Chapter 43
CHAPTER 43
MALO
I cradle a sobbing Maria in my arms and turn to Beast, who is in the midst of giving out orders, instructing the guys to get back to the compound, and ordering Harley to do the same. But, now, as the flames reach the sky and what’s left of the building crumbles, there’s only one thing I can think of.
The promise I made to Maria. And how badly I’ve just let her down.
“Hey!” I yell to Beast, as I get to my feet again, Maria by my side. “We need to go back in there!”
“No the fuck we don’t,” Beast fires back, narrowing his eyes at me. “What are you talking about?”
“This is our only chance to get Jose back!” I exclaim. Something about the adrenaline in my system and the feel of Maria crying next to me, it’s making it near impossible to think straight. My eyes are clouded with anger, and I lunge at my Prez, grabbing him by the tattered edge of his jacket.
“We need to send people in, now,” I growl at him, and he steps back from me, refusing to engage. For some reason, it just makes me angrier. Before I can stop myself, I’m getting up in his space, pushing my face closer to his.
“Tell Blue to stop.”
“Too late for that, Malo,” he replies, keeping his voice as steady as he can. He doesn’t break my gaze for a second. I want to shake him, remind him that we made a fucking promise to Maria and I’m not going to let it fall through.
Sin grabs my arm, tries to yank me back, but I shrug him off. Even despite the recent overdose, I feel strong enough to take Beast on right now. I refuse to let Maria down like that, I fucking refuse, not after everything she’s done for me—for all of us.
“Back off, brother,” Thor warns me, stepping between me and Beast, but I shove him aside, squaring up to Beast. I know I’m not in my right mind, I know I might regret this, but all I care about right now is finding some way to lift the ache in Maria’s sobs, and I’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen.
Beast lifts his hand to me—right hand, palm up. A small signal he’s used with me since the start, whenever I would start getting an attitude with him. It had started back when I was still using, and he was trying to help me get clean. When I wanted to put up a fight and get out there and find someone to hook me up with what I needed and he was the one standing in the way of my next hit. A small reminder of what he was doing for me, that he was on my side, even when it didn’t feel like it.
The sight of it snaps me back to my senses, and my shoulders slump. The ringing in my ears begins to slow and quiet, and I hear Maria sobbing once more. I turn to her, wrapping my arms around her. She’s what matters right now, she’s the only thing I need to be focused on. I don’t know where this leaves us in regards to getting her father to safety, but I can deal with that when the time comes. Right now, I need to get her out of here, rested, fed, and then we can figure out what we’re going to do next. There is a small hope that her father wasn’t even here.
“Come on, babygirl,” I tell her, wrapping my arms around her and holding her close. I tune all of the attention, all of the energy I’ve been using to get through this brutal day, into her once more. She is trembling, holding on to me for dear life, and all I can do is cradle her and keep telling her, over and over again, that it’s going to be all right, that we’re going to get through this. That her father will be okay, somehow, even if I don’t have any fucking reason to believe that.
When I pull back, I see El Serpiente being loaded onto the back of one of the bikes. He’s slumped forward, clearly woozy from the blood loss. My mouth sets into a hard line. Good, I want to see him suffer. I’m surprised Beast let him walk out of here in one piece, but I guess he’s going to keep him as a prisoner for a while, get what he can out of the bastard. Clear out the last roots of the cartel and make sure there’s no chance for them to regrow even after we’ve dealt with them.
I hope I get a chance to get a few licks in, too. I want to make him pay for the pain he’s put Maria through. I’m not certain what happened to her father, but I know she’s not going to recover if he’s… if he’s dead. She’s poured so much of herself into making sure he survived this, and, when it’s over, if she really has lost him, I don’t know what she is going to do.
I gently lead her back to my bike, and pick up the helmet that she tossed aside when she scrambled off Harley’s motorcycle. I have no idea what the two of them are even doing here, what they were planning to pull by turning up here. To be part of the fight? I can see that. Neither of them are women who are exactly happy with the thought of stepping aside and letting other people handle shit for them, I guess.
“You ready to go?” I ask her, as I climb onto the bike. She winds her arms around me and grips on tight. I can still feel her shaking, but she’s stopped crying, as though she’s numb. Like she can’t feel a damn thing. She nods against my back. I hate seeing her like this, fucking hate it. She’s fought so hard, come so far, and without her, we likely wouldn’t have even gotten to this stage with the cartel at all. But the one reason she did this, the one reason she stuck with us throughout all of this, was because she wanted to save her father.
And, like it or not, she might be too late for that.
I kick the bike into gear and follow the flood of Kings back to the compound. During the fight, it was hard to keep track of who was going down but it looked like for the most part the Kings were intact, not without injury but thankfully no casualties. El Serpiente might have had the number but experience and a clear head were on our side.
Beast arrives back at the compound first, and he pulls Serpiente off the bike and drags him roughly toward the back—probably to get his shoulder seen to by Stitches. We can’t have him dying before we can get some answers and some payback. But, as I draw closer, I see the shape of a figure outside the clubhouse—no, not one person, two. We sent Q out to the cartel’s hideout, that’s one of the men standing there, but the other, I don’t recognize. Shit, did we leave someone alive, someone who’s coming to take their revenge?
Beast doesn’t seem to be bothered by it, nodding at them both as he passes by. I pull the bike to a halt and climb off, offering Maria a hand to steady her as she does the same. She pulls off her helmet, and I see the dark circles under her eyes, the utter grief that colors every inch of her face.
Until she lifts her gaze and sees the man standing there on the porch next to Q. Her entire body registers the shock, her head jerking back, her eyes widening. She claps a hand over her mouth, and I see her eyes fill with tears again. I turn back to him, trying to figure out who this man is, and then, Maria lets out a cry.
“Papi!”
And, with that, she brushes past me, and rushes into the arms of her beloved father.