Chapter Seven
I had never been a fan of grime music. It wasn’t something that often drifted over from England with enough popularity to make me take the time to notice it. When I barely even liked rap – I was more of a rock and roll or punk guy – it was definitely something that barely made it onto my playlist. But for some reason as we traipsed down the stairs to the dark and chilly basement level of the piece of shit nightclub,their playlist was nothing but grime.
And you know what?
It was a good backing track for murder.
The beats and pure anger that bounced off the white-tiled walls and concrete floors downstairs only heightened the rage in my soul. Though I was mad enough, considering why we were here, and the music probably wasn’t a necessity. My head was pounding with a fog of darkness, so much so, I barely even registered we were in a large hallway, filled with a dozen doors and a table that had a handful of gangsters sat at it, playing cards and smoking nasty smelling weed without care.
I only clocked the death in the air that echoed with screams. Everything else was redundant.
Lilah pulled her trigger first, opening fire on the gangsters hovering around, keeping each of the rooms free from distractions and threats. Honestly, they were doing a shit job, considering she took out two men before me. It was even worse for them, considering I opened fire long before one of them managed to even grab at the guns on their hips. They were useless – they were nothing. Fodder for the sharks and we were those sharks. Big fucking ones with nasty teeth and the taste for bloodshed. I was fucking Jaws, and they were nothing but pesky bodies in my way.
“Check the rooms!” I yelled to Delilah, as I rained death down on all the gangsters in our way, trusting my friend to do her job.
My gun ran out of bullets before I’d killed everyone, but that was fine. I had hands, and I enjoyed using them. There was something so personal and wicked about using your fists, or a blade, or anything else that meant you were right up close and feeling the life drain from your enemies.
Bodies fell like dominos and blood covered more of my skin than anything else. I was drenched with enough lives to ruin my soul for eternity, and I didn’t care one bit because I was here for something that I would never leave behind and didn’t care how much I corrupted my soul for.
Henley was here. Henley was in one of these fucking rooms.
She was somewhere in these halls of heartbreak and pain and God knew what she’d been through. So fuck it. Fuck the morality, fuck the risk, fuck the staining on my soul. She was mine. My family – my blood. Nobody got to hurt people that were mine and get away with it and anyone who stood in my way was going to die like the rest of my blood had – like Rocky and his goons had done to the entire fucking McCormack family before he dragged Henley kicking and screaming from a place she should have been safe in.
A place I should have kept her safe in.
A place that all those I loved should have been safe in had we not got too cocky and presumed John O’Malley wouldn’t find a way to fuck things over for everyone.
We all knew what he was like – we all knew the depths of his depravity. Fuck. I’d been eight the first time I’d discovered what he was capable of, when I’d come home from school to find my older sister, Poppy, as nothing but a message from the psychotic Vice King leader.
She’d been beaten to death and then he left her hanging in our hallway as a message to our father not to mess with the Vice King businesses.
Poppy had been thirteen.
I still couldn’t get the sight of her mutilated corpse from my mind, despite how many years had passed. I still couldn’t get over the hatred in my heart for every single gangster who had been involved.
Even my own father.
“Widow!” Lilah screamed for me, as I killed the last gangster and forced my brain off from its trip down memory lane.
I ran without thought towards Lilah, skidding to a stop in the doorway of the room she was in. It was just a giant concrete room with nothing but a hook on the ceiling and a single lightbulb on the back. There was enough light for me to see what Delilah was struggling with, as she used her knife to hack away bits of rope that looked like someone had spent weeks pulling at and desperately trying to escape.
The light was enough for me to see the sick and twisted shit that had gone down in a space Henley should never have been in.
“Help me!” Delilah hissed. “I can’t get this shit off her – I’m not strong enough.”
“Fuck.” Even though my body moved for me, heading to Delilah’s side to hack at the same ropes, the air left my lungs with the force of a shotgun blast as I stared at the barely conscious form hanging by her rope bound wrists, her bare feet barely scraping the filthy concrete floor.
“We’ve got you, Henley. You’re gonna be okay.” Delilah murmured, as she continued hacking away the ropes that bound my cousin to the hook on the ceiling and we worked together to get shit done as fast as we could. “You’re gonna be fine, girl. You’re safe now.”
I couldn’t seem to make my lips repeat the same bullshit words of sweetness that Delilah offered. Not because I didn’t want them to be true, but because I couldn’t seem to do anything but stare as I worked.
Henley wasn’t just beaten like I knew she would have been – like I had spent each night having nightmares over until the fucking sun came up.
She’d been tortured.
Cuts, burns from a cigarette, and bruises covered her from head to toe. She only had her underwear on, which meant most of her body was on display, and I could see every ounce of damage that some sadistic fucker had done to her that would no doubt leave more than just mental scars. Like the cut over her left eye that I had a nasty feeling would have done more than just scar her. The rest of the deep welts and marks trailing down her tanned skin that were no doubt permanent, too. All of them leading to the worst of them all – the sickest, most sadistic thing out of the fucking lot.
Someone had carved a word into her flesh. On her stomach, nearly covering the entire space.
Mine.
Letters overlapped. They were messy and manic and entirely not able to be covered. Unless Henley got inked up from head to toe, there would be no way to hide what was on her. No way for her to cover up the pain.
Rocky had done his best to make sure she would spend the rest of her life remembering him, even when I managed to turn him into a fucking ghost.
As the ropes gave way and Delilah and I finally succeeded, Henley groaned. I caught her limp form, cradling her to me as gently as I could as once again the numb ringing in my head came back, far worse than before.
She dropped a little as her head bobbed and she blinked at me, once or twice, barely seeming to see through her cut up eye. Fuck, I was pretty sure she was blind there. Or at least that eye was hazy and unfocused, not entirely able to grasp what was visible around it.
The motherfucker had blinded her. He’d scarred her. Marked her. Fucking scrawled on her flesh with a fucked up signature. He’d made sure that there was no way she could stomach the sight of herself in a mirror for a long ass time and that was just what I could see.
I had no idea what he’d done to her on the inside – what he’d done to her that wasn’t visible as anything more than mental scars.
I wanted to be sick. I almost was sick. The only thing holding me back was concern for my cousin and not wanting her to think I was disgusted by her – she wasn’t the problem. She never would be.
“Widow?” she rasped. “Am I dead, or are you real?”
Forcing myself to speak, I coughed and cleared my throat. “Yeah, Barbie. It’s me. I got you – you’re safe now.”
“I knew you’d come for me.” Her eyes rolled a little as she collapsed into my arms. “I told that fucking prick you would save me.”
I hadn’t saved her. Not really. So what if I had burned half of Hendrix City to the fucking ground, trampling over my father’s businesses and everything that had even the slightest Vice King or Jackal connection that could have led me to her?
So what if I’d lost track of the amount of people I’d tortured and killed for information – each one of them blurring into nothing more than bullshit noise in the back of my brain?
So fucking what if my father had outright ordered his Jester’s to bring him my head on a silver platter for standing against him and touching what was his?
I hadn’t done enough. I hadn’t been fast enough.
“Are you okay with me touching you, or do you want Delilah to help?” The words were bitter on my tongue. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
I may have been her blood, but I was still a man. I was still closer to being someone like Rocky than I was to a woman like Delilah, and I refused to let Henley feel uncomfortable even for a minute more.
“You.” Henley rasped, her hands gripping my shirt with surprising strength. “Please don’t let me go, Widow. Please never let me go.”
My eyes started burning and my throat got tighter. I could have sworn someone had a fistful of fingers wrapped around my flesh, squeezing the fucking life out of me with each second I was in the stifling room. There was barely any air in here. It was a fucking trap of all the dark and dingy things in the world and I was choking the more I had to breathe it in.
“I’ll go ahead. You bring her.” Delilah touched my arm, and I pretended not to see her crying, before she headed out of the room, the sounds of her gun firing a few times hitting me a second later.
I shuffled around, trying to help my cousin to her feet as gently as I could.
“I told Rocky you would never let him keep me.” She mumbled.
It was ridiculous, but Henley sounded happy – she sounded smug as anything that she had been proven right and despite the situation I wanted to laugh at her attitude, and just how infallible it was.
“Who else is gonna piss me off until I die?” I tried grinning, but it fell flat.
She winced and her legs gave way the second she was on her feet, so I refused to let her walk even if I knew holding her would hurt, too. Instead, I hoisted her into my arms as softly as I could and followed Delilah out of the room of hell, leaving it empty for the rest of my group of hoodlums to burn to a crisp.
Though I didn’t copy Delilah as she had gone from room to room, shooting the patrons of each space and letting the women inside go free. I would have helped her, but she was already on the phone to Beau and Aiden, who were outside and waiting for us as backup. They would turn up any second and help get the rest of the innocent people out. Then Logan would help them burn the fucking building to the ground with his explosives. None of them had come inside – it seemed smarter for us to go incognito until we found Henley. But now that we had? Everyone in the building would die, and we wouldn’t care who saw us.
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “We’re gonna take you to the hospital – we need to-”
Henley cut me off. “No hospital. Take me to Sapphire’s or something. I don’t want to be somewhere public. I want to be home.”
Her voice was weak, and she was shivering in my arms. She’d always been scrawny compared to me, but I could see her ribs poking out a little too much for my liking and just knew she’d been starved too. No doubt Rocky had kept her too weak to fight back because he knew Henley – he knew the only way she would never have stopped fighting against him was if she couldn’t physically move from exhaustion.
My chest got tighter. “You need to be checked out. We need to make sure-”
She blinked up at me, doing her best to scowl despite the cut across her eye and the dryness to her lips. “There’s nothing wrong with me – I’m not dying, so don’t be dramatic.”
“You’re covered in cuts and bleeding. And you… you’re hurting. And you might be hurting more on the inside, and I don’t want to risk anything worse happening to you.”
Henley started laughing and as much as I wanted to question her sanity, there was no point. She had earned the right to break, and I wouldn’t blame her for it. Instead, I would just pretend that her hysterics were entirely normal.
“I stabbed Rocky in the dick – that’s why he’s not here anymore and he left me just to rot.” She laughed harder and harder. “He pinned me down, and I got his knife – and I don’t care that I lost the fight or that he damn near took my fucking eye. I don’t care that I didn’t get away.” She kept laughing, and it bordered on the hysterical. “I fucking decapitated his scrawny little cock, and he won’t ever be able to use it again. So no Widow, I don’t need help – I feel really fucking good and I just want to go home.”
Pride burned through me in the crazy way only someone like me could feel it when talking about such violent things.
“I knew you were a crazy bitch.” I tried to laugh. “But you still need the hospital – we need to get you checked out and… and I can get a lady doctor. I can let Lilah sit with you whilst you do… so you can…” I couldn’t get the words out. “Regardless of what happened, we are going to the hospital. But it’s practically owned by Raya, so it’s safe – you’ll be safe there and I won’t leave you.”
Despite the agony she was in, she started grinning ear to ear, her eyes wide and wild as tears streamed down her filthy cheeks and she figured out what I was saying.
“I appreciate the concern, but Rocky learned his fucking lesson about touching girls without consent before he could put that nasty cock inside me.” She laughed louder, her breathing harsh and fast. “Fuck, Widow, you should have seen him – I think all this was worth it for that look on his face and the sounds of his screaming.”
Her graphic detail of her heroism kept her going until we made it back upstairs, Delilah following us once she’d made sure the way out was clear of anyone but our guys. But the second we entered the main room, Henley’s hysterical laughter stopped, and she went entirely still.
The room was filled with bodies and blood. Beau, Aiden, Kellan and other Red Diamonds I barely knew were everywhere, killing or setting up the tiny controlled bombs Logan had been working on lately. Barely an ounce of floor space was free from corpses and splatters of red, and I ought to have known it would be a problem.
It looked just like Sapphire’s mansion had when we’d made it there.
Henley whimpered, and I twisted myself around, trying to shield her view as best as I could.
“Close your eyes, Barbie. You don’t need to see this shit.” I tried to get her to listen to me but that was not something she ever did, even as I carried her out of a fucking prison and far too long a torture.
“They’re dead, aren’t they? My parents… Georgia… Harley…” Henley’s rough voice broke further as she said her brother’s name. “They tried to keep me safe… and I heard… I heard the gunshots and saw the blood. I know they’re dead, Widow. I know they’re all dead and it’s my fault.”
My throat was dry. Hands shaking. I wanted to scream into the air, but I fucking couldn’t and it was killing me. It hurt even worse when I hadn’t even been able to bury them. I had to help Raya and her crew take my fucking family to a funeral home nearby to burn them all to ash and pretend that they had never existed at all because it was safer that way.
I hadn’t even been able to wait for Henley to come with me.
“Yeah. They’re dead.” I breathed, chest heaving with the fight against my tears. “I’m sorry. They were gone before I could get there – I was too late and only Harrison was left. We barely saved Darius. But regardless of what happened, it wasn’t and will never be your fault. You’re a fucking kid, Henley. You hold no responsibility – you did nothing wrong. If anything, you helped; Harrison is alive because of you. I saw the tapes of you trying to save him – I know you even helped Darius, too.”
I supposed it was a silver lining that even hardened mercenaries couldn’t bring themselves to kill a screaming toddler as he lay in a pool of his parent’s blood. But even if they had wanted to, they never made it. I had watched the CCTV footage as Henley had done her best to help – as she had distracted the gun man attacking Darius, and the other one about to grab her nephew.
“I tried to help Darius.” She sobbed harder and I couldn’t stop my tears anymore; they flowed down my cheeks as I finally stepped outside, into the bitter night air. “I saw him get shot, and I tried to help him and-”
“And you did good. You saved him.” I wiped the tears from her cheeks as I told her what Darius had said about her the second he’d woken up from surgery. “You were so fucking brave, and I know that means nothing now, but it will one day; I promise it will.”
I knew if the mercenaries hadn’t been distracted by taking her, they would have finished my friend off and as much as I hated she had been stolen away from us, knowing she had saved Darius made a tiny piece of my soul grateful. Without Henley’s distraction, Delilah wouldn’t have been able to get to him and hold enough pressure on his bullet wounds that he hadn’t died.
The two girls had saved a man I considered my brother, and that was a life debt I would never be able to repay.
“Where are the others?” Henley sniffled as I gently lay her on her feet outside Beau’s car so I could unlock the doors and check her over better, now that we were outside in the cool night. “How is everyone else that was there?”
“Not good.” I swallowed down the pain as I yanked open the door and found my hoody on the backseat, chucking it over her. It reached her knees and covered most of her marks, but there was no way I could forget they were there, even with the coverup. “Those women we saved… they were…”
“Dead?” She asked.
I nodded. “All of them. All of them are dead and I…” Running my hand through my hair, I cursed as Delilah let herself into the car, giving us a little privacy.
“What about Diamond and Yeva?” Henley asked, as she harshly wiped at her eyes.
“They’re fine enough – Yeva killed a lot of the men who attacked. She’s weirdly good with a gun. And she got Diamond into Tanner’s room and locked her inside. They were both shaken up and Yeva had a couple of nasty bruises, but that was about the gist of it.”
I had no idea how she had lasted so long on her own. All I knew was that as we pulled up onto Sapphire’s drive, Yeva had been there on top of a man, stabbing him more times than I could count with a sadistic fucking look in her eyes that had scared even me a little bit. There had been at least five bodies inside thanks to her too… all big men with big guns she had torn apart like she was more than just a girl with a blade and a gun.
It was insane and since that day I hadn’t been comfortable turning my back on her in case I accidentally pissed her off and wound up with a blade in my spine or something.
“What are we supposed to do now? What’s Sapphire saying?” Henley croaked as I handed her an unscrewed bottle of water from the trunk and helped her drink some.
“Nothing.” I replied. “We haven’t found her yet.”
“What?” She frowned, wincing when she tugged her wounds a little against my jumper. “What do you mean you haven’t found her?”
“She got taken the same time you did, and so did her guys. Beau managed to get there fast enough that he rescued Lincoln and that before they even made it a mile away. But they couldn’t find Sapphire and we haven’t been able to find her since.”
Henley’s eyes shut for a moment as she tried to pull in a breath. And when they opened, the bright blue shade that matched mine was gone.
There was nothing but darkness there. A sight I had never thought I would see on her, especially.
“How long has it been, Widow?” She stared at me, a thousand twisted memories burning in her eyes. “How long was I gone? How long has Sapphire been missing?”
As much as I wanted to lie, I couldn’t. It wasn’t fair to her. So I pulled up my big boy pants and grabbed her hand, vowing a billion silent promises that the look in her eyes would one day be replaced with nothing but happiness.
That I would avenge our fallen family – I would avenge her and all the others and do what I needed to do and I would die to make sure she got the happy ever after she deserved in her life.
My lips parted, my tongue darted out to lick them and I swallowed down the anger as I said, “Three weeks. You’ve both been gone for a few hours shy of three weeks.”