20

20

KADE

“How many do you think are inside?”

Barry sits beside me in the car, which is parked across from the building Stacey and I left two hours ago. Three SUVs are parked up too, keeping an eye on the surroundings as I strap the ammo belt around my waist and fill each compartment with magazines and daggers.

I look over and tilt my head from side to side as I contemplate my answer. “Maybe fifty.”

“Easy then,” he says in his Geordie accent.

I huff a laugh at his sarcasm. “They’re all armed, so probably not.”

“Are you sure they know her name?”

“Do you not listen?” I snap, scowling at him. “I’ve gone over the exact conversation five times.”

“I just find it a little dramatic to be doing this over a name.”

“You’ve been working for me for over a year and you think this is dramatic?”

He grimaces. “There was that time you tried to burn someone’s house down. For the same girl, may I add. Is this not a step too far?”

I stop loading my belt and pinch the bridge of my nose. “If they tell Bernadette her name, she’ll track Stacey and then probably manage to dig up our past. I don’t want to imagine the shit she’d do to her to make me more compliant.”

Barry knows everything. I had to tell him, or he would’ve thought I was just stalking some innocent girl. He sends reports to me when I haven’t the time to watch her. He thinks, as a twenty-one-year-old, I should find another obsession that doesn’t drive me to murder.

Am I extreme? Yes. But for my own fucking sanity, I need to know what she’s doing. Is that weird? To hate her yet need to know what she’s doing? Even though she’s a snake?

A snake who still belongs to me.

“You plan on killing an entire gang for a girl who apparently cheated on you?”

I grit my teeth and try not to smash his face in. “Yes,” I reply as I throw open the door. “Did you manage to find out who called her back at the hotel?”

“No. The phone has a fucking steel barrier around it.”

“Keep digging.”

Barry doesn’t respond as he, too, gets out of the car and checks his ammo belt, hidden under his suit. I made him wear the same one as me, since the material takes most of the power from gunshots.

Fifteen guys follow us, but I have three more on standby and a sniper on the roof of the building across from the warehouse. Heavy-metal music plays from inside as we hack the gate.

Our steps are silent in the warehouse, our guns aimed as we take the stairs. I send some guys left, another group right, and Barry and three others follow me.

“Clear,” someone says through my earpiece as another says, “One down.”

I keep my gun raised, aiming forward as I side-step from a corner, the silencer muffling the shot I take. The bullet sinks into the man’s skull, killing him instantly. Four more go down, and we stick explosives to the walls.

Bernadette sent me to Russia for intense training with their armed forces, a group of soldiers working under her pay who didn’t hold back on torturing me while I learned how to fight, shoot, stab and resist interrogation tactics.

Barry stands beside me as I put away my gun and grab two blades, fisting the handles and signalling for my team to follow me.

I shove a knife under someone’s chin, ripping his jaw clean off, then stab him in the eye while covering his mangled mouth with my palm.

“Go to sleep,” I whisper in his ear as I yank the blade from his eye and slice it across his throat.

His body drops at my feet, and I step over it as I wipe my knife on his denim vest.

“The leaders will be in the basement,” I say to Barry. “Leave Crawley for me.”

As the elevator lowers, the rest of my team take the stairs down. I check my pistol is loaded then flip a blade in my hand while I wait. It was only hours ago I was in this shaft with Stacey, holding her in my arms to try to calm her down.

Now I’m covered in blood, adrenaline in my veins like a kid at Christmas Eve.

As soon as the elevator reaches the bottom, the sliding metal doors creak open, and gunshots are fired from both sides. The impact of a bullet hitting my armoured vest throws me into a wall, the searing pain stealing my breath away.

Before the dickhead can finish me off, I launch a blade at his face, and Barry breaks his neck.

We set a few more explosives as we run through the basement, shooting anyone and everyone. I dodge an axe coming straight for my chest.

Through my earpiece, one of my guys says, “Fuller is injured.”

I swear to myself and head towards them to find Fuller with a bullet wound in his chest.

“Keep pressure on it.” I point to one of my newest members. “Take him to our medic. Do not go to the hospital.”

He agrees and heads off as Barry and three others stay on my left. We dodge and shoot, killing at least twenty gang members before we plant the last explosive.

The heavy-metal music is still playing, and as I load my gun, I absently nod along and whistle to the tune.

I grin at Barry like a crazy person. “Ready?”

“You’re insane – do you know that?”

“Yep.”

Blood stains my face, and Barry is almost unrecognisable under the crimson splatters on his. I signal for everyone to follow us out, and once the elevator has taken us back up – the metal doors barely stopping the bullets from penetrating them – I cut the power.

A fist flies at me from behind, the burn on my cheek welcoming through all the adrenaline pumping in my veins.

Crawley limps to the side and grabs hold of the wall, evidently trying to flee the place and leave his men behind. I order my team to lower their aim.

“Sir?”

I look at Barry. “Leave. All of you.”

My assistant lingers for a second too long before he tells everyone to get back to their vehicles.

I sigh and pull the joint from behind my ear, amazed that it managed to survive the gunfight. “Thinking you could hit me and get away with it was an error, but your worst mistake was looking in her direction.”

Crawley scoffs as he clutches at his thigh, blood seeping between his fingers. “Your whore?”

My jaw strains as I stare at him, my patience worn to the point of snapping. “She is not my whore.” I light my smoke and inhale, hoping it’ll calm my temper, because I’m not in the mood to torture this guy. “Have you been in contact with my boss since I left?”

“Why would I have contacted Mrs Sawyer?” he asks, confused as he grips his wounded leg tighter and stumbles into the wall, sliding down it until he’s on his ass. “Was the girl her daughter?”

I grimace and exhale. “No. Cassie is even more insufferable.”

“Is that why you are here? Because of your whore?” He laughs. “Sharing is caring, Nāve.”

I roll my eyes. “Stop calling me that. My name…” I grab his jaw in a painful grip that has him thrashing. I press the bright, hot end of my smoke to his cheek as I say, “My name is not fucking Nāve.”

He yells as his skin burns beneath the ember, tears filling his eyes.

I let go, reach behind me to grab one of the blades in my ammo belt and bring it between us. “My name is Kade. Kade Mitchell. Son of Tobias. Maybe I should carve it into your skin? Will you still call me Nāvethen?”

“F-Fuck you.”

I knock his hand away as he tries to punch me, weak and slowly dying from blood loss. He must’ve been shot.

Instead of giving him a quick end by putting a bullet between his eyes, I carve each letter of my first name into his sweaty forehead in block capitals until he has spittle dripping down his chin, unmovable, nearly unconscious.

“There,” I say, admiring the four crimson letters with a smile. “Now you’ll never forget who I am.”

“You are Death,” he says in a low, slurred mumble. “Your time will come. You and your whore.”

I throw my hands out to the side, exasperated. “She’s not my fucking whore.” I lean my elbows on my knees. “In fact, she isn’t a whore at all. She’s the girl I watch, the girl I obsess over until I feel like I’m going fucking insane. I gave her my heart when I was a teenager, and do you know what she did? She shattered it. She’s a venomous snake. Wait. Do you understand a word I’m saying, Crawley?”

He’s fading, not listening anymore.

The light leaves his eyes, and I roll mine and drag the sharp side of my blade across his throat to make sure he’s actually dead. Blood pours from his neck and drenches my hand. I massage the warm liquid between my thumb and fingers before I stand.

Stacey would look wonderful covered in blood. As long as it’s not hers.

I shake off the thought. “Blow it,” I order.

“You’re still in range, sir,” Barry says through my earpiece. “You need to leave the area.”

I smirk and wipe the blood of Crawley’s men from my face – it’s already starting to dry – then glance at the elevator shaft. “I’ll be fine. Just blow it.”

There are a handful of men still down there, trapped and wounded, trying to get out. The stairway is blocked, electricity cutting off the elevator.

They’ll be entombed in the warehouse basement.

All of them stared at Stacey. All of them wanted her. But no one ever gets to have her – not even me.

I pull off my suit jacket and throw it to the side, then roll my sleeves up to my elbows with my blade still in hand. I unbutton my stained shirt as I walk through the car park and yank out the bullet lodged in my armoured vest.

That’ll leave a bruise. I already feel the sensitive skin and the ache on my side where it impacted.

I reach the car to find Barry sitting in the passenger seat. “I said to blow it.”

“As immortal as you seem to think you are, I’m not going to put your life in danger, sir.”

“I gave you an order.”

He sighs. “For your safety, I chose not to follow it.”

“You and Stacey are starting to annoy me with this talking-back shit.”

He chuckles and then taps on his phone screen, bringing up the app that connects all the explosives and triggers them. The flash comes first, and then the thunderous sound of the world blowing up nearly ruptures my eardrums. The ball of flame erupts like a volcano into the skies, and I smile at the artwork we created. I would have been in pieces if he had blown it when I said.

I announce to everyone, “Nice going, team. Pack up and get some rest.”

I turn to my assistant. “I need to complete a contract. You good to clean this up, head to your hotel and wait for word?”

Barry nods and climbs out, patting the front of the car.

I look at what was once a warehouse filled with a gang, now obliterated and filled with dead, incinerated bodies.

If Bernadette finds out I eradicated an entire MC, she’ll flip. I can’t be fucked with that. I’ll need to lie and tell her we had an altercation and they threatened to out us, so I simply had to blow them up.

It was unavoidable. A travesty. A huge shame.

Maybe people will learn not to mess with my things.