by Finn, Emilia
“Kyle,” he sobs. “Joshua Kyle.”
Angelo jolts behind me, like an electrical charge ran through his body and seared his fingertips.
“Who do you work for?”
“The government.”
“Who, specifically?” Spence lifts the flame to Joshua’s nipple and chars it black. “Don’t play coy with me, motherfucker.”
“I can’t–”
“Name!”
“Bishop,” he screams. “Bishop. Lieutenant General Colum Anthony Bishop. Please let me go.”
The flame switches off. Every man in the room turns still. Joshua’s crying is the only sound apart from Jay’s heavy breathing. “CAB,” he repeats in disbelief. “Colum Anthony Bishop?” He turns to Kane. “Is this real?”
“Pack it up,” Eric orders. “We’re done.”
Jay and Kane back up as though shell-shocked. Eric packs away unused tools, and Spence packs away the one’s he used. But Angelo, quiet, watchful Angelo, steps forward and takes the blade from my hand. His chin-length hair drops over his eyes for a moment, and the leather bands on his wrists move as adrenaline slides through his veins and his muscles bunch. Gently using his shoulder, he pushes me aside so he stands directly in front of Colum Bishop’s assistant.
Our group is silent while he does this, but no one else notices his presence in front of Joshua. The rest of them are busy doing their thing.
Finally, bringing silver-gray eyes up, he stares into a tear-filled pair of green eyes and shakes his head. “It’s bad luck for you I recognize your name, Joshua Kyle.” Kane’s gaze comes up across the room, alerted by Ang’s somber tone. “I’ve heard it late at night,” Ang continues. “While my beautiful Laine cries in her sleep and relives what was done to her against her will.”
Striking out fast as a viper, he jams my blade into Joshua’s throat so blood explodes over his strong arm and onto my shirt, and doesn’t stop until a full inch of the blade is embedded in the wall.
“She either didn’t see his face earlier,” Angelo turns to me with a kind of wildness in his eyes, “or she doesn’t consciously remember. Either way, none of you speak that name in front of her.” He turns and meets each of his friends’ eyes. “If you remind her, you’ll feel what he feels. She’s found her peace, and she never has to go back to Infernos again. Don’t tell her his name.”
“She won’t hear it from me.” Stepping forward, Spence claps a shaking Ang on the shoulder and moves away.
Kane stops in front of Ang for a long minute. They speak no words. They do nothing but stare. Then Kane nods and cups the back of Ang’s head until they hug. “You’re saving her,” he whispers. “Every day, you save her. Don’t let this hurt you.”
“Come on.” Jay takes my hand and drags me away from the men standing in front of a dying rapist. Taking a bottle of water and a towel, Jay sprays the water onto my shaking arms and cleans another man’s blood off my skin.
Again.
24
Final Plans
Jay
For the first time in a long time, I sit in the kitchen of the home I shared with my brother while working an undercover operation inside Infernos club. The kitchen is packed with bodies, with the army Kane now controls, and all eyes are trained on the dining table.
Kane sits across from me. Jess sits beside him.
I sit on the opposite side, and with a heavy-duty laptop in her face, Soph sits beside me.
Ang stands beside his girl, and Riley beside his. Spence and Eric lean against the counter, and a tiny pig in a pink tutu roams around the floor beneath our feet and claims the crumbs that Soph drops from her plate.
“Colum. Anthony. Bishop.” Riley says it like it’s not what it actually is. He says that name like they’re just words, and not the name of my father. “What the fuck are we supposed to do about that?”
“We find him,” Kane declares quietly. “Then we take him out.”
“Your father?” Jess asks in disbelief. “You’re prepared to take your own father out?”
“Yeah, Blondie.” Blowing out a long breath and tugging her closer, he buries his face in her hair and nods. “I am. He’s nobody to me.”
“He’s your father!” she snaps.
“He shares our name,” he clarifies. “But he has claim to nothing else.”
“But…” Brows knitted, she looks around the room, then stops on me. “He’s your father.”
“He had me executed.” I take a curly fry from the pile in the center of the table and take a slow bite. “He beat us every damn day of our lives. Starved us. Waged mental wars just to fuck with us. He had me taken out, then he put a hit on Kane’s head. His own son’s head. I think we’ve established we’re not discussing a dearly beloved daddy, but an unfeeling fucking prick.”
“I just…” She takes Kane’s hand in hers and threads their fingers together. “I don’t know how you’re going to deal with this without hurting yourselves. This will haunt you.” She turns and meets Kane’s eyes. “I don’t want you to hurt your own heart to take care of this.”
“No, what hurts my heart is knowing I’m someone’s target while you sit right beside me. We all know now that a bullet will pass straight through my body and pierce the next in line. You getting hurt, or even you being in someone’s scope is what hurts my heart. We need to eliminate this threat, then I’m taking your ass back to the beach. Because I miss vacation me; he was mellow as fuck.”
“What if you trap him?” Andi volunteers. She’s an innocent in this group; she doesn’t hurt people except with her sass. She doesn’t know what the rest of us know. “You could make it so he’s arrested and sent away to prison, right? That solves both your problems; he’s gone, and your hearts remain intact because you didn’t kill him.”
“Sure.” Not sure at all. Glancing up, I nod and give her a smile that everyone else in the room knows is bullshit. Even her man. “We’ll make it so he’s arrested, then he can be sent far away from here.”
“Good.” Impressed with herself, Andi steps forward and takes a curly fry from a growling Sophia.
“Soph.”
“I’m hungry,” she scowls.
“It’s just a fry, babe. We’ll get more.”
“How do we find him?” Riley asks. “You’ve been searching for eight years already; it’s not like he’s gonna just knock on your door for your birthday and say hey.”
“Actually.” Spinning her laptop, Soph shows us a satellite image of downtown. Zooming in on the Checkmate office, she enlarges the picture, enlarges, enlarges, and then stops.
“What the fuck?” Kane snaps. He pulls the laptop closer and narrows his eyes. Standing, since he pulled it from her reach, Soph leans across the table and works her tech until she pulls the image out a couple clicks, then she zooms in on the town lookout and a man lying in the tall grass with a CheyTac M200 sniper rifle tucked before his eye and a dark green ghillie suit moving with the breeze.
“Anyone wanna go back to work today?” Soph’s smile is heartless, unfeeling. And bordering on homicidal.
“That’s not Colum,” Kane says. “He’s not that stupid.”
“We’ll see.” Shrugging, she pulls the laptop back and sits down so our shoulders touch. She speaks of the time she found me, and the humanity she was drawn to when presented with Bishop brothers. She chose me because I was smiling even when in hell. I was laughing, even when it hurt.
I get it now, because all day, since the moment we found that asshole darting across the road toward Kane’s office, she’s been this machine. I understand why she’s done that to herself. I know why she needs to do it. But that knowledge doesn’t take the fear from my heart.
“Soph?” Standing, I extend a hand and wait for her eyes. “We need a minute.”
“Not right now,” she murmurs. Playing with her laptop, her fingers fly across the keys, and windows appear faster than my eyes can keep up. Every second image that pops up looks painfully like me and Kane.
The apple didn�
�t fall far from the tree—we look just like Colum.
“Sophia.” I take her shoulder and try to pull her back. “Get up, we need a minute.”
“Not right now,” she snaps. Picking up a curly fry, she stuffs it into her mouth and continues working, even as everyone else watches us with wary eyes. “We’ll talk later, but I need to do this right now.”
“Sophia!” I snap her laptop lid closed and say goodbye to my life. Nose flaring, lips quivering, she looks up with rage in her eyes and flexing fists. I don’t let her speak, because once she starts, she won’t stop until she’s torn the skin from my bones and watched my blood run black. Instead, I pick her up and accept the grunt when her knee slams into my stomach. Carrying her similarly to how I first carried her to bed, I turn away from my watchful family and head straight toward the internal garage door.
“Jay!”
“Wait a second, Sugar Plum.” I carry her through the door and into the small half-staircase that leads us down to the garage.
“Jay!” Her fists rain over my back and hurt more than I’ll ever admit. She aims for the healed wounds and winds me each time she hits my lungs. “Put me down!”
I push the final door open and step into the cool garage. Turning, I flip the door closed for privacy, then I set her on her feet and hold her back, because she’s coming for the kill shot. “You need to stop for a second, Soph.”
“What the hell are you doing?” she screeches. “There’s a man with a sniper rifle just a three-minute drive from here, but you’d rather gossip in the fucking garage?”
“Not gossiping, babe.” I pull her in when she continues to fight my hands. I step forward and pull her against my chest until the oxygen explodes from her lungs and her knees become neutralized. “You’re having a moment, and it’s my turn to help you through it.”
“I’m not having a fucking moment! I’m doing your job.”
“You’re obsessed with this, and now you’re leaving your humanity at the door.”
“Of course I’m obsessed.” She headbutts my chest and growls when it does nothing. “He killed my sister! You were obsessed too, but now that you got Kane back, suddenly our mission is over? Fuck you! Let me go so I can work.”
“It’s not over, Sophia. It’s still going ahead, but before today, you were still able to love, to smile; you could still feel. You were able to live in conjunction with working the case. But I swear, you left Sophia in the basement back at Checkmate, and only your machine parts came out.”
“I found out who our man is! I found out today the name of the man who brutalized my sister and dumped her body. Excuse me for not smiling about it.”
“You act like you’re all alone in this,” I snap back. “You act like you have no one to turn to for help. You gonna head on up to the hill and take him out yourself? Leave your team at home, so you can take care of business by yourself?”
“I don’t have a team!” she roars. “I’ve never had a team. I’m just me, and I buy muscle. You’re my muscle, but now you’re compromised. So I’m taking care of it.”
“We are your team, Sophia! We’re all here. We showed up. We’re upstairs working this together right now. How do you not see us?”
“You’re upstairs reuniting with your brother and shooting stink-eyes at the guy you’re jealous of. You have this whole other world playing out inside your head right now, and that’s fine, because you deserve your happiness, but you’re not focused on me or Ellie, so quit pretending that you are. You’re planning to go to the beach with Kane! You’re fucking useless now that you got what you needed out of all this.”
“Got what I wanted?” I shake her. I’m ashamed of it, and when her teeth snap closed with a loud clang, and her eyes register the pain, my heart hates me for it. But still, I shake her. “I started this to make Kane safe! I could have come home to him seven months ago if all I wanted was him. But I didn’t, because having him doesn’t mean shit if his threat is still alive. Now we found the threat. We’re working it, Sophia! What the fuck do you want from me?”
“The threat is your father! He’s your fucking dad! Are you gonna pull the trigger? No! Are you gonna slide a blade into his trachea and watch him choke on his own blood? No! You will choke; you will try to reason, and when it comes time, you’ll try to talk me down from our mission. He hurt my sister, Jay!”
“You’re making this scenario up in your head. I haven’t choked once! I’m not talking you out of what needs to be done. I’m right here, in love with you, and terrified you’ve forgotten who you are in your heart. You’re so obsessed with Ellie, you forgot about Sophia!”
“That’s not true.”
“No? So tomorrow, when this is done, you’re gonna go back to your dance career?” Her mouth pops open to argue, but she flounders. “You gonna go be that Anna chick and make your millions dancing for the crowds and making people fall in love with ballet? Are you going to open a dance school tomorrow, Sophia? Will you ever dance again?”
“No… I…” Her pulse thumps in her throat and hurts me. She’s vulnerable, and I’m cutting her. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“Right! Because you used to be fast-tracked to dancing fame, but then you just stopped. You fucking quit, Sophia, and you became obsessed with something so unbelievably unhealthy.”
“Unhealthy? My sister–”
“You changed your metabolism! Ellie’s death isn’t the core of your trauma; your mission is! You changed the very fabric of your soul, not because Ellie died, but in your mission to make it all better.”
“She didn’t deserve to die, Jay!” Soph slams her fists against my chest. “She didn’t deserve that, but it happened, and it happened while on my watch, while I was dancing. I don’t deserve to dance again!”
“So tomorrow, after you execute the man responsible for all of this, you won’t dance because you don’t deserve it? What will you do? Your mission will be complete, so what will you do? Go bury yourself beside Ellie? Slide a knife into your own throat, since you’ll have nothing left to live for?”
When she jolts in my arms and her face drains white, my stomach drops. Because there it is. The truth.
She never expected to live beyond this.
“I don’t know what I’ll do,” she whimpers. “That’s tomorrow. But today is today, and my boyfriend’s dad is the man I need to hunt down.”
“Does the fact he’s a Bishop hurt us, Soph? Will you never look at me the same again, because someone who shares the same blood and eyes as me hurt Ellie? Will you bury us tomorrow too? Was I nothing but a tool to you?”
“I don’t know…” Finally, she breaks and lets the torrent of tears slide over her cheeks. “I don’t know. I can’t see further than my nose. I just need to make Ellie safe again.”
“She is safe, Sophia. Nobody can ever touch her again. But what about you? What about your heart? You put yourself in a thong, dance for gangsters, and put yourself in the very danger you’re trying to save Ellie from. Why? She wouldn’t want that for you. And if the roles were reversed, what would you want for her?”
“The roles aren’t reversed,” she hisses. “And my sister is dead. She’s not on a fucking beach in the Bahamas enjoying being beautiful and free. She’s dead, and she was buried with a torn vagina and stolen innocence.”
“Sophia.” My breath comes choppy and fast while I try to absorb Soph’s pain. I don’t know how to help her because this is way beyond Colum and Kane. This is beyond anything we know; this is about Soph’s mental state. And she’s been having a moment for eight long years. “I love you, Sophia.” I pull her closer, despite her anger. “I love you.”
“I want you to let me go.” She tries to push back. “Let me go. Let me go!”
“No.” I press my lips to the top of her head. Over and over and over again. “I love you. I know you think I’m just an idiot. I know you think I can’t be serious for more than two seconds. I also know you think I’m only hired muscle. But I love you, and I’m going to
stick by you no matter what.”
“I want you to let me go,” she cries. “I can’t do anything until CAB is dealt with. Tomorrow, we deal with the rest tomorrow, but today, I need to deal with Colum.”
“I want you to trust me and the guys to take care of it.”
She stiffens and pulls back. “No.”
“Yes.” I step forward. “I want you to trust me to fix this for you.”
“I am not going to be relegated to the fucking kitchen, Jay! I will not be left at home while you go out there. This is my mission!”
“I’m not relegating you to the kitchen, babe. But maybe to a therapist’s office.”
Her fist swings out so fast, my brain rattles before my eyes see her hand. “Fuck you, Jay Bishop! I’m not crazy, and I’m not staying home. I know my mission, and you’re dismissed. Ace no longer needs your services.”
25
Hugs
Sophia
For the first time in longer than I remember, I run with tears in my eyes and blindly throw myself up the stairs toward the kitchen. The garage door is closed, and I need my laptop anyway, so I forge forward with the intention to barge through, collect my shit, and make myself a ghost, but my plans are squashed when I race into the kitchen and am attacked by a horde of bodies.
My brain is in fight or flight mode, so I swing out with the intention to immobilize my attacker, only to be pressed into an all-encompassing hug filled with long blonde hair and a snuffling pig.
“You’re not crazy for wanting this,” Jess Lenaghan murmurs. Her strong arms hold me close, and her sister presses against my back so our faces squish together. “I wanted to hurt the men who hurt my sister, too. I wanted to hurt them so bad, Kane and I went round and round about what I could live with and what would haunt me for the rest of my life.”
