Chapter 43
Scarlett
I’m sitting alone inside the dark interior of Bohnes’ brilliant bulldozer-turned-tank, staring at the screen of my phone. It’s mounted on the dash, showing me the view from the bushes outside the wall of the HDLC (Housing Dignity for Lane County) office.
“Fuckin’ diabolical,” I murmur to myself without bothering to hit the unmute button on our group call. I barely even register the words leaving my own lips. Jonas raped my boys? He took their seed? He tried to cut Widow’s heart out?
For as much as I hated Chet or Ernest or the rich boy who killed my brother, I don’t hate anyone as much as I hate Jonas Kelly.
I wish I were a saint. I wish I were a character from one of Adrian’s books, somebody that’s good and just and deserving of the world.
I’m not. I’m just a woman, and I hate Jonas without restraint, and that feeling has little to nothing to do with his scheme of kidnapping homeless people and selling their organs to his politician friends.
The hideousness of the world doesn’t surprise me anymore.
All I want to do is protect me and mine and get the fuck out of here.
The trembling overtakes me, a secret emotion that I won’t let any of the boys see, not until I’ve got all four of them safe and naked in my bed at home.
All four. Safe.
A song is playing softly in the background, “You Make Me Sick!” by Ashnikko, talking about crushing her enemies like little rotten fruits.
The shaking is so bad that I almost drop the knife in my hand, my eyes glued to the phone screen and the feed from Bohnes’ camera.
He’s scaling the side of the brick wall now, with the plan of heading inside with Alexei and Widow, to see if Jonas and Ash are actually here.
If they are, I’ll move the killdozer from its current location, tucked inside of an alley with abandoned small-scale apartment buildings on either side of me.
The signs in their front yards, the ones that used to proudly claim that Borisov Group was in charge of the demolition and future construction of two high-rises, the ones that currently read Archer Realty, are covered in graffiti.
The project is dead in the water, and so am I, sitting here like a bitch while Ash suffers—because I know for a fact that if he’s with Jonas, he’s suffering—and I do my absolute best to maintain that cold, logical robot brain that served me so well when Bohnes went missing.
All around me, stationed behind dumpsters or in bushes, or in beautiful classic cars fixed up with a wing and a prayer, I have Widow’s new crew of boys.
My girls are infatuated with them and have started calling them POP—the Princes of Prescott.
Widow has as much control over that name as I did over the title of Crimson Crew. So, POP it is.
They’re watching for police, controlling traffic, checking the trunks of unknown vehicles. They’re also the ones that helped me move the slow-driving dozer from its hiding spot to my current location, across the street from the HDLC office.
The minutes tick by, forcing me to slow my breathing, to rein in the trembling.
Tap, tap, tap goes my hungry blade against my thigh.
Ain’t no Legend in Prescott ever got ahead by crying when she should be plotting, you know?
That long-ago Legend, the girl named Baby with the machete, the one who fell in love with Maverick the Nightmare, she once had to kill her own beloved brother. If she hadn’t done that, not only would her lover have been implicated in a crime he didn’t commit, but they’d probably both be dead.
I can do all that and more for Ash and his screaming black eyes, our obsession in the rain.
I exhale sharply and lean forward, one elbow on the dash, studying the camera with a critical eye.
Is that the office’s front door opening?
Bohnes hasn’t cleared the wall. Instead, he’s sitting atop it with Widow on one side and Alexei on the other.
“Fuck, he’s coming right out,” Bohnes murmurs into his phone, adding captions to the scene I can already see playing out on the screen.
The door of the building is opening and Mayor Kelly is coming out with an entourage of bodyguards, secretaries, and nurses.
He’s in a wheelchair, but wearing a suit.
A nurse drags a rolling IV pole beside him.
Su…surgery.
My eye twitches and my right hand flies out, grabbing onto the killdozer’s gearshift. It lurches forward with a metallic groan, oddly innocuous on this potential construction site. Who has to know that I’m up to no good?
With the speed of an angry, metal slug, I roll that beast forward and across the street, a scant twenty feet between us and the brick wall. The POP boys scramble to attention, enacting our plan even though I haven’t said a word about it.
Surgery? SURGERY?! Why does it look like the mayor’s had surgery today? My mind won’t stop reminding me that Ash said he needed a kidney… Oh my God. Oh my fucking God.
“Ready…set…” Bohnes whistles and a dozen of the POP boys—good ol’ salt of the earth dudes like Sticks and Manny and Wolfman and Jack—scramble up the walls to join my boys. With a gravelly, half-whispered, “fire”, gunshots fill the air.
At this point, I could give a shit less about being cautious, about holding back for want of some future career as a star.
All I want is the people I love to be safe. I’d even give up my vengeance against Jonas, so long as I knew we were safe and he was a long way away from here.
The boys fire indiscriminately, hopefully killing every person in that entourage but for Jonas.
I ram the murdered-out killdozer into the brick wall, collapsing it like a house of cards. Red bricks tumble against the reinforced steel roof, turned to dust by the impact. With a crunch, I roll over the debris and through it, just far enough to leave a hole in the wall for me to pass through.
I am done hesitating. I will never hesitate again.
I will finish this, and I will do it right.
With my knife in-hand, I scramble out of the dozer’s cab like some weird preternatural predator from a fireside story, something ethereal and vengeful and angry.
With my hair tangled around my face from the crash and the press of the helmet, I scale bits of broken concrete like a wild-eyed goat with curved horns and square pupils.
Instead of going around Jonas’ car, I go over it, leaping onto the shiny black paint of the Maybach and onto the ground in front of it.
There he is.
The current mayor of Springfield is pressing buttons on the arm of his electric wheelchair in an attempt to get it to move. One of the boys—probably Bohnes—was cunning enough to put a few bullets in it, so it ain’t goin’ nowhere.
When Jonas sees me, when those black eyes of his, so like and unlike his twin sons, land on my face, he stands up. Despite his apparently fragile state, he seems to have no problem getting to his feet.
Makes no difference to me.
With an unhinged roar, I leap on him, wrapping my legs around his waist. The knife I’m using today was carefully chosen by myself before I left the house.
It’s got a short blade because, while I’d sacrifice everything to save Ash, I also don’t want to rescue him only to have him then killed by the mob. Jonas needs to stay alive.
He doesn’t need to be in one piece.
I plunge my knife into Jonas’ right eye first, splattering blood and humors across us both.
I don’t worry about guards or goons or what the fuck ever.
I’ve got a crew for that. Fuckboys. POPs.
Nisha and Bastian are waiting down the block with some of the girls, ready to join us once I give the signal.
Jonas is screaming now, and I’m deadly silent, wrenching the knife free and then plunging it immediately into his other eye. I said that when I got a hold of him, that I was going to carve his eyes out. I am a woman of my word, after all.
Except when I promised Ash that he’d be safe. That he’d never be alone with Jonas again.
It doesn’t matter if the man is in pain and can’t talk; he’d rather die than tell me where Ash is.
In that regard, he’s useless and I’m not about to waste much of my time on him.
It’s imperative though that he go down, stay down, and that he’s neutered before I leave him to continue the search for the man I love.
Oh, Ash, God. Let me protect you, baby. Let me bring you home.
Jonas collapses underneath me, taking us both down to the bloodied steps.
From the corner of my eye, I spot the silver cryogenic tank that Widow mentioned.
My rage surges a second time, ricocheting through the nerves in my hand.
Without any conscious thought, I find myself stabbing Jonas in the shoulder over and over and over again.
Stab, stab, stab, stab, stab. Blood is flying, splashing all over me as Jonas writhes.
Before I end up killing him, I drag myself up to my feet while he thrashes around, kicking and moaning in a pile of corpses and a puddle of blood.
I barely see the carnage around me, but I do take note of the boys as they appear behind me, holding weapons from Pavel’s private stash.
I squat down and ram my knife into Jonas’ dick. Stab, stab stab. Not anywhere near his femoral artery, just his genitals. Hopefully they’re mutilated beyond all reason.
Alexei spits on him as he walks by, sneering down at his father’s complicit killer.
“To the pain,” he announces, lofty and confident in a way that I wish I were. Ah, The Princess Bride quote that Bohnes so wanted to hear from our husband. Too bad I’m not in the headspace to enjoy any of it.
I’m so angry. I’m ballistic. I’m fired-up. But goddamn, I am terrified.
“Dear God, what is that thing?” Bohnes adds, moving ahead of me with a psychotic laugh and some sort of black carbine in his pale hands.
My knife presses down on Mayor Kelly’s fingers, pinning the digits between sharp edges and unforgiving concrete.
One finger is severed entirely, and the other is barely hanging on by a thread of flesh.
Jonas roars in pain, and a shudder of pure pleasure zips through me.
Suffering can be fun, can’t it? This fuckhead wasn’t wrong.
No, Scarlett. Waste of time. Find Ash. Get Ash. Save Ash. Emotions are luxuries for later. There’s no time for me to hate right now.
I shoot to my feet and stumble into the building behind Widow, running into a pair of people who look like they heard the commotion and were trying to flee. He grabs the first of them, some guy in a tweed suit, and throws him into a wall.
“Where is Ash Kelly?” he demands, and the man sputters that he doesn’t know.
Widow slits his throat like it’s nothing, shoving the body aside. Since I know it’s hard for Adrian to hurt women (a good quality, obvs, not complaining), I take charge of the woman. My blade goes against the side of her neck, smearing Jonas’ blood all over her skin and her expensive white blouse.
“Show us where you do the surgeries.” I’m not playing.
She can hear the ice in my voice. She saw her colleague die.
With a sobbing half-prayer to some god or another, the idiot woman guides the four of us down several sets of stairs into the dark of the basement.
It’s not a very defensible place to be, on stairs like this, especially when an unknown entity is taking us to an unknown place.
It’s worth the risk though, for expediency.
Ash, Ash, Ash. Please. Ash-pen, please. Please, baby.
The woman uses her fingerprint to open a door, leading us down one hallway and then another.
Through a second door into a much nicer hallway.
At the end of it, there are some rooms with closed doors that the boys methodically kick open, one after another.
We’ve brought an entourage down with us—a few POP boys, like Jack and Wolfman—while half our army waits up top, moving the dozer and covering both the hole in the wall and the metal gate with a tarp to keep curious eyes out.
We come to a stop in front of a steel door. Another fingerprint from my hostage.
The door opens, revealing a sterile place that smells like antiseptic. There are sinks in here with soap dispensers beside them. A shower in the corner with an eye wash station. Through one last door, I find the operating room.
One of the rolling metal tables is still covered in bloody instruments.
I pick one up and bring it to my nose, sniffing it like a crazy person, as if I could tell Ash’s blood from anyone else’s based on scent alone.
“Where is he?” I whisper, my eyes scanning the room for a gurney with a sheet over it. I can’t breathe. I’m trembling again, and my knife hand is aching to plunge the blade into this bitch’s neck. “Where’s the man you took the kidney from?”
My hostage seems surprised that I know as much as I do about the situation, sputtering wildly when I turn on her like the unhinged, obsessively romantic psycho that I am.
Behind her, Bohnes, Widow, and Alexei are waiting. The POP boys on either side are calm enough, fully immersed in the role we have to play today. Widow is as bad an actor as I am. He’s trembling as much—if not more—than me. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I made him love Ash and then I lost Ash.
“He’s still alive!” the woman cries, falling to her knees and pressing her forehead to the ground like she’s praying. “He only left just now.”
My heart soars as I squat down, looking her dead in the eye.
“What’s the vehicle look like and where is it going?
” I demand, trusting that Bohnes is already on his phone, relaying this information to Hype.
She can start checking traffic cams again.
We can send my girls out to search the streets.
Nobody knows this neighborhood or this city the way my crew and I do.
“White,” the woman cries, lifting her head and scooting forward on her knees toward me. “It’s a white truck. I don’t know where it’s going. I’m not privileged enough to have that information.”
I grit my teeth and fight the compulsion to stab her, squeezing the bloodied hilt of my knife.
“Who would be?” I ask, but she acts like she doesn’t know, mumbling something like a curse or a threat under her breath in another language.
I stop resisting the urge to kill her.