Khane
Iswept my tongue over the dry skin of my busted lip as I nursed a splitting headache. The metallic taste of blood lingered in my mouth and my mind tried to force-feed me images of Desiree being tortured by her captors.
Arjen had dished out a few good knocks upside my head before I was pissed enough to hit him back. His fucking hard-hitting hands were like iron fists connecting with my head.
His rigid voice rang out like a siren as he cursed out his protection detail behind me. We were still inside the study that looked like two battle-crazed Vikings had fought with their best death instruments.
While Arjen and I had been arguing and fighting, his six-man detail had been distracted enough that they had allowed Desiree to leave without protection. Now, she was out there alone and probably taken by now. I was never going to forgive myself if any harm came to her. I didn’t want to think about what would happen if I didn’t find her.
Every nerve, every thought, every instinct within, wanted to destroy whatever was in front of me until I found her. However, I treated this the same as if Arjen had gone missing. Patience, attention to detail, and accepting help would get her back before I turned the world into a living hell.
“Two motherfucking hours! She could be any-fucking-where by now. She could have hopped on a plane and be halfway across the fucking U…S…A by now. Mother Fuck!” Arjen yelled at the top of his lungs.
The only comfort that we had was that she didn’t have a death note out on her head. If so, they would have stopped at nothing to kill her at the spa. We would have also received an image confirming her death.
If she had been taken, it was likely for ransom, and despite my brother wanting to kill us, I knew he would stop at nothing to get her back. He knew her background as well as I did. She was a hardworking woman who had been attempting to live a normal life, and had never gotten into any trouble. She was loyal to her family despite them being the sole reason she had ever faced any kind of danger.
If Arjen didn’t care, he would have brushed our affair off and gone out and fucked the first woman that caught his eye. Instead, he stared daggers at me, his jaw continued to tick, and his fist continued to clench and unclench as he paced a hole in the floor.
Even if my brother proved me wrong and didn’t go after Desiree, death was all that was going to stop me from finding her.
Our first task was to track her down, hopefully before she was found by an adversary.
Arjen had gotten so used to being feared that he had relaxed his standards where protection was concerned. The fact that his men had been distracted enough for her to get away revealed our weaknesses and our complacency. It wasn’t that the men he hired weren’t qualified. Most were ex-military and members of the syndicate, but the men were going to follow the example of their leader.
“If we don’t get her back within the next forty-eight hours, you’re all fired. I don’t care what the fuck was happening, she should have had eyes on her at all times.” Arjen shouted at the men, although it was our fault that Desiree had gotten away.
He knew, as well as I did, that anyone associated with us would be targeted from the start. It’s why we had placed Desiree and Mecca under protection. There were as many people inside our organization as outside that wanted to see us fail, hurt, or dead. There were two groups after Desiree that we hadn’t identified yet. We believed that the ones searching for the Bookkeeper may have been a one-time event, but we still hadn’t proven it without a reasonable doubt.
Arjen turned back to the men, his eyes wide with fury, “And from the six of you, one of you might just die tonight.”
This was the part of my brother that struck fear in the hearts of the people who knew him. The men knew of his reputation, had seen him in action, but he hadn’t had to assert his authority in so long, they had forgotten.
I didn’t have the patience to deal with finances, employees, or setting rules and guidelines. I received a task, made a plan, gathered what I needed, and made shit happen. I was notorious for taking on Arjen’s hit-list from the syndicate to avoid the monotony of those types of tasks.
I probably put in more work than my brother, tracking down and cleaning up messes of the humankind, but I’d rather not deal with people unless I was studying them to kill them.
Tap! Tap!
The shots from Arjen’s silenced weapon were followed by the spray of blood from one of his guards. The man’s heavy body thumping to the floor may as well have been a bomb going off. The men surrounding the fallen man weren’t the kind of men who scared easily, but my brother had managed to freeze them in fear.
My glance fell to the man leaking his head contents before I returned my attention to the surveillance footage that had been sent from Tywin. Arjen was crazy. A different kind of crazy from me. His nickname was Loud, but it wasn’t because he had a big mouth.
He was notorious for delivering acts of untimely deaths to many, just as he had just demonstrated. None of those men would have ever suspected that one of them would die this night, by the hand of their boss, no less.
Arjen, in my opinion, was the most dangerous type of crazy. His was rational and always with a clear cut reason. If he had chosen to kill one of his men, he had a reason other than to release his anger.
He must have known something about the man, a side deal he had cut, selling information, or proof of him snitching or feeding our enemy information. Some detail that labeled him a rat, a rapist, or one of the few things Arjen wasn’t going to tolerate.
Knowing my brother the way that I did, he had known of the man’s secret, weeks, or even months ago, but rest assured the man had been marked for death the entire time. Whatever the reason my brother had killed that man, it wasn’t the reason that the others assumed. However, it was delivered at a time when he needed it to count.
“If we don’t get her back within the next twenty-four hours, one more of you will die,” he promised the men with a menacing glare. I noticed he had changed his recovery time to twenty-four hours to entice a stronger sense of urgency in the men.
However, I was sure, blowing one of their friend’s head off in front of them was incentive enough for them to do whatever it took to help find Desiree. “Now, clean this up and figure out where the fuck my fiancée is.”
When Arjen got like this, I didn’t mess with him because he couldn’t be reached to be reasoned with. His goal, upset with me or not, would be to find Desiree. I believed he enjoyed the drama of solving life and death situations. I also believed he carried as much guilt as I did for letting Desiree slip through our fingers. A text drew my attention, alerting that Tywin had arrived.
A few minutes after Tywin’s alert, he strolled into the study, took one look around the destroyed area, and shook his head. I had stacked the broken furniture in one corner, but cotton, feathers, and chunks of wood and broken glass remained scattered all over the floor.