Page 2 of Fight for You
The sound of boots scrambled down the stairs from the hallways in the house. Bratva enforcers moved around our display through the double doors and exited into the night.Oh,no.Oh,no. My quest for freedom had condemned an innocent. Why had I asked for help?
As another man squeezed past us and through the front door, Aleksandr shouted an order in Russian. Then his soulless eyes latched onto mine again. “Jordyn, I’m familiar with that car. An Aston Martin. Seems you’ve higher standards than you let on when moving into the chef’s quarters.” Aleksandr’s mouth shoved into a vicious smile as one hand gripped the doorframe to help support him. He lifted his foot again, and when it came down against my temple, I prayed for the only form of freedom guaranteed in this life.
Death.
And he didn’t relent. The attack just kept on coming.
To survive,I blocked out the pain of his kicks to my stomach and chest. Curling into a ball was partly a reflex from the pain and loss of breath, partly for protection learned from my uncountable beatings. I let rage for someone else fill my thoughts.
I saw an image of a bony little white boy. His legs trembled like a leaf every time our captor visited us in the basement. We weren’t the only children locked up. Unfortunately, our captor paired mewith a child whose thick Scottish brogue made communication difficult.
Whenever my captor picked me instead of the thin boy, Jamie grabbed my hand in a rescue attempt. The strength and passion he’d shown in those moments convinced naive, five-year-old me to believe in Jamie MacKenzie.I loved him.
Jamie had always said, “We’ll get out of this place together, JorJor. My clan will save us. Clan MacKenz?—”
With each of Aleksandr’s hits, my wrath for Jamie MacKenzie grew. My hatred for him surpassed every strike. Kick. Slap. Clan MacKenzie saved him. Not me or the other children. Him and only him. Their blood. Now, I loathed him and his entire MacKenzie clan. A final, barefooted kick met my temple and made the pain disappear.
2
LONG BEACH
Jamie
“You are mywean,Jamie! My child! How dare you walk away from me? I’m your mam! YOUR MOTHER!”
Annoyed at the shouts, I pulled my long blond hair up to keep it from teasing my tensed jaw as I strolled out of Big Brody’s office. My father’s office. But I no longer referred to the lad as such.Lad. I chuckled. I wanted nothing to do with Clan MacKenzie.
“Do not walk away, son!” Big Brody’s voice quivered with rage.Good. He was usually the easy-going one. Probably wouldn’t have torn the world apart to find his six-year-old. Not like my mother.
“Be back the day after …” I gripped both door handles and allowed in the fresh light of day. “… Never.”
On the front porch, I turned around. Man, it slipped my mind how into the holidays my mother got, and it appeared she hadn’t spared any expense for the Fourth of July celebration tonight. My parents and brothers looked like the quintessential American family amid the Independence Day flags and a red, white, and blue wreath my mother had put up for the holiday. Yep. The GoodAmerican Family. They weren’t. They ran one of the most successful criminal enterprises on the West Coast.
I took one last long look at my family.Oohh.That’s who was missing. Camdyn MacKenzie. We shared the titles of the middle son … until I had given up on my clan. The MacKenzies must’ve excluded Cam. Perhaps to keep him from the guilt ofnotbeing taken as a child when clan enemies abducted me from that park around the corner. In a voice relieved of all emotion, I muttered, “Thank you all for the intervention. I’ll keep everything you all have said in mind.” My hands lifted in a salute, a last farewell to the whole lot of them.
At his father’s side, Little Brody’s face reddened, the vein in his forehead pulsing.Littlewas a name those MacKenzies gave their son for some reason or another because only God knew if that bear of a man was ever so tiny. There were six ofthem. Seven, if you counted me. Smack dab in the middle. Son four. Little Brody, Leith, Camdyn, me, Lachlan, Rory, and Baby Jake, now twenty-three, I believe, and already had an advanced degree behind his name.
With a swagger, I descended the steps, putting distance between me and the MacKenzies and the trellises I’d once longed to use as my escape from their suffocating grip. I hadn’t asked them to save me. I hadn’t asked for much from the people I no longer knew. Seven days in captivity—an entire week. Why hadn’t it wiped away six years ofthem? I was about the age Baby Jake was now when I decided enough was enough.
As I removed the key fob to my Gladiator truck, the Hydro Blue Pearl paint gleaming in the sunlight, footsteps approached from behind. A hand gripped my shoulder. I pivoted. Muscle memory sent the other man—whom some would call my second oldest brother, Leith—stumbling back a few paces when my hands slammed his chest. “Don’t touch me,lad.” I made a joke of their dialect.
“Lad?” Leith scoffed, scrubbing a hand through his blond crew cut. “Okay, I get it. You’re not Scottish anymore. You’re just some random American.”
“Yep. It’s rather simple, really. Did you come out to discuss that? I thought I made myself clear when I walked out of their house. And”—my head tilted—“when I stood from that rollaway chair in your father’s office and sent it crashing through the French doors. Yeah, that just about sums it up?”
I should’ve walked away. But Leith might be the only MacKenzie boy I still loved. I wanted to love Jake, but who could love a shrink? Baby Jake hadn’t even started his supervised clinical hours and already seemed annoying. Therapists got in your head too much. Besides, out of my older brothers, Leith never condoned the weapons and drug trafficking. He wasn’t so … bad.
As if he sensed it, too, Leith took a step forward. A muscle worked under his jaw. “Listen, I won’t say you’re breaking Mam’s heart.”
“Nan, you mean?” I referred to the woman by the name most everyone in Southern California called her. Most everyone who wasn’t on her hit list. When Nan MacKenzie wasn’t the matriarch of the Scottish mob, she baked delicious cookies.
That muscle jumped again. Leith put his hands together, breathing deeply. “We aren’t your enemy. Even though you disappeared for the last seven years. Almost a decade! The same blood running through my veins is?—”
“I wish …” I stepped close enough for my nose to press down against Leith. Yes, I’d grown much taller and loved it. At six seven—and now two hundred twenty pounds of raw muscle thanks to my seven-year career as a Marine, eventually becoming a Raider—I no longer felt like a reed blowing in the wind. Because of my time in the military, my presence dominated any space I occupied. “I once wished I were never born. After Uncle Nolan rescued me when I was six, I was this weak thing, not even human. A clingy parasite not fit for life.”
“That’s not how anyone saw?—”
“ ‘Make sure Jamie takes his pills.’ ‘Make sure the boy uses his breathing techniques.’ ‘Little Brody, if you’re gonna watch people hump on the telly and Jamie’s home, don’t do it in the den. Do it in your room, son.’ ” I mimicked Mam as best as I could with a much deeper baritone. “Your mother admonished Brody about his viewing choices when I was fourteen, I believe. I’d trembled while standing in the archway to the den. She’d just skinned tatties for bangers and mash. Little Brody had some R-rated movie on. I suppose other fourteen-year-olds hid magazines under their bed while I couldn’t move, except for how my entire body trembled uncontrollably.” A laugh barked from my tensed lips.
