“Artie, move.” Charlie took my arm, dragging me to my feet. I held Cheska tighter as I moved toward the cars, my vision blurred with red. I couldn’t breathe, every fucking inhale like taking in boiling-hot air.
I looked up and saw Vera holding Ronnie, Ronnie’s fucking stunned eyes on Cheska in my arms. I scanned the yard, the fire raging and the bodies on the ground. Freddie and Vinnie running around, dragging men from the flames. Eric, arms around Betsy and Gene. Cheska limp in my motherfucking arms.
All the life fled from my veins and, in that moment, I became death. I became nothing but evil, revenge all I could crave, the bitter, addictive taste of bloodlust filling up my mouth.
A noise travelled to my ears and I looked down. I fucking froze when Cheska’s eyelids started to move, when her arms and legs shifted. “Cheska,” I rasped, and her eyes finally opened. She blinked, and then those fucking green-browns fell on me.
“Arthur,” she said, dazed, but I saw the fog in her mind clearing by the second. Then her eyes widened and she looked back at the container, at the flames clawing higher, the last of the night’s fireworks fizzling out in the sky above us.
“The girls,” she whispered, kicking out of my hold until her feet hit the ground. “The girls.” She tried to get back to the container. But my arm was a fucking iron cage around her stomach. She was back. She was bloody breathing. And I was never letting her fucking go again. “Arthur!” she cried, trying to break from my grip. “The girls!”
“They’re dead,” Betsy said from behind us. I heard a fucking agonised wail from Ronnie. She was in her girlfriend’s arms, sobbing, clutching Vera like there was no bloody tomorrow. “None of them survived the explosion,” Betsy said as vans came racing up the road, our soldiers coming to contain this shitshow. To find me fucking evidence of who it was so I could decapitate the fuckers who were attacking us, once and for all. So I could destroy them and tear their organisation apart.
No one fucked with what was mine.
No one fucked with my fucking woman!
“We’re leaving.” I dragged Cheska, kicking and fighting me, back to the car. I pushed her inside, nudging my chin at Vera to bring Ronnie in our car too. The soldiers piled out of the van, their eyes turning livid as they saw the carnage. I would be speaking to Old Sammy tonight to find out what he knew.
The soldiers looked at me as I stood by my car. “Clean up, but search the grounds for any evidence of who did this. I’ll pay any of you who get me leads or any kind of answer a truckload of money.” I met each one of them in the eyes. “Someone is trying to fuck with our firm. Now they’ve fucked with my family, and that’s taken this from fucking child’s play to an out-and-out fucking war. Keep your ears to the ground and find me the fuckers who thought it would be wise to mess with me.”
I got in the car and got on the phone to Charlie. “Get men stationed around our house. No fucker but family gets in and out. We’re staying together—tell everyone to get their bags packed and get their arses to the church.”
“Got it, Art.” Charlie hung up.
Cheska was staring at the flames of the container through the window, her eyes fixed on the one bird they’d managed to pull out. She was already dead, fucking died alone, naked in a cage. I threw my arm around Cheska’s neck and pulled her close. I turned her face to me, gripped her cheeks and kissed her shaking lips. Tears fell down her face, and I tasted the salty water on my tongue.
“You’re alive,” I said, feeling some of the molten anger inside me turn to smoke at the fact that she was here, beside me, fucking alive.
“Those girls …” Cheska said, her breath hitching. She shook her head. She took my hand and fucking squeezed my fingers with all she was made of. “The one we pulled out …” She closed her eyes, more tears falling. “She looked like Freya. For a minute …” Her mate. Her mate whose throat had been slit in front of her. “I tried to save her. I needed to save her.” Cheska looked up and found Ronnie. She reached across the seat and gripped her hand. “Ronnie …”
“They had the brand,” Ronnie said to all of us and no one at the same time. Her dark eyes were like fucking glass, her deep skin paling. Vera held her girlfriend closer, kissing her forehead, but Ronnie was fucking lost to the past. Locked in the days when she’d lived in a fucking cage, been branded just the same as those birds who were now nothing but ash and charred remains.