A gaping hole, gushing blood, was dead center in his forehead.
That was when Bobby Byrne fell over, landing on top of his own father.
Whip knew right then that his pap was dead. So was his father.
And during it all, his mother continued to scream.
Chapter One
“Gonna kill the bitch,” Sig snarled with his jaw hard and eyes cold as ice. Definitely deadly.
The VP was pacing back and forth across The Barn’s floor. His body stiff and his hands jerking as he took long, agitated strides.
Trip had gathered everyone for an emergency meeting. Of fucking course, it was about the Shirleys. Whip wondered if they would even need to have church meetings after they dealt with Hillbilly Hill for the last time.
For patching in prospects? Maybe. But other than that?
The president ripped his black baseball cap off his head and held it crushed within his fingers as he used them to scratch the back of his neck.
Both half-brothers had trigger tempers and right now, their tempers were flaring.
Of course they would be. All of them standing inside The Barn were tired of the Shirley bullshit.
Bone. Fucking. Tired.
The Fury needed to deal with them one final time to end this shit. For good.
Now that winter had passed and the snow was gone, those redneck roaches were repopulating that mountain. As well as beefing up the numbers in their clan. That had to be the reason they were bringing in “breeders” and “snot monkeys” from clans located elsewhere. Like from Ohio.
Red’s mom had been living with the Ohio branch of the Guardians of Freedom with her second husband and, apparently, a bunch of kids. Not just the three she gave birth to, either. Probably more, since the man she married already had kids of his own. The reason he married Red’s mom in the first place.
To raise the widower’s litter of children and to breed more.
The members of the militia wannabes or sovereign nation—whatever the fuck they were—believed the more children they had, the closer they’d be to God. They figured their way into Heaven was guaranteed by producing tons of snot monkeys.
If that was a requirement to get through the pearly gates, Whip would be shit out of luck.
The problem was, the Shirley gene pool had been so small, the offspring tended to be inbred. Whip wasn’t sure about the Ohio group or the rest of them.
It turns out, Red’s mother had been persuaded into following those cult beliefs after Red’s father died. The woman had been dealing with grief, depression and, at the time, had been extremely vulnerable. As well as lonely.
The perfect target for gaslighting.
However, now the woman was no longer in Ohio, but in Pennsylvania. Apparently to join the same clan she had a hand in sending Red to as a “breeder” against Sig’s ol’ lady’s will.
Kidnapped, restrained, confined and raped.
Red had been so traumatized, she called the baby inside her a “seed.” She didn’t see it as anything other than that. Proof the mind did its best to cope with what it had been dealt.
But, seriously, what fucking mother did that to her own damn daughter? Someone who wasn’t playing with a full deck, that was who.
No surprise, seeing her mother had put Red, aka Autumn, in a tailspin. And of course, that had put Sig in a tailspin. If the Shirleys tried to grab Red again, the whole world would burn. Nothing but scorched earth would remain.
It would be Sig lighting that damn match, even if he burned along with it. If he had to stop breathing to make sure Red continued, he would do it. No one doubted that. All of them feared it.
His love for Red was so damn intense, it was scary.
The fact that he might sacrifice himself to do so worried his brother Trip.
With Red, Trip, his sister Syn, his niece Maya and now his newborn nephew Rush, Sig had too much to live for. Unfortunately, he was so zeroed in on and in sync with his ol’ lady that he sometimes forgot there were other people around him who cared for and loved him, too.
The other day in the Walmart parking lot, Red noticed her mother had three young children with her. She also had no doubt they were her half-siblings because they all had bright red hair like Red, who got it from her mother.
Red knew about Ezrah, now about five, but not about the younger two, who appeared to be around three and one. She had no idea what their names were because they had been born after she’d been kidnapped and traded to the Pennsylvania clan to become a sister-wife for one of the Shirley men.
Red only spotted her mother and her children in the group unloading from the van and didn’t see her “stepfather” among them. That didn’t mean he hadn’t come along. It could simply mean that the women were tasked with doing the shopping.