Page 2 of To Claim A King
My already roiling stomach sloshed a fiery wave of acid. My number was up. Years of planning, executing, and administering revenge had now come to a head. The media had discovered my actions, and it was just a matter of time before they discovered me.
Mutilation Mistress. The shock of the news announcement over the radio was still present, even in theaftermath of our severed head cleanup. The clever title underscored the many women and children I’d saved from cycles of abuse. I circumvented the useless justice system that protected so few by removing the predator’s weapon and destroying their pride. Caught or not, I would apologize to no one.
Care and concern morphed into irritation when three flashing dots showed up on my screen. At the warehouse.
Fury flooded into the hollow marrow of my bones at the realization they were blatantly ignoring my many calls and messages, sitting inmyshelter while I panic spiraled from my world collapsing around me.
Joey brandished her gun beside me as the elevator doors slid open, on her guard as I stalked through the concrete underground with a renewed vengeance in my heart.
“Mother fuckers,” I growled as Joey ushered me forward and I tossed my phone into the waiting front seat of one of my newer, less noticeable vehicles—a simple black Audi Q8. “I hope you have extra ammo in this vehicle, Joey, because we have three men to kill.”
I only half meant it.
I’d seen the bargain basement dregs of humanity as a con man, but I’d never watched a man bleed out in front of me.
A thick layer of the red sticky stuff surrounded me; on the floor, on the smock the Doc had made me wear before she’d had us load Aaron on the hospital bed she’d stolen from God knows where. So deep beneath my fingernails, a thousand showers probably wouldn’t take it away.
I conned a high-profile surgeon once—a secret baddie who’d dabbled in some French gambling ring. Luckily, I’d held onto some of that medical training. Unluckily, that meant I was the man to help the Doc with the bleeding wounds all over myColombian’s body.
Tan men weren’t meant to look like ghosts, not like the pasty skin of my Gaelic blood. I swallowed the swirl of panic back into my guts as he lay in front of me. The whisper of breath and the chirp of the heart monitor she’d left behind were the only real confirmation Aaron was still alive.
Nothing left to do but wait and hope something with more power in the universe would show us some mercy.
Worth a shot.
I sat down on the hard office chair beside the bed and put my hands together in prayer.
If you’re there, gods or goddesses, please don’t let this stubborn, sexy, scary-as-fuck man die. Please allow him many more years of flaying and fucking, if anything, to keep our little family of misfits together.
How did you end a prayer again? Ahh, right.
Amen.
I wasn’t a religious man—wasn’t even sure I believed in God in the traditional sense. If there was a God, he would be she, and she would be an all-knowing, all-seeing woman like myEpona, not a surly man in the sky like a more impressive version of my Conan.
Still, when the world was going to shit and your Colombian crush lay on the table like a barely there cadaver, saying a prayer to the Sky Daddy certainly couldn’t hurt.
He was more than a Colombian crush. He was a good man with a shyte family who needed us as much as we needed him. Well, he probably needed Blondie more than he needed any of us, but he wasn’t going to have her, if he let himself drift off to the mafia version of the afterlife tonight.
If Aaron died today, a piece of Blondie would die too, and then Kellan would lose the tiny amount of hope he had that wasn’t scrawled in ink across his knuckles. And I… well, I’d have nowhere to go.
The realization hit me like an anvil over the head, like I was Wile E. Coyote in the children’s cartoon. Without this group of fuckery… what did I have?
I still didn’t have a solution for The Six—not without Aaron’s forger at least, and I wasn’t rushing back into the arms of my opportunistic Mumsy. Never had, really. And now she was salivating for a coup with my head on the chopping block, not ever. My friends in Dublin didn’t have a clue who the ‘real’ me was.
Without these three, I was just a lonely wandering conman with a decent bank account and a grand car.
Scratch that. My car was long gone, abandoned in Club 7’s parking lot. I’d shed a tear for my lost baby when our whole day had gone arseways, before I shed more tears for my Roboto on the makeshift operating table.
I carefully wiped my clammy hands on the cotton of the hospital blanket the doc had brought with her and draped over Mr. Roboto’s sleeping form.
Aaron Rodriguez was a scary, stubborn sap with a bleeding heart and a bunch of bleeding orifices. Doc had given him a transfusion and patched him up as best she could, but he’d lost too much blood, and he had to make it through the night. Only three hours had gone by, but it felt like an eternity.
Doc had said the incisionjustmissed Aaron’s liver and his stomach, by a millimeter on both sides, at most. I don’t know what we did to deserve that miracle, but a word of thanks could probably get me in the Almighty Creator's good books.
We were in what was supposed to be an office. A barren desk with two chairs had been pushed into the corner to make room for the hospital bed and monitors Kellan’s contact had brought with them. The rest of the room was empty—nothing on the walls, no lighting but the crappy fluorescent tubes overhead. I had no idea what Blondie wasplanning for this place, but it wasn’t cushy or expensive like any of her other spaces.
Kellan was confident it was the safest place for us. State-of-the-art security, planned for things like this, blah-blah-blah. Hadn’t been paying much attention to him with a bloody body in the backseat, but I trusted him. And I most definitely trusted Hillary’s security measures. Her condo was a feckin’ fortress.
