Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
HAYAMI
PRESENT
Blinking away my tears, I stare at this man who I’ve spent six months with—knowing nothing of what he’s been through, nothing of what he’s endured, nothing of who he was before he leapt into my swimming pool.
The man before me is no longer a beast in my eyes—he’s Fenrir, a tortured soul who has been through more pain in this life than I could ever even begin to understand.
This is the most he’s ever said to me—to anyone, I’m sure.
I’ve never seen him talk to Willa or Bastian.
And it’s no wonder he keeps to himself. No wonder he shudders when people ask about his scars.
Because what he’s just told me has left me feeling so numb, I’m not even sure I’m really sitting here and not still asleep in my bed, caught in some horrible nightmare.
Who lives through something like that and comes out okay at the other end?
No one.
“I’m so sorry.” My words feel flimsy, as if they have no power to undo what he’s just told me. He lost everything. Everyone. At the age of seventeen, everything he’d ever known was taken from him. How do you live with that?
Fenrir doesn’t respond, simply hangs his head and clutches at the tumbler in his hand.
“How did you go on with your life?” I ask, my eyes swimming at all the possible answers to this.
His jaw flexes, the scarring around his chin moving like a mask.
“I spent much of the first year in the hospital, recovering from my injuries. The burns team helped my skin to heal. I had specialists, doctors, nurses, therapists, surgeons, you name it; they were all involved in helping me to recover. So, when I was finally discharged, the thought of ending it all felt wrong because so many people had helped get me to where I was. What kind of repayment would it have been for me to undo everything that’d been done to help me?
For the first few weeks, I was lost, but then I had some counselling, and my therapist said that I needed to channel my anger, find a cause, fight for something good.
He told me there’d been a reason I didn’t die in that fire, and that I just had to find the reason.
That’s when I realised what I had to do. ”
He waits, his eyes narrowing. I’m not entirely sure what he’s referring to, so I ask, “You joined the army?”
“Yes. Two years after that night, I joined the army for one reason and one reason only.” He balls his fist, flexes his fingers, and the penny drops.
He wanted training. He wanted to know how to fight. He wanted to be strong, an immovable force, someone who nobody would ever threaten. He wanted to become invincible.
“Revenge,” I say quietly.
“I served ten years before I left. I told them I had a job to do, something I’d been meaning to do for the last twelve years.” He slides the empty glass onto the table, the whisky fuelling his words.
“You wanted to find the people who killed your family,” I guess.
“Yes.”
“And did you?”
I feel the walls shrink, as if the whole room is waiting with bated breath.
“Yes.”
His face is so cold now, I can feel the chill coming from him.
I don’t want to ask, afraid of the answer, even though I know what it’s going to be.
“Are they…?” I begin, and he must see my struggle, as he finishes my question.
“Dead?” He tips his head to the side. “Yes, all of them are dead.” His eyes burn, a fierceness to his voice that I’ve only ever heard when he’s mad with me or cross about something. The words he says next are like a knife to my gut.
“Morris Hamlin was the man who shot my dad and my mum. He’s dead. Tyrone Miller was the man who poured the petrol and dropped the match. He’s dead.”
The names are familiar. I’ve heard them whispered at home when no one thought I was listening, and Fenrir mentioned them when we first arrived at Belial House.
They are—were—members of the Castro gang, until they were killed.
I never paid much attention to the gossip.
This is my father’s world, not something I choose to get involved in, but I am now. I’m in the firing line because….
I stare at Fenrir. It can’t be. It’s not possible, but his face is telling me otherwise.
I swallow hard as my next question works its way out of my head and onto my lips. “Robert Castro?”
“Was the man who gave the order.” His gaze is hard, brutal, and unforgiving. “And he’s dead.”
It’s not just the whisky now burning my insides. He’s just told me that he was responsible for killing three members of the Castro family, the likes of which has now started a gang war.
“You?”
“Yes, Hayami. Me. I’m the one who killed them all. I’m the reason the Castro family are now sending you death threats. I’m the reason you’re in danger. I’m the reason we’re here.” He holds my gaze as this sinks in, the enormity of it, before adding, “I brought this on you.”
I want to respond, but my brain is struggling with this new information.
“Does my father know? Did he sanction their deaths?”
He doesn’t blink, doesn’t break eye contact as he answers, “No. No one sent me.”
“I don’t understand.” I want another drink, but the bottle is half-empty and too far out of my reach. “If my father knew nothing of this, then how did you pull it off?”
“When I left the army, it was with the sole purpose of finding the men who killed my family. It took longer than I expected. But after tracking down some of my dad’s old friends, I discovered that he’d been working for the Castros, delivering things for them and using his legitimate business as cover.
But something went wrong. He messed up a delivery that cost the Castros a lot of money and put them in dicey waters with some other gang.
Robert Castro wasn’t happy with my dad, which resulted in two men being sent to kill him: Morris Hamlin and Tyrone Miller. ”
He pauses and drains his glass before slamming it down on the table.
“What I don’t understand is how you ended up working as a Hellhound.”
“Hamlin was easy to find, even easier to kill. He liked women and he liked to party, so catching him one night whilst he took a piss around the back of a club was like child’s play.”
About a year ago, I remember hearing something about one of Castro’s men being found behind a nightclub. They thought he’d been jumped and robbed, but he’d been beaten so badly that they had to use his tattoos to identify him. I shudder, pulling my robe tighter around my body.
My next question slips out even though I’m not sure I want to know the answer. “And the other two men?”
“Very heavily guarded and very difficult to get to. I needed a different approach, and that’s why I became a Hellhound.”
“You joined the Hellhounds because you’d get inside info on the Castros?” I guess.
“And resources. The Hellhounds are very well equipped with all the latest tech and weapons.”
“Oh my God.” My body sinks further into the chair from the weight of all this new information pushing down on me. “My father really doesn’t know any of this?”
He shakes his head. “I thought he did, the day he told me to come to the house. I thought he’d found out I killed Hamlin and Miller.
But later on, he said he’d wanted to talk to me about a job, a job that only my face would fit.
Then he assigned me to your security team, and I never found out what the job was. ”
“So, after you were brought onto my team, you still went ahead and killed Robert Castro.”
“Things got more difficult when I was reassigned as your bodyguard. I wasn’t on the front line with the Hellhounds anymore, and much of my time was spent guarding you.
But the days when you were at university, I watched Robert Castro.
I’d told myself he didn’t need to die. I tried to convince myself that the two men who’d physically killed my family had been dealt with, but I couldn’t let it drop.
Working on your security team gave me some advantages.
I started to look at Robert’s security team, how they operated, how they worked, and I soon rooted out the weak spots.
The bodyguards who weren’t as eagle-eyed as they should have been.
I knew Robert’s routine. He visited his club, the Kaleidoscope, every Thursday afternoon.
So, I positioned myself in an empty office overlooking the club, set up my rifle, and waited to get a clear shot.
I’d done this a few times, and each time I never had him in my line of sight.
Until last week. When he walked into the Kaleidoscope, one of his security guards dropped his phone.
He stopped and bent down to pick it up, leaving me a clear shot of the back of Robert Castro’s head. ”
The image plays in my mind. I’ve seen how good Fenrir is with a gun, how skilled a marksman he is, so this shouldn’t surprise me, but it does. And it isn’t just the killing itself; it’s the repercussions, the chain reaction that Robert’s death has caused.
“People have died. You told me the Castros killed a load of people in one of my father’s clubs.” My voice falters between sorrow and anger. What has he done? What has he set in motion?
“I know. And for that, I’m truly sorry. I never thought it’d start a gang war. I was careful, made every effort to ensure that it didn’t point to the Hellhounds or your father.”
“Jesus.” I push my hair from my face, unsure how to process this. It’s terrible, what he did, what he’s done.
Then I look at his scars, the reminders he carries with him daily of what was done to him at seventeen, what he went through, what he witnessed, and how he lost his entire family at the hands of three men. My chest burns, my teeth clench, and I wonder if I’d have done the same in his position.
“What I don’t understand is how you could work for my father as a Hellhound, dishing out the same sort of things that Castro’s men dished out to your family,” I say.
He lowers his gaze. There’s no pride in where his journey has landed him.