by V Vee
“Who the fuck is this friend?” Brodie snarled.
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“Do you believe that the little boy, Charlene’s son, is yours?” Riley asked.
I groaned and glanced away, running my fingers through my hair again.
“I didn’t want to, but then I looked at him. Not at her. At him and…”
“Holy. Fuck,” Galvin breathed.
“Yeah.” I nodded.
“Drew, he looks just like you. Like you and AJ.”
I inclined my head again. “I know.”
“Fuck,” they all said simultaneously.
“Does Kyra know?” Brodie asked and I swung my gaze in his direction.
“Are you stupid?”
Before either one could say anything else, Carrick ran in through the open door, his eyes wide.
I jumped to my feet, already grabbing my gun.
“What happened?”
“There’s been a shooting over at Dr. Hierro’s office. Eddie and Heaven were there.”
I snarled and led the way out of the room. Eddie was one of mine and Heaven was one of Kyra’s. They were under our protection. Plus, Heaven was pregnant. Kyra would string me up by my balls if I let anything happen to her.
Yep. They definitely want to sit on my knife and eat my gun.
Chapter Four
Eddie
The Johns Hopkins Hospital
Baltimore, MD
“I don’t even know why we’re here,” Heaven groused, folding her arms across her chest, where she lay reclined in a hospital bed.
I cut my eyes over at her, knowing that her annoyance was simply her trying to mask the fear and anxiety she felt after being shot at.
I had to admit that I felt a bit of the same. Though I’d served in the Marines for over eight years, that was nothing compared to being shot at with my woman by my side, and my babies in her belly.
I’d never felt fear like that before.
I’d also never had such rage thrumming through my veins.
Some dumb fuck had taken a shot at my wife. My pregnant wife. I wanted to rip them apart, and barring them, I wanted to rant, rave, and destroy any and everything I could until the rage, fear, and anxiety rumbling through my body subsided. But I couldn’t do that, so I’d decided to focus on the one thing I could control. Getting Heaven checked out by the doctor to make sure she was okay.
“Because your blood pressure is no doubt elevated, and with you being pregnant with twins, that could cause problems for both you and the boys,” I explain, for the fifth time, to Heaven.
She nibbled on her bottom lip as she looked up at me.
“You think so?” She asked, fear causing her voice to wobble just a bit.
I hadn’t meant to scare or frighten her, but I did want to make sure she was aware of just how important it was that we get her seen by a doctor after what just happened. Not just to make sure the boys were okay, but for my own peace of mind. I needed to know she was alright before I went after the motherfuckers who had tried to kill us.
And I needed to go after them.
I’d originally thought it was only one person shooting at us outside of Dr. Hierro’s clinic, but as the gunfire continued, I was able to pinpoint the trajectories.
Two shooters.
Two different directions.
Two dead men walking.
I stopped planning all the ways I intended to track down the thugs who’d put my wife’s life in danger, and make them pay for their actions, when the doctor finally came into the room. I wasn’t sure why it seemed as if doctors, who only spent five to ten minutes with each patient, took so. Damn. Long to get to said patient. It was the nurses who spent the bulk of time with my wife, and they were the ones who did all the work, or at least it seemed that way to me.
Maybe I should hire a private nurse rather than a private doctor to look after Heaven.
“Hello, Mrs. Steele. I understand you were outside Dr. Hierro’s clinic when the shooting occurred?” The doctor, an older white man whose tone made him sound just a bit apathetic, asked as he stared down at the tablet in his hands.
“Um… yes, that’s correct,” Heaven answered, glancing up at me with a quirk of her eyebrows.
“I see. And were you hit by any shrapnel, debris, or bullets?”
“No. I wasn’t.”
“Hmm… so… what brought you here, exactly?”
“I’m sorry?” I frowned at the doctor’s question and shared a look with Heaven.
“What made you come in if you weren’t injured by the shooting in any way?” The doctor asked again, giving my wife what I could only describe as being a pathetic smile.
Gritting my teeth, I stepped forward, away from Heaven’s bed. Movement from me caused the doctor to finally look in my direction. His eyes widened and he swallowed loudly.
Yeah, that’s right you little bitch. She’s not here alone. She’s got me.
“I brought my wife in because she is pregnant with twins and wanted to be sure that the stress, anxiety, and emotional trauma of being involved in a drive-by shooting did not cause adverse effects on our children,” I stated firmly.
The doctor nodded quickly. “Yes, of course, Mr. Steele.”
I gave him a grim smile. “So you will make sure to give my wife a complete workup, correct? I’m sure my friend, Andrew McCarthy, will appreciate it.”
I watched with a sort of sick satisfaction when the doctor’s eyes widened and the pulse at the side of his neck began to beat rapidly.
I hadn’t been entirely on board when Logan had first shared with me that he’d joined Clan McCarthy, one of the deadliest and most dangerous Irish mobs in the country; especially not now that they’d joined with an underground all-female criminal organization. They were so badass that they didn’t even have a name. They didn’t need one. They weren’t the mob, or the mafia, or the Yakuza, or anything, they were just… women.
Which made them even scarier.
But as I watched the doctor stumble and stammer all over himself in order to explain why he’d spoken to my wife in such a way, I smirked. Being tied to Andrew McCarthy was definitely starting to have some major benefits.
But before I could settle into that truth, my phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out and saw there was a message from an unknown number. Dread curdled my stomach and I swallowed the acid which had risen in my throat. I looked over at Heaven who was looking up at me with a question in her eyes. Trying to reassure her, I simply gave her a gentle kiss to her forehead, before fixing the doctor with a stern gaze.
“I have to go check this message, you’re going to start checking my wife over, correct?” I continued without letting him respond. “Good. And I know you’re going to be respectful, not cause her any unnecessary pain, and you’re going to watch over her until I get back. Yes? Good.” I nodded, patting the older man on his shoulder, satisfied when the color left his cheeks before it rushed back in a surge of redness beneath his pale skin.
Yeah, Heaven would be okay for a moment. The doctor was too scared of Andrew to do anything to fuck us over.
Thoughts of the doctor’s submission fled my head almost immediately when I opened the message from the anonymous number. There was a video attached to the message, the still of which was an image of the numbers on the outside of a house. The same numbers on the outside of my home.
12154.
I growled at the caption sent with the message.
Who knew a darkie could be so… enthusiastic when they weren’t killing each other in the streets?
The racist words brought with them not only an inferno of rage, but also the slightest tingle of memory. I’d heard someone else say something to this effect. But who was it?
Knowing it was a mystery that would have to be solved later, I pushed play on the video, and after three seconds immediately turned it off, permanently, by throwing my phone across the waiting room so that it crashed and shattered into pieces against the wall
across from me.
The image of my wife’s naked body as she rode my cock in the privacy of our bedroom still blazed brightly in my mind’s eye, only serving to fuel my rage even more.
Someone had been recording us. Me. My wife.
I was going to rip this world apart to find the perpetrator.
Then I was going to bathe in their blood.
Chapter Five
Sig
-REDACTED-
Washington, DC
“Kiss him and say goodnight for me,” I say gruffly into the phone’s microphone as I stand out in an undisclosed location, in the middle of Washington, DC.
Sometimes the best place to hide is right in plain sight.
Sometimes that was the stupidest advice a person could take.
I was meeting up with a spy for a deep, dark agency whose information had been passed along to me by my employers. People in the country thought that the CIA, Black Ops, Navy Seals, were as dark and as secretive as a person could go, but only a few knew that those organizations were at least four degrees separated from the most secretive, darkest, deadliest, and most successful organization that existed. We took care of shit all over the world. We didn’t just handle terrorists, we eliminated threats, sometimes created chaos, sometimes solved it.
We basically controlled the world.
But there was something taking place, tension, unrest… danger, and we couldn’t handle it because we weren’t entirely sure where it was coming from. Who the source of it was. Or what their endgame was.
But this spook I was meeting with apparently knew more than most because of their ability to infiltrate various groups and gather information.
“I will,” Renata breathed into the phone, exhaustion evident in her husky, melodic voice.
I frowned, hearing how tired she was.
“Did you get a nap today?” I asked, hearing the growl in my voice. She knew she was supposed to sleep when she could. Between her health issues, the kids, the newborns… our house was full of love, laughter, noise, and general mayhem, but my Renata handled it like the boss she was. I’d never thought I would have the life with her that I did. Not after everything the two of us had been through. Not after the childhoods we’d endured, the upbringings we’d escaped from, the situations and circumstances we’d both barely managed to escape. I was forever thankful and grateful to have Renata in my life. Which was why I hovered. Why I was constantly worried that someone or something would try to take her from me.
I’d blow up the world before I let that happen. Renata and our children were my life.
“No. I was going to, but Mary got a call from her sister and she rushed out. So I had to handle making dinner, homework, bath time, bedtime, and the deliveries that came in.” She yawns on the phone and I’m tempted to say fuck it to this meeting and go see about my woman, to make her go to bed, but before I could finish running through the statistical data in my head and weighing the pros and cons, a small black car pulled up to the other side of the empty parking lot.
“Fuck,” I cursed.
Renata laughed and the sound caused my heart to shiver in my chest. Just as it always did. Just as it had the day we met. When I’d spent decades frozen, numb, not feeling anything, her laughter had broken the ice I’d been trapped in for so long.
“Go to work, my sexy Viking. I’ll be right here when you’re finished, and then you can put me to bed,” she told me, using that fucking sexy ass voice with a suggestive inflection at the end of her direction, that made my cock so hard I could crush my vehicle with it.
“You’re so going to get a spanking when I get home,” I tell her as I push away from my automobile and head towards the spook.
“Promise?”
“I guarantee it.”
“Good. Love you. See you in a bit.”
“Ég elska þig , elskan mín,” I reply and hang up the phone, just as I come abreast of the spook I was sent to meet with.
The spook I knew all too well.
“Michele?” I say softly.
She turns to look at me and besides the slight lifting of her eyebrows, I wouldn’t even know that she was surprised to see me.
Before I can ask her how long she’d been with The Kingdom, she holds up her hand.
“I was ordered to kill Zander O’Sullivan, but someone got to him before I could.”
I nod. “Charlene.”
“Fuck,” Michele breathed angrily. “She is becoming too much of a problem.”
I nod again. “More than she’s worth in my opinion.”
“Agreed,” Michele stated.
“The Kingdom will soon want her to be dealt with.”
Michele stared at me for a moment, assessing me, no doubt trying to gauge not only my sincerity, but my devotion to the organization. I wasn’t offended. I was doing the same to her. After a while, she nodded, and I smirked.
Placing her hand over her heart she bows. I do the same, then we both rise.
“Yuàn huángdì yǔnǐ tóngqíng.” May the Emperor find favor with you.
It was our customary departing statement. One which showed fealty to The Kingdom as well as the leader of it, and each other.
I stood and watched as Michele turned to walk away, before I did so as well.
To anyone listening to our conversation, it would have seemed as if we did nothing but air our grievances over a nuisance but to those of us who worked at the behest of the Emperor, we knew that much had been said.
And many deaths had been ordered.
I didn’t get far before my phone rang with a tone assigned to my wife. My lips spread up into a small smile as I answered it.
“Yeah, Baby?”
“Your eldest son wants you,” Renata said, and I could hear the smile in her voice.
I chuckled softly. “I’m on my way.”
Chapter Six
Heaven
Steele Family Home
Baltimore, MD
Why the hell had I said no when Eddie offered to put a refrigerator and small microwave in our room?
It sounded self-indulgent and kind of lazy to me at first but walking down the stairs to fulfill my craving for black olive pizza with strawberries on top, I realized that my husband had made a pretty good suggestion. Again. Though I would never tell him that. Eddie’s ego was big enough as it was.
As I headed towards the kitchen, I let my eyes wander over the pictures on the wall. Photos of Eddie and I through the years, of us with our families, our siblings. We had plenty of images of the two of us from our wedding. As well as framed portraits of us individually, with each other, with Ashley, and the most adorable picture of Ashley, sitting on a throne, wearing a pink dress, with a long, velvet red mantle with white trim, around her shoulders, her hair was up in a top knot, but on her feet, instead of a pair of elegant slippers were a pair of combat boots, and in one hand was a book, and the other hand held a scepter with the African continent as a small statue on the top.
It showed how truly badass our little girl, armed with her heritage and knowledge, truly was.
I looked at that painting at least three times a day, and I’d caught Eddie standing in front of it, hand to his chin, more than once since we’d had it commissioned. I’d asked him once why he always went to that spot and simply… stared. And he’d told me something so profound and so beautiful, that I’d pulled him into his office just down the hall to give him the best blowjob he’d ever had in his life.
I stand there and stare at our little girl because when I see her, when I see what we want for her, when I see what she represents, it helps me make my decisions. Is what I’m doing going to make the world a better place for Ash? Is what I’m doing going to help make things easier for her to grow into her excellence? Her power? Her place in the world? Is the choice I’m going to make one which was going to leave a legacy she could be proud of, or one where she was constantly apologizing for it? Everything I do, I do for you and our children, but she’s my little girl. The future is hers. It�
��s my job to make sure she can embrace it.
Yeah. I love that man.
When I focused on my surroundings, I found myself standing in the middle of the kitchen, completely confused as to why I was there and what I’d wanted. With a huff, I turned to make my way back upstairs, muttering the entire way. I decided to check on Ashley, and when I opened the door to her room, I had to cover my mouth to stop the laugh that wanted to spill forth.
One of the things I loved about Eddie was that after he’d found out about Ashley, he’d taken a little bit to process, but then he’d jumped into the role of “Daddy” with both feet. And Ashley—who’d already known that Zander wasn’t actually her father—had embraced him as her father with open arms. But one of the biggest things they connected and bonded over was video games. I wasn’t sure how it happened, but I’d raised a gamer… when I not only didn’t play video games, I didn’t even understand their appeal. I was a scientist. A reader. More than once my coworkers had teased me about how much of a nerd I was.
I mean, I was a nerd who could shoot and kill, but… I mean… can’t all nerds?
I thought about some of the women in my life who weren’t exactly as they appeared. The minister who was an expert assassin. The preschool teacher who was the best at poisoning people. The model who could get state secrets with just a wink. Not to mention the disabled writer who was the best sniper I’d ever met in my life. They were all completely badass, and no one would ever expect them to be as deadly as they were.
Just like I never expected to find my daughter, lying in bed, cuddling the controller from her video game system like it was a teddy bear.
Eddie had gone out and bought her a new one after she’d gotten a little upset when her character had lost an opportunity to go on a quest, or had lost a mission… whatever it was, my daughter had not reacted rationally. I’d been fully prepared to discipline her. To ground her. Or hell, to whoop that ass, but Eddie had placed a hand on my arm and took our daughter outside to talk to her. When they came back inside Ashley cleaned up her mess and came over to me to apologize for disrespecting me, her father, our house, my rules, and the gift I’d given her.
