Page 127 of Beast

I reach for him and ram him into the wall, over and over and over again.

The force of his skull against the brickwork should kill him.

But it doesn’t.

The fucker is still breathing.

When he falls to the floor, I straddle him and start slamming my fist into his face. The bullet wound in my shoulder hurts like a bitch but I can barely feel it over the adrenaline coursing through me. Or the rage vibrating in every cell of my body.

That’s when the bar owner tries to intervene with a baseball bat, but I reach out and stop it mid swing.

“I suggest you leave while you can,” I say, yanking it from him and snapping the bat in two.

“I can’t let you do this,” he says.

So I grab him by the throat and send him out the plate glass window and onto the street.

He’s safer out there.

Because in here, I mean business.

I return my focus to Gaston. The man who dared put his hands on my wife.

“You should have walked away when I told you to,” I tell him as I smash my fist into his face again.

He looks up at me from swollen eyes and laughs. Because I’m the one wailing on him, but he’s the psychopath.

“This is where it ends.” I wrap my hand around his throat as the other one grabs a bottle of whisky from the floor.

“Do it,” he taunts, looking up at me and laughing. “Fucking do it.”

He thinks I’m going to hit him with it. But I have a better plan. One more suited to his level of depravity.

I throw the whiskey bottle, and it smashes into a million pieces against the wall, sending whiskey spraying across the floor and furniture like a geyser.

Reaching inside my cut for my lighter, I lean down so I am eye level with my brother, and I flick the flint so the flame glows between us.

His laughter stops when our eyes meet.

“You wouldn’t,” he says through his bloody and bruised lips.

“Watch me.”

I throw the lighter onto the spilled whiskey and it erupts.

Flames roar into the air and spread across the floor and up the wall.

I lean down so I can whisper into his ear. “This isn’t for all the evil shit you’ve done in your miserable life. This is because you touched her.”

There is a moment when the revenge you seek comes to you, and mine is in those few seconds when he looks up at me and I can see the fear in his eyes. He knows he is about to die. He knows he has lost.

The bar catches alight like a tinderbox, and within seconds, flames dance all around us. Liquor bottles catch alight and explode like fireworks, and I watch with a quickening in my chest as the flames grab onto everything.

Somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind, I acknowledge the owner had this coming too. We all know where Seamus Doyle got the money to open this bar. He might have set it right in his mind. But selling arms to street thugs so they can kill each other, as well as the innocent people who get caught in the crossfire, is always going to bring you karma from a higher power. When he comes crying to the club about it, I’ll remind him about the seven-year-old girl who was killed when she was caught in a shootout between The Psychos and another gang. Using the guns he put in their hands.

Then I’ll remind him about the girls of a questionable age he liked to ply with drinks before introducing them to his bedroom upstairs. That was until he did a short stint in prison for it. He’s only been out a matter of weeks. But given time, there is no doubt he’ll return to his old ways. Because that type of poison runs deep.

But right now he isn’t my concern.

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