Diamond Desire

Chapter One, The Day Of The Crash

Maggie Montana had always looked like an angel whenever I’d seen her. Most angels didn’t have dark hair and a gun in their hand, but this time I found her, she did. Most angels weren’t made of darkness and light in equal measure – they weren’t a teenager with long braids and pretty eyes and a voice like silken velvet.

Most angels were not saving me. They had ignored me and my cries.

“You’re okay, my love.” As she bent down to gently grab my hand, she had tears in her big blue eyes, and I wasn’t sure why. “You’re safe now. Nobody is going to hurt you. I promise I won’t hurt you.”

She was just looking at me as she whispered words over and over that I barely registered hearing. She was just existing there in a halo of golden light that streaked through the window. Covered in her grandfather’s blood, like an avenging angel sent down by God himself, she slowly put her gun away and didn’t look anywhere else but at me.

At the bruises on my skin, the blood on my legs, and the darkness I knew had been in my eyes for ages and ages now.

“Do you have a name? My name is Maggie.” I whispered my name as I chose to not tell her that I already knew who she was and not just because I’d snuck out sometimes and spotted her.

I had seen pictures of her. My monster had mentioned her. He said she was pretty, and she was going to make a powerful man very happy once he’d convinced her daddy that love didn’t matter in a marriage, money and power did. That a marriage between her and a rich man was far better than letting her waste her time on some other man, he said was a loser from the wrong side of town.

My monster said she wasn’t as pretty as me, though, but I disagreed. She was better – she would always be better, considering she was standing there with the gun in her hand she had used to shoot out his brain the moment she saw what he had been doing to me.

What a monster he was and had been just under all of their noses.

“Do you want to take my hand?” Maggie carefully offered me hers. “We can get you out of here and find you some clothes, and toys, and food. You can get cleaned up and do something fun – what do you say?”

“What about him?”

“He’s not a problem for you anymore.” She whispered as a boy I knew too, hurried into the room behind her, his blue eyes wide as he stared around at everything.

Like the blood. Lots and lots of blood.

“Maggie.” He whispered. “What happened?”

“He was hurting her, Ford – he was…” Maggie shook her head, unable to say the words that we both knew we were true. “He was doing unforgiveable things, and I stopped him. That was that.”

Ford hovered in the doorway, not that much older than me, yet wearing the same expression I often wore.

One that told of a lifetime of darkness even before you were old.

“Where’s your gun? We should blame her for killing grandad – they won’t kill a kid.” Ford snapped, as he shrugged off his shock and stormed into the room, shutting the door behind him. “Dad heard the shooting. He’s going to come and see what happened, and you might be in trouble if we don’t lie.”

Maggie didn’t look away from me or lose her smile as she waved toward the corner of the almost empty room, and the gun she’d saved me with that was now sitting on the table.

The one her filthy and twisted brother had wanted to blame me for using…

He truly was a Montana man. Just like all the others.

He was a monster, too.

“I’ll deal with dad.” Maggie refused his idea. “I’ll tell him the truth and I’ll bear the responsibility for it because I don’t regret it and it was the right thing to do.”

I grabbed her outstretched hand, letting her lift me to my feet from the filthy mattress that was my bed.

“I’m sorry I didn’t find you sooner.” She breathed, as she kept smiling and the whole world drifted away until there was nothing else left inside of it but me and her. “But you’re okay now, Cassie. I promise you’re okay.”

I woke up with a gasp, cursing myself for having fallen asleep in the armchair when I knew better. Sleeping was something that people with too much time on their hands could take part in, and I was busy. Far too busy. I had no time for nightmares. No time for anything but the plan and finishing what I had started far too many years ago.

Get up, Cass. Get up and go outside – you need fresh air. Find your pills and take them on a walk or something.

Ignoring the cursed woman in my head, I headed into the kitchen of whatever random home my brother had been using as his base, pretending I wasn’t burning with the urge to be sick. Sickness was a weakness, but I’d been weaker lately and had been slipping up. It was getting harder and harder to ignore the cursed woman and her ridiculous thoughts. Don’t kill Misha. Don’t kill Lincoln. Don’t hurt Maggie. Blah, blah, blah. The list went on and on as she claimed all the rules she set were unbreakable. The things she wanted done, the people she wanted spared, had to be left. They had to be allowed to continue doing the same depraving things that all men did to my Maggie.

My angel.

Maggie had been haunting my dreams a lot lately. Worse than normal. I wasn’t sure why she wouldn’t leave me alone, but there was nothing I could do about it. I’d seen her again and again like a nightmare on repeat in my brain for years after her first death, and now she was back again. I presumed the nightmares would stop when I decided to let her live this time, but they only got more frequent and the urge to make her regret her betrayals against me was becoming harder to ignore.

That’s because you need your meds. You’re supposed to take your meds to make things okay.

The cursed woman was wrong. Things were okay even if I felt sick because Maggie was here. She was stunningly beautiful, like always, and so perfect. So, so, perfect. I enjoyed seeing her, especially when it was in person, and she smiled at me and seemed to hold none of the anger she’d had in her past life.

Old Maggie had got mad when she realized what I was doing for her – she’d told me off for killing the evil of the world and had betrayed me and ordered me far away to a place that was cold, and she never visited. But the new Maggie wasn’t betraying me this time. She had no interest in the man who ruined her life for the first time beyond calling him family. And I didn’t mind that. Maggie needed family for now until I could be all the family she needed. But Malone was doing a good enough job of it until I could do it all because he had saved her from death all those years ago. He had brought her back to me when her mother had died, and my foolish brother had acted without my consent to harm her.

John hadn’t known Maggie was mine when he did it. He hadn’t even known I was still alive. But he figured it out soon enough when I killed dozens of his soldiers in retaliation and then sent them in to slaughter his child too. I didn’t like killing children, but sometimes I had to make a point.

Cass, I told you to stop thinking about that – you need to stop remembering all the darkness and concentrate. Take the pills in your purse and concentrate!

Ignoring the woman, I remained standing in the kitchen, watching the way the Vice Kings outside on the driveway hurried to get some vans and weapons ready to go, as I continued my trip down memory lane that I wasn’t a willing passenger on.

The fool brother of mine had thought it had been random at first all those years ago. He thought the attack had been from a rival gang, but it hadn’t just been that. It had been me – me reminding him why I was always going to do what needed to be done to keep my Maggie safe, even if it meant working against him. It was me reminding him I was not to be messed with ever again.

He got a spare pass to live because I liked John. He had been kind to me when he was little.

He hadn’t sold me off like our father had.

John had used it to his advantage, though. Like with everything, he had spun the attack to his benefit and made a large amount of money. He’d even gained power from The Company through it. Turned out the not so secret organisation enjoyed being sold children that they could use as soldiers. Children they could break and train over and over again until they were ready to do whatever it took like the perfectly controlled machines they were.

Children that would grow up to be lethal adults without an ounce of emotion inside their bones except loyalty to The Company and its causes.

They’d been all too eager to take innocent little Silver Gomez. So much so they hadn’t minded it at all when she had been kicking and screaming her way to freedom, despite being a child that was outmatched by monsters bigger than her. They hadn’t cared in the slightest. Nor had John when years later he’d had another child with Elaina – another one that would have met the same fate had he not been a boy.

That poor child still hadn’t made it another year before the O’Malley darkness had ruined him.

Ruined him just like the rest of us and made his name nothing more than a whisper spoken of once in a blue moon.

“You ready to go, lass?” John’s rough voice broke my concentration. “We gotta get going if we’re gonna collect your toys and be home before the Red Diamonds get here.”

Taking what belonged to me required a rather large amount of planning and patience. Sure, it probably hadn’t needed to take me so many years, but truthfully, not all of that had been my fault.

Some of it was hers – the cursed woman.

She’d been occupied with other… things. Things I could not care for, but required her undivided attention for a while. Things that were… well… they were not things I wanted. But she had been busy and constantly forced me to behave. Still, no matter how many pills she took to calm me down, or lies she told to convince herself that I was nothing but a specter, nothing could hold me back forever. It didn’t matter that she said I was just a figment of her dissociative identity disorder she claimed the doctors said was a result of what had happened to us when we were kids. None of her denials would make me go away.

I was still here.

I was still a part of her.

I was the one who came out when the monster had taken us – the one who saved her by taking on the brunt of the pain and forcing her to sleep so I could experience everything wrong in the world. She should have been thanking me. Not pushing me away. But alas, nobody in this world was truly good. Even her.

With all her interference and the Red Diamonds being menaces, it had taken far too long for me to get my Maggie and save her. But not anymore. Now all I had to do was keep pushing with my decades long plans and then I would have Maggie all to myself where she belonged. All I had to do was get her into the basement of a temporary Persephone home, leave her there for a handful of weeks until things cooled down, then transport her to my permanent safe house. One in the depths of the Irish countryside, not a soul in sight for miles and miles, but the trees I owned. It was there that she would remain for the rest of her days, trapped safely within the walls of my land, unable to be tainted and ruined by any more of the Montana bloodline.

It was there that I could finally be happy. It was there that the cursed woman would realize that I was right, and she didn’t need to try to stop me. We were doing the best thing.

All I had to do now was wait – wait and see how my plan worked out.

“Are you ready?” John called out to me again, as I stared over the horizon, watching the way the sun rose against the clouds.

I turned to face my brother, no care in the world for the dangerous man he was supposed to have been. Other people feared him, dreaded meeting him, and slept dreaming of him like the bogeyman that entered homes of a night and ruined lives. I just knew him as John. As the little one who had shared my snacks and followed me around like a puppy.

The boy who had been screaming bloody murder the day my father had sold me and the cursed woman away.

I’d always liked John. I’d never liked Shannon. My sister hadn’t cried about me being missing. She’d never screamed for me.

“I’m ready.” I muttered, as I did my best to calm my mind of memories and thoughts. “Do you remember what you’re supposed to do? Who you’re supposed to leave alone?”

John patted my arm. “No worries, lass. I know what to do.” He grinned that grin of his. The one I couldn’t bring myself to trust.

My brother had never been loyal, or a man who kept his word. He’d always been self-serving and a bit of a menace even when we had been young. My kindness to my brother, and the fact I let him live, was purely down to the fact that he had vowed to kill our parents for what they did to me, and then he had gone on to do it. He had slaughtered them for their sins – he had avenged me, and I appreciated that.

Well, a minor part of him had wanted them gone anyway. His wife had been cheating on him with Shannon… she’d been sleeping away with his own sister, and her husband sometimes too, and killing the entire family allowed John to get revenge against his wife in the same night he got revenge for me.

I had no issues with people who enjoyed the pleasure of more than one gender. Though I could find men attractive and had been more than willing to sleep with one for the last few decades, I mostly found women better. Women were softer, more beautiful – less cruel. Shannon and my brother’s wife, Cecelia, had been perfectly fine to like each other in the general sense, but they shouldn’t have acted on it when married. It was a sin to betray a marriage vow – a sin to step out on the home and family you were building, even if the cursed woman had done the same. It was unacceptable and why Shannon should have died, too, and why Cecelia had been slaughtered with her unborn baby.

It was sheer luck the baby had been born early – that John’s legitimate child with his wife and not a whore, had made a sudden appearance early. Shannon had stolen the little thing away hours before John had done his work. It was a shame for that baby that I had found them – that I knew where they lay their head each night.

With Shannon. With Shannon and her husband and their child.

London wasn’t a pleasant city, but it was useful to go there sometimes and see where my sister was. What she was doing.

What John’s child did.

I wondered if the baby would be just like their father. Or if they would be like me.

I’d seen the child before. Only once but enough – enough to burn that pretty little face into my brain.

I’d be seeing all of them again soon enough because despite Shannon’s attempts to hide from me, I had an ace up my sleeve. I had a puppet about to meet his master, who would give me what I needed to make sure she could never be a thought in my mind again.

“Tell me now what I want to know.” John insisted on talking to me as though I cared to listen to him. “Tell me now and I’ll keep my word.”

Despite preferring to work alone, I had no choice in the matter now. I needed him – I needed his army. God, I needed him to leave the ones I refused to kill, all alone. John was a necessary evil that I could handle.

“Shannon lives in London now.” I said, as we made our way outside. “She’s there with her husband and…”

I had to tread carefully; to reveal that which was necessary, but nothing else. And though it may have been silly to lie, and hope John could not remember, I had no choice. Truthfully, I knew deep in my bones that the words about to slip from my lips were the only way the innocent pair of children might be safe.

They were innocents, and I didn’t harm innocents when I could help it. It was only sinners I went after.

“Shannon ran away with her daughter.” I lied, without a flicker of remorse as I shared the information my little puppet had unwillingly given me already, thanks to his friend being far too smart for his own good. “And your son. She uses the name Cassidy Cardinal-Fineman, and she teaches mythology at a fancy rich school. She specialized in the Greeks, and even named your son Ares.”

Sexism, a stupid thing. A thing so pointless and ridiculous that only those of a lower IQ could take part in it. John would have been mean to his daughter – he would have seen her as just another good-for-nothing whore like his first wife and second. I knew that because he had felt the same way about his first daughter, Silver. He’d sent her away the moment he could and hadn’t lost a night of sleep over it. If he knew he had another girl, the poor thing would be ruined too. So for the sake of his innocent daughter, I lied. I lied and claimed her Shannon’s, and pretended that Shannon’s son was actually his.

I would lie about the children and keep them safe because children didn’t deserve pain. Well, the Montana children did. But that was different. They were evil. But the O’Malley children? They were good, for the most part. All the ones I knew were good inside. Because of that, I could speak my lies to my brother, knowing that John would leave his false son alive to cause havoc and he would not care to intervene until the boy was old enough to play monster with him. And by that time, I had no doubts John would be dead, either through Maggie seeking revenge, or one of his many other enemies growing bored with his behavior. Like the Cartel that had been sneaking around lately. The ones who thought he had been responsible for ruining parts of their businesses, just like Maggie wanted them to think. She was such a smart woman. I was so proud of how well she had done in her life, considering she had been raised in the home of sinners and fools.

“My son?” John frowned, a small crease appearing on his forehead that I wanted to poke and poke and poke and… “Yes, okay, yeah. I have another son. A boy.” He burst out laughing. “My heir, named so fittingly after the God of War.”

“Yes.” My head cocked to the side, a smile twisting up my lips that was not friendly. “Now promise – promise or I’ll find your son and pull his spine out.”

The boy was thirteen, if I was correct. It would be easy to peel apart his flesh. Not that I would do it yet. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. He was innocent. And we didn’t hurt innocents. The cursed woman didn’t like it, and that was the one concession I had made for her.

John saluted me, two fingers against his head, as he unlocked one of the large vans that sat on his drive with a click of his keys and whistled for his soldiers. The ones who would go with him today, like Elaina, to collect what I was owed and take out a minor threat.

Widow Smyth was a minor threat. He was too close to everything. Knew too much.

He was such a smart boy, and his mother was proud of him for it. But I wasn’t.

I didn’t need him to be smart; I needed him to mind his own business and stay away from mine.

I needed him to do as he was told by those who knew better, and stop trying to prove himself as a better monster than his father.

“I won’t kill them, okay. I won’t ruin your little toys or do anything you don’t want me to do.” John smirked at me. “The Leroux boys shouldn’t be on your list, though, Cass. Their daddy is our enemy, and he’s dangerous. His boys will be the same.”

There was no hesitation in my reply. “No.”

“Not even one? The scrawny one wouldn’t be missed. He doesn’t look much use, anyway.” John yawned. “Or that little Jester punk. What’s his name? Meadow or something stupid. He would be fun to string up on the ceiling.”

“Ares Cardinal-Fineman.” My voice was lifeless as I spoke. “A name you seem to like for its power being linked to a God. But tell me, John, would our God care for his life? Would our God see to it that your son survived a handful of hours in my care?” I stepped closer to my brother, staring up at him and letting him see the monster under my flesh. “I think he would scream rather beautifully – better than our father ever did. And if you think of killing a single name on my list, then I will ensure that Ares screams loud enough that you hear him from the other side of the world.”

“You said only one name was a hard no – that’s why I’m checking.” John grinned. “But fine. I can make each name on your list a hard no; I’ll just take ‘em out of your way then let them free.”

“Not free.” I corrected. “They’re in the way – they need to be held but not harmed until Maggie is fine for them to die.”

“But not Misha.” He said. “You won’t kill Misha though will you.”

Misha was the only hard no on my list. The only one I couldn’t bring myself to slaughter. Even if the others had been innocent enough to warrant sparing until Maggie was done with them, even after I had debated killing them all, Misha was the only true one I didn’t want to touch. He was innocent even if he was a sinner – even if he had touched what was mine in the worst sort of ways, just like all the others. Nobody else was safe after today. The hesitance I had towards killing certain people was almost all gone, and I was only holding back for Maggie’s sake and because the cursed woman kept prodding her claws into me.

But even without that interference, I just couldn’t bring myself to harm the baby boy with the big hazel eyes and wavy blonde hair. The one who’d grabbed my hand the first time I’d met him and stared at me with such innocence that I almost forgot who he was. I’d almost forgotten that he was a man, and men were the worst sorts of monsters.

That light had never faded. That speck of brightness in his stare had never once dulled whenever he had looked at me. It had done nothing at all but remain, regardless of what he went through in his life or the fact he had turned into a sinner himself. He was like Maggie – he was an angel. And I didn’t kill angels. Not anymore. Not when they were kind to me and always did good, even when they didn’t need to do so.

John squeezed my shoulder before he unlocked the van door, jumping inside the driver’s seat, ready for his mission.

“Don’t look so worried, lass. I won’t touch what’s yours – I know the rules.” His laughter echoing around the air didn’t help my confidence, but knowing he feared me did something. Enough for me to step back and watch as he and his soldiers drove away in big vans, finally ready to collect what was mine and bring her to me.

So I could keep her safe and show her just how happy we could be.