Conviction: Devine (25 page)

“Thank you.” Unzipping the bag, I took the shotgun and ammo out before I kicked the bag towards Adam to take a piece.

Katie nodded as she pulled both guns out of the back of her jeans and clicked the safety off. “This is Jarred and Mark.” Both her men nodded civilly as they loaded up their own guns.

“What’s going on?”

“We’re in there with you,” she stated casually.

“What? Why?”

She glanced at me. Katie Fox was known for her lack of empathy. She took after her father in many ways but it was her hunger for blood and carnage that saw her ruling South London. She’d been my neighbour for a couple of years and her allegiance right then meant more to me than anything else in the underworld. “Because we’re friends.” She locked my gaze as she ran the tip of her tongue across her blade then shivered as she swallowed her own blood. “And also because your wife has a hot ass.”

I couldn’t help but laugh, even though my heart was dying and my soul was raging for a fight, I had to agree with the little Hells Angel beside me. “Then let’s go save that hot piece of ass.”

She grinned at me. “Lead the way.”

I nodded and pulled in a deep breath. “By the way,” I spoke to them all as we quietly made our way up to the house. “Keegan is mine.”

“You need to concentrate on Isla,” Adam said.

I stopped and turned to him, my eyes narrow as the twist in my gut started and my veins stretched with the rush of blood when the rampant beat of my heart alerted me to the wrath taking over. “You save him for me Adam.”

“I think you might have someone else to worry about,” Carrie said in a hushed voice.

I glanced at her. She tipped her head to the car at the rear of the house as we moved round the back.

The wrath that had slowly trickled in surged at a velocity I struggled to control when my eyes landed on the silver Merc. In the many years I’d been in this business, the darkness inside me had been what had got me through, but when I spotted my father’s car, it possessed me with an intensity I knew I could never come back from.

“He’s mine.”

They all turned to look at me when the tone of my voice reflected the hatred taking over.

“Carrie,” Adam ordered when he realised I’d lost it and succumbed to the rage. “You take Genesis.” She nodded. “Joel, you get Isla out and Keegan’s mine.” Everyone nodded. “And Katie, if you could take anyone else and just have our backs.” Katie nodded.

I moved forward, my soul hunting for its mate and my heart trying to hear the beat of its twin. I didn’t see anything through the white mist that had descended, only bloodshed and a deep hunger for pain and destruction.

I was calm when I kicked the back door in. I was calm as I took out the men sat waiting for us. I was calm as I put a bullet through every single head on my way through the house. I was calm as I searched each and every room.

However, when I opened the door to the final room and found my father stood over my dead wife, the calmness slipped away and the crazy slipped in.

“I
SLA.”

My eyes opened as his smooth voice filtered in to my dreams. “Seb?”

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

“Aren’t I?”

Shaking his head, he slipped his hand into mine. “Not yet, sis.”

Another hand slipped into my other. “You need to go home, honey.”

Turning at the sound of my mother’s voice, I shook my head and reached out to touch her beautiful face. “But I don’t want to. I want to stay here with you.”

“No you don’t,” she whispered as her clear, seeing eyes roamed my face. “Henry and Jake need you. Seb and
I
have each other. We’re happy. We need you to be.”

“But I miss you.”

“We’re always with you,” Seb whispered as he kissed my head. “But right now you need to open your eyes and fight.”

I frowned. “But my eyes are open.”

“No, honey,” my mum said. “No they’re not. Open your eyes, Isla. Open them. Open them . . .”

“Open your eyes . . .”

My eyes snapped open when I heard Kris desperately pleading with me. “Isla . . .”

The pain that wrenched my stomach blurred my vision but I was numb to it all when I focussed on the hell before me.

The room was dark, the light subdued by just another simple lamp but still providing enough for me to make out the silhouettes. Kris was laid at the side of me, his pale face telling of his own pain as his hands pushed into my stomach. Looking down I frowned, wondering what he was doing but then I looked up again, the room swimming before me.

Ted Michaelson stood grinning at Jake as he held a gun to Jake’s chest. The shotgun in Jake’s hand was low by his side as he regarded his father with dead eyes. I could see the rage in him, the fury an actual entity that had seized my husband and refused to let go. I could see it drowning him, his own soul haunting him.

“You never had any patience,” Ted said with a chuckle. “Even as a child you had to rush in, all guns blazing, burying yourself before you’d even fought.”

Jake remained silent, his blank expression making me wonder if he was actually listening. “Help him,” I whimpered through the pain to Kris. “Jake needs you.”

“Shush, Isla.”

A cold sweat covered me when Ted thrust the gun harder into Jake. “You were always a selfish little bastard too. Although I’ll admit you get that from me.” He laughed. “You should be grateful that you never got any of her genes.”

“Hers?” Jake finally spoke but the tone in his voice surprised me. It was dull and void of any emotion. I’d never once seen him this way. Before when he welcomed his fury, he used it to feed the fight in him but now, it was as though he didn’t care, that whatever happened he just wasn’t bothered.

“Your simpleton mother,” Ted hissed nastily.

Jake’s eyes finally glinted and he turned slowly to look at his father. “Simpleton?”

Ted curled his lip and shivered. “Stupid bitch tried to kill herself. The docs said she was depressed.” He blew out a disgusted breath. “She wasn’t depressed, just fucking lazy.”

“Lazy?”

Ted nodded and rolled his eyes. “They blamed you, of course. Well actually, so did I. She was never right after she had you.”

“Me?”

“Mmm,” Ted mumbled as he started to reminisce, his mind taking him back long ago. “She tried to top herself when you were four months old. Didn’t quite make a decent job of it, fucked up her brain but unfortunately, she didn’t fuck up her lungs.”

“Her brain?”

My heart beat hard as I watched the fog seep into Jake’s eyes, his gaze cool but I could see it. I always saw it. The sin in his soul. The malice in his heart. The debauchery that ran in his veins.

“Kris,” I warned when I shivered against the ice radiating from my husband.

“Close your eyes, baby,” Kris whispered urgently.

I couldn’t close my eyes, they wouldn’t allow me to. I lay on the floor beside my best friend as I witnessed exactly who my husband was.

“Her sick fucking dead brain.” Ted Michaelson spat his last words as his son’s hand snapped to his neck and his fingers tore out his throat in one swift move.

I watched in shocked amazement as Jake opened his fist and dropped Ted’s throat on the floor. For the longest moment, Ted stood wide-eyed, staring at Jake as he started to gurgle. His hand slowly moved to his throat as his knees buckled and he dropped to the floor.

Jake bent down, picked up Ted’s gun and pointed it at his own head.

Then he closed his eyes and pressed the trigger.

I
WAS NUMB. THE
world around me, dead.

I watched my father fall at my feet.

Did I deserve this pain that blackened my heart? Had my life been leading to this one moment? The moment when everything inside me died.

I knew I wasn’t a good man, I’d never claimed to be. Yet as I stood, alone and bitter, watching my father take his last breath, I knew my life was nothing without Isla. I didn’t want to breathe anymore. I didn’t want to feel my heart beat in my chest. I didn’t want to feel this pain that fractured my soul and crushed me from the inside out.

I was numb. The world around me, dead.

The light in my father’s eyes went out and his face softened when peace found him. I wanted that. I wanted to end the despair that clawed up my throat and tore me apart on its route.

She was dead. My beautiful wife had left me. She’d promised she would never leave me. I swore she would never be free of me, and I intended to keep that promise.

I bent and picked up the gun that my father had dropped, deeming it fit that it would be a bullet intended for me that took the beat from my heart and the pain from my soul.

I was numb. The world around me, dead.

Nirvana called to me, the abyss promising freedom from the agony massacring me. This world didn’t belong to me. It belonged to beautiful people, not people who hungered for slaughter and destruction.

I pressed the tip of the gun to my temple. I closed my eyes to Isla’s beautiful smile calling me home.

And I pressed the trigger.

I flew backwards as I fired, my back hitting the wall with so much force I was sure each of my vertebrae snapped and broke in sequence, like a wall of dominoes going down in a line. The air gushed from my lungs as a scream echoed around me.

“No, no, no.”

I snapped my eyes open at the sound of Isla’s voice. She was crawling along the floor, her legs dragging behind her as she pulled herself along with her hands. Her face was pale and full of pain.

Hell wasn’t quite what I had expected.

I tipped my head and watched as she dragged herself further, a thick line of blood smeared across the concrete in her wake.

“Isla?”

“Jake!” she cried. “Phone an ambulance.” When I frowned, she screamed at me. “NOW!”

I watched as she grabbed hold of Kris and pulled him into her lap. “No, no, no,” she sobbed. “No!” Her cries were so wretched that they seemed to sink inside me and tear at my heart, her distressed wails so passionate I felt her suffering as if it were my own.

“Help me!” she screamed as people rushed into the room.

I didn’t understand what was happening. This wasn’t how hell was supposed to be.