the implementation of the edict.
She didn’t enjoy taking lives, even of people such as Faegan Lewis who were well-deserving. Her first kill had been at eleven, just weeks after the deaths of her father and brothers.
Taking vengeance on those she knew were responsible for their deaths, people her father and brothers had considered brothers-in-arms, even though those same people directly caused their deaths.
She’d poisoned their tea when she knew the three of them were gathering for another planning session.
She’d killed two others in the process who hadn’t been directly responsible for their deaths, but, then again, they were “collateral damage” the way her father and brothers had been.
Another “tragic accident.”
Their own term to describe the deaths of men they’d claimed were their “mates” and had shed public tears over at their funeral and wake.
And she’d left an untraceable note she’d composed and printed on a school computer, supposedly from the ringleader, admitting to their deaths and that he couldn’t live with his guilt.
The Guards had been content to accept it at face value despite the explosive outrage from other people she knew had been his “friends.”
Just like they’d been “friends” with her father and brothers.
“Whatever you have to do,” Trevor continued, pulling Aisling out of her murky memories, “I’ll back you up.
All of you. I’ll get the resources if we don’t already have them.
Plus, I’ll summon help from other packs.
Aisling, you have my full authority to appoint people and resources as needed for hunting and killing Faegan. Blank cheque.”
She grimly nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“And while I want him dead,” Trevor added, “I also want him to suffer. If a quick kill is required, fine. But if the situation allows, feel free to drag it out and make him plead for his life. And tell him I said that.”
“Do ye want us to wait for ye?” Aisling said. “To hold him?”
“Absolutely not. If it’s possible to get me on a video call, brilliant. If not, film it. But if that can’t be accomplished either, don’t hesitate to kill him. And I want his actual head, not just a picture of his body.”
“Yes, sir,” Garrison said, looking a little…greenly grim.