Page 63 of Viking

“H-help me.” He reaches out a hand.

“I am helping you.” I step closer, leaning into his face and forcing him to look at me, the way he always did when I was strapped to the bed. “I’m not giving you to Viking. Your death is all mine, and you should know that if hell is my fate for erasing a sick fuck like you from the earth, I’ll meet you there, because I can’t wait to do this all again.”

I drive the knife into his flesh again, this time my jabs are unrelenting. I’ll happily hand my soul over to the devil if it means Prophet Ulf is wiped clean from the earth.

The scent of copper, raw meat, and his putrid bowels fill my nostrils, but I jab again and again, unable to stop. My hands slip on the bloody knife, my fingers sliding from the hilt and encircling the blade as I stab.

“Arie! Stop!” Viking pulls me away, the knife clattering to the ground. I lean into his embrace. “He’s dead, babe. He’s dead.”

I can’t breathe. My body goes through the motions, but no air moves in or out. My vision blackens and I can vaguely hear the sounds of gunfire close by. Meatball and the others have finally joined us inside and he’s screaming to Viking that we need to move.

“You good, sweetheart?” Wolf asks, his face cutting through the blackness around the edges of my vision. “Vike, we’re losing her.”

The ground goes out from under me as I’m hoisted into Vikings arms. Over his shoulder, the two dead figures of the Mother and Prophet Ulf lay motionless. Pools of dark blood spreading out around them. The door at the end of the room bursts open and more guards, armed to the teeth, filter in. Several of the Brothers fall to their knees in front of their dead Prophet, but the Mother is all but ignored.

“Get her outta here,” Wolf shouts. “We’ll cover you.”

He and Meatball aim their guns and a shower of bullets tear through the Elders and guards. Bile roils in my stomach as I’m jostled down the sacred pathway in Viking’s arms. Outside, there is more gunfire, more screaming, and more death. The island is being torn apart. My home is now a battlefield. People are dying all because I ran from my marriage to the Prophet. I ran from my responsibility, right into the arms of a killer. But as violent as he and the Knights might be, as brutal as their lifestyle is, I would take a thousand bikers over the brutality of life on this Island any day.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Viking

“You still with me?”I ask as I run toward the vans with my woman in my arms.

“I k-k-killed him. K-k-killed the M-m-mother.” Her teeth are chattering, her skin ice cold.

“You did good, darlin’.”

She shakes her head, but her violent trembling almost swallows the gesture. “G-g-going to h-h-hell.”

“Then we’ll go together, dance in that fucker’s blood and piss on his charred remains.”

Her body goes lax in my arms, and I dart through the underbrush as my brothers follow. We leave the village center and round the front of the van, but I stop dead in my tracks.Fuck. The causeway is rising. If we don’t leave soon, there will be no way off this fucking island until it reopens, unless we want to brave the goddamned sea. Arie was so beaten and battered from tossing against the rocks when I found her that our chances of making it with everyone in tow are slim to none, not to mention these ‘Children of the Moon’ bitches can’t swim. The fucker’s never taught them in case they got in it their heads to fling themselves into the sea to escape. At least the ocean wouldn’t rape them.

“Oh shit,” Wolf says.

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