I laid back in Wave’s yard with my face toward the sun and my hands wrapped around my growing bump. The weather was glorious, and I felt strangely at peace.
Lila was at my feet making daisy chains for her unicorn and Ben was off somewhere being a man, or so he kept telling me.
“She looks alright,” Malia whispered back.
“Aren’t you worried about her?” Gears whispered, joining in, and I knew my friends thought I was asleep.
I wasn’t, but I’d give them time to get it out of their systems.
“No,” Gigi replied. “She’s content.”
Gigi was right, I was.
When I slept at the club in Beckett’s bed it was a kind of foreboding, it was his way of telling me he was still with me. That dream was a sign from above that still had us connected and it came just when I needed it, when I was losing faith.
“Daisy,” I murmured to the sun above.
“What was that, honey?” Angel wasn’t fooled by my pretend snooze, she’d been paying attention and knew that I was more relaxed, calmer and taking it in my stride.
I looked back down at Lila, squinting from the brightness of the sun. “Shall we call this bubba Daisy if it’s a girl?”
“Is it a princess?” Lila looked up briefly, her tongue poised in concentration as she poked the stem of one daisy through a hole in another and threaded them together. “Yes. Daisy is a princess name.”
“I agree, we need another princess to come and live with us.”
Ben appeared from the kitchen balancing a soda can and a football looking very unimpressed with our conversation. “Uncle Beckett needs to come home, all this girl stuff is a pain. Can’t we have a boy to wrestle with and throw a ball?”
“He’ll be home soon enough.” I smiled. “And you can fight, wrestle and throw a ball with him.”
Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at me. “What?”
“Uh, babe,” Wolf butted in, “do you think it’s wise to get the kid’s hopes up?” His words were gentle.
“He’s coming back.” I was defiant.
Angel put a hand on mine. “Sure he is, and Daisy is a beautiful name.” I saw her glare at her husband. “Let’s just hope he’s home for the big day.”
“If he isn’t, we’ll be waiting, although…” I paused, “would you come with me, you know as a birth partner?”
I watched as the hard-faced, tough, sassy, kick-ass mother hen to biker brothers, swallowed a lump in her throat. “It would be an absolute honor.”
Smiling, I looked away quickly, I might be at peace with Beckett not being here at the moment, but that didn’t mean to say my hormone levels were emotionally stable. “Malia, it’d be good if you were there too, your bond with her dad is important.”
“Her? Thought we were having a boy?”
“Just got a feeling.” I shrugged.
Wave then knocked back a healthy slug of his beer. “Yeah, because this family needs more kick-ass women.”
Malia elbowed him. “Shut it, you, and Flick, you just try to stop me.”
That was sorted then, if my man was still away doing his thing, I had the next best thing, his family.
Wolf’s cell rang in his pocket, when he pulled it out, he shrugged before hitting a button and putting it to his ear. “Yeah?”
The confusion dropped immediately before he stood up and stalked off leaving everyone with the same question that no one wanted to ask. If they needed to know, he’d share.
After twenty minutes he reappeared. “Flick, sweetheart, you got a minute inside?”
Angel looked ready to throw herself in front of a train to stop that conversation from happening. “Whatever it is, can we remember that her condition should be stress free?”
Wolf looked at her. “What do you take me for?”
“You’ve never had a human sucking the lifeblood out of you, so just thought I’d remind you that any more aggravation isn’t good.”
“Plenty of humans suck the lifeblood out of me on a daily basis,” he sighed.
“Are we talking about past girlfriends-slash-bitches? Because just to say that kind of talk could aggravate me and send my blood pressure far higher than Flick’s.”
“Jesus fucking Christ!”
Lila gasped and then sing-songed, “Uncle Wolf said a bad word,” from her static jewelry making position.
“You’re right I did, that’s probably why your Uncle Beckett needs another boy in the house, to even up this kind of thing. Lila, love, sorry for my potty mouth, but when you get old enough for a boyfriend, give him a break, yeah. Don’t bust his chops over nonsense.”
I laughed; Wolf was a saint at appeasing women. “As amusing as this is, did you want to talk to me?”
He nodded. “Want a hand out of that chair?” When Wolf stuck his hand out, I grabbed it and let him pull me up like I weighed nothing, and like the true gentleman he was, he kept hold of my hand as I walked up and down the decking, and over the back stoop into Wave’s kitchen. He was about to start when the rest of the women piled into the room with us. “Don’t need an audience.”
“She might need—”
Wolf cut off Malia’s maudlin train of thought. “He rang.”
“He what?” she screeched back.
“Shadow just checked in, knew it was a possibility he might at some point.”
“And he rang you?” Gigi asked.
Wolf nodded.
“Why didn’t he ring Flick?” his wife asked quietly, not wanting to upset me.
“It’s okay.” I reassured her. “It’s just good to know he’s safe even though I knew he was.”
“But don’t you want to talk to him?” Malia still wasn’t convinced about my mental state and how I was handling all of this.
“Enough!” Wolf used his presidential voice, and it worked on the old ladies as much as the brothers. “You want these hecklers here, fine, but quit with the commentary.”
They all shut up.
“He didn’t want to talk to you because he isn’t done yet. He needs to concentrate, and I reckon hearing your voice will put a dent in that. But… but,” he hesitated and ran a hand through his hair. “He’s happy, fuck, not happy, over the fucking moon about the baby and working on coming home for good, he just needs you to hang in there with him a little longer.”
“Wait, what? Where is he?” Gigi asked and by now, Wave and Gears were also in the small kitchen with us.
“On a job,” Wolf told her.
“What kind of job?” Angel asked, and it didn’t take a genius to see that her husband was losing his cool with this circus.
“Just a fucking job, and didn’t we agree you were here in an observation capacity?”
“I didn’t agree to that,” she barked back.
His head shot round to her and he pinned her with a look that said if she so much as squeaked at the moment, he’d deal with her later.
Malia walked into the middle of the floor space. “Wait a minute, how does he know about the baby?”
This time, Wolf looked at me and I returned that look, finally catching on. “I wasn’t dreaming, was I?”
Slowly, he shook his head. “No, babe.” That was when I felt my knees knock like they were struggling to do their job of holding me upright.
“Someone needs to tell me what’s going on?” Malia huffed again as Angel reached for me.
“He’s on home soil,” she whispered, “and he came to see you.”
“I’m so confused, I just can’t keep up,” Gigi whined.
I looked down at my bump, water filling my eyes. “I knew it was real. You hear that, Daisy? Daddy knows about you and he’s coming home to us soon.”
“You okay, Flick?” Wolf came and stood with his wife, waiting for me to collapse and crumble to the ground.
But I didn’t, I snapped out of my happy moment and smiled at him. “Never better, it’s nearly over.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Shadow
She was p
regnant!
My girl was having my baby.
My fucking girl was having our baby and I’d missed out on all of it so far, all because of this bullshit job and knowing that this, only solidified my plans.
People were going to fucking pay.
I didn’t just want to kick myself, I wanted to kill people, burn them, annihilate them all from taking this away from me. I only went back to the clubhouse because I needed somewhere safe to crash while I planned the final stage of my exit from the firm. I could have gone home, but I knew if I saw Flick or the kids, I’d have talked myself out of doing the rest of what needed to be done.
But… yeah… I was gonna be a dad and that thought was slaying the black infested creature inside me, slice by joyous slice.
Getting Poppy out had been tough, I can only say that some god somewhere must have wanted me to do it, like I was finally useful for something or someone, for once, because we got ourselves into some scrapes and managed to get ourselves through them and out the other side. Thank fuck that girl could use a weapon. I might have been a silent assassin, working in the shadows, but no Arab expected a female to have the skills she had; and we made the most of that. We crossed the border high up in the mountains on foot, and after giving her the details of my contact, I dropped her a rail station and watched her walk away.
I made it feel like a clean break, but at least I’d made some plans for her, she needed all the help she could get because she’d have the same demons to fight as me. It was because of that, that I’d decided to see this through, right to the bitter fucking end. The shit that she’d been through, she never signed up for that. The advert never said, ‘join the agency, we’ll sell you as an ISIS bride to be fucked and battered until we don’t need your services anymore.’ The way I saw it, I had two choices; carry out my mission, kill her and disappear into the darkness forever, I could take her back to America and risk my family, and if I did that she was dead anyway. Poppy simply knew too much. She was a threat to some serious people and blowing open that whole ugly world we’d been sucked into was probably a threat too far.
Faking Poppy’s death was my third option and the one I could live with. Option number four I’d created when I realized what she’d been through and I only prayed it would help both of us see many, many days to come.
My final task and plan was to get out of it for good, I was going to kill the man behind the program.
I was going to cut the snake off at the head and put a virus in the machine.
I was going to leave all of my evidence with the people I trusted, and if my handler didn’t believe I’d blow the lot wide open, he was deluded. I’d give it to so many people, advising them to expose it all in the event of my demise at the hands of the government, that they’d never be able to keep a lid on it. Killing the man who’d dragged me in and progressed to the very top of the agency’s food chain would be the start of my new life, then and only then would I go back to my family.
I spent two weeks following him around, and I slotted straight back into it with ease. I was the gray man once again. This was how they’d trained us initially, if we could tail people from the agency undetected, we’d passed. Simple as that.
Stanley Markham was never going to pay attention to someone like me, I’d gone from looking like an insurgent to the quick and easy transformation of homeless guy. I sat outside the non-descript agency building and tagged his car, and then quickly changed up my disguise and went to his house. After a few nights, I figured out his routine never altered.
Sloppy.
Lazy.
The man was too complacent, and his attitude was born out of his field of power. He thought that he was untouchable, and it would be his undoing. When I’d got his daily routine down, I then began to stake out his home. I needed to know absolutely everything. Did he have staff that came and went? Were his neighbors inquisitive? Did family visit him? And when I was certain of all of that, I scoped out his house and its layout. His level of arrogance meant he had little security, no cameras, just a simple alarm system that any fifteen-year-old could bypass with an app and some link wire. What I was about to do, and the ease of the circumstances shouldn’t have made me smile, but they did.
This was one kill I could justify.
My first and I felt at ease with it.
I’d waited until the moonlight was covered by cloud, and just because he wasn’t prepared for intruders, didn’t mean that I hadn’t double checked and triple checked everything.
Before he set his alarm for bed, I broke into the house and waited in his coat closet. Using the tiniest of scopes under the crack of the door, I watched as he closed down the house for the night. I got ready to sneak out. In true shadow-like form, I edged cautiously up the stairs, the only light visible was that of a lamp casting a glow, helping me to see under his bedroom door.
I picked my spot in the hallway and knocked over an ornament on the table before moving to the room adjacent to his bedroom and waiting. The hallway was suddenly bathed in light as the door flew open and I heard his rubber-soled slippers drag across the wooden floor, I even felt the breeze from his movement as it disturbed the air. When he bent down to pick up the porcelain figure of a cowboy riding a bucking bronco, I shadowed my way into his room, breathing deep and assuredly to keep my head during the adrenaline rush that coursed through my body. Not fear, it wasn’t something I ever felt, but excitement; this was pure excitement, reminding me that the job had just begun.
Carefully, I reached into my pocket and removed my taser, beating back the need to press the button and test it. The crackle and fizz of it would be too loud, it would disturb the silence.
The minute old man Markham closed the door, I stepped out of the shadows and extended my arm. The slightest pressure on the taser took him down, but I was hesitant with just how much of a jolt I gave him, I didn’t want him unconscious yet. While he only writhed, trying to coordinate his limbs enough to move, I pulled my surgical gloves from my other pocket and put them on. The noise of the latex snapping caused his eyes to become more alert, and I saw the fear in them. Pushing the gloves into place, smoothing them down between my fingers, he realized what was coming, and finally, I could smell his fear.
I didn’t just enjoy it, I relished in it.
This was his time for torture.
“This is your reckoning, Sir,” I added sarcastically. “You will never sentence anyone else to death. You will never cause pain and suffering again.”
Markham moaned, his mouth drooping like he’d had a stroke.
“I will not let you take the rest of my life. I will not let what you have turned me into, consume me. You’ve had my past; I will not let you take my future.”
Markham’s eyes widened and like I knew it would, the shock began to wear off. His foot twitched, giving him the strength to try for more, but before that could happen, I needed to end this.
“Shadow is dead. And now you will die with your program.”
I pulled the taser out again, passing it across his face, and pressed the prongs into his chest with a more decisive finger action than before. I pressed it like I was pulling the trigger of a gun, zapping him into complete unconsciousness.
Standing over my prey, I lorded the power I possessed in this very moment and felt a touch of mournful sorrow that this would be the last time I would feel this way. Reaching into my inside pocket, I produced the agency’s deadliest weapon; a lethal injection not on any market, not available to anyone but the agency, and completely undetectable. Any pathologist would only see the signs of a sudden heart attack, but in the case of the healthiest heart, it would do enough damage to the heart itself, the arteries, the main thoracic system that it would appear that they’d had a heart condition, that had just gone undiagnosed.
I connected the two intricate parts of the stainless-steel syringe and took the tiny vial of Markham’s own creation and drew it into the chamber. Leaning over the body, I pried his jaw open with my gloved fingers and pushe
d the needle in the gap in his back molars, just enough to deposit the poison into his system.
While I dismantled the syringe, his body convulsed, his torso moving like someone was conducting violent CPR.
The master assassinator would be my last kill, my final act.
I took his pulse to be sure and looked down at him, wondering if I waited for long enough would I see his soul get sucked down to hell. When I was sure he was dead, I grabbed his foot and dragged his body to the bathroom—the wooden floors made that task easy—and after pulling down his pajama bottoms, I hoisted him up onto the toilet. Looking at my watch, I waited for the inevitable bowel evacuation. The sound of thick liquid hitting the porcelain, signaling that this was nearly over.
This wasn’t just a kill for me, it was a message. Leaving Markham looking like he’d had a heart attack while taking a shit, was a classic cover up for what we’d really done when we’d killed someone. When important people were left on the toilet, no one talked about it, the police usually stayed quiet as a matter of respect because no one wanted important people to be remembered for dying on the toilet.
“You will be the last death on my shoulders.”
Finally, with my index finger, I gave Markham’s body the slightest poke on the shoulder and watched as he leaned like a tumbling tower and slumped against the wall.
I worked my way back through the house, checking the route I’d taken, making sure no trace of me was left, and it was just as I’d checked the coat closet that I spotted it.
A photograph.
The man I’d just killed in what I’d convinced myself was a mercy killing to save many more like me, was smiling and laughing surrounded by kids. The photo frame was ornate, stuck with bits of painted pasta and sticky hearts covered in glitter. Across the top the words someone had scribed the word ‘Grandad’ using what I imagined was their very best handwriting.
This frame was something Lila would spend hours making and with the very proudest of smiles, before handing it over to someone worthy of treasuring it. Someone like Flick.
Flick (The Black Sentinels MC Book 4) Page 21
