Quiet Chaos : The Chaos Series- Book #2

by Keta Kendric

  I believed we had started at that kiss. Now, I had a strong need to know if he had experienced the same charged vibe that I had that day.

  “You are so beautiful, Mecca. But, so quickly you became more than just this pretty woman. You were about to become my wife, a permanent fixture in my life. The magnitude of what everything meant hit me all at once, and I no longer wanted it to be an arrangement. When I glanced deeper than your outward appearance, I connected with something more profound, something that was blind to my eyes at first, but blaringly loud to my instincts. I had this urgent need to connect with what I sensed. It’s hard to explain.”

  “You’re doing a good job of it so far,” I stated, eager for him to continue.

  “Once I kissed you, that first small touch was confirmation of me connecting with something so much bigger than me. It was bigger than anything I understood. When you kissed me back, it grew stronger, so intense that I didn’t want to let go.”

  His eyes were fixed with a dreamy expression, and I imagine mine were also.

  “For someone like me that’s never experienced much outside of pain and disappointment, it was a connection that I wanted to last for as long as possible. If that meant causing a scene at our wedding, it was a small price to pay.”

  We stared at each other, his eyes closing when my fingers brushed his chin. It was an action I hadn’t intended, but one I couldn’t help, lending to his explanation of experiencing something bigger than us. Even though he had admitted such intimate details, I had a strong desire to dig deeper.

  “For you, was it a one-time thing, or have you experienced the connection again after our wedding day?”

  He leaned in, placing his lips to my ear, the closeness warming me fully. He knew how his closeness affected me.

  “I feel it every time I’m in your presence. I feel it now. I feel it the strongest when we touch.” He leaned back enough to capture my gaze. “When you initiate a kiss or caress without being prompted, it’s overwhelmingly strong.”

  His heavy eyes searched mine, but it wasn’t lust reflected in them. I believed it was our special connection, the one that raged through me as intensely as I believed it did him. I leaned in and brushed my lips across his, loving the way he shivered and his breath caught at the small action. His reaction let me know that we were on the same playing field, that we were experiencing our special connection together.

  He responded to the harder press of my lips with a firm caress of his own. Our link eased into an intersecting solid emotion that had me relishing the warm sensations coursing through me. I brushed a soft peck along his chin until I reached his ear. “I feel it too, and I didn’t want to let go either. I never have.”

  At those words, he drew me into a tight hug that took my breath away and made me release a playful giggle.

  Who knew that I would find genuine affection in the midst of an arrangement that was meant to build a bridge that linked danger and chaos?

  “So husband, why don’t you tell me how you got such a wicked reputation? I sensed it and got a glimpse of it when you cut out George’s tongue. I’m always hearing whispers, but you do a good job of keeping that part of yourself hidden. And don’t skimp because I know that your devil is in the details.”

  The boyish smile, laced with a ton of charm, got me every time, enticing me to grin. The cute crinkle that showed up at the edge of his right eye, and the way his lips bent and filled up his face, were small details that let me know his smile was genuine, along with the way his nose wrinkled when he was thinking hard. I liked it, realizing I had never paid that much attention to a man’s less obvious features.

  “You can say that my reputation was built from years of training, and torture, but mostly abuse.”

  Torture? Abuse? The words stuck out and latched onto my brainstem.

  “There is no doubt in my mind that our father was the living version of the devil planted here on earth. I’m sure you know already from all of your data collecting on me and my brother that we grew up in the syndicate, but what you probably don’t know is that our father started grooming me to be a death-soldier at age five. He started taking me to syndicate sanctioned beheadings, firing squads, and executions of every kind. He wanted me desensitized so that I’d get used to the gore involved in death.”

  This bit of news kicked up my intrigue and had me glaring harder at his lips as he spoke, unwilling to miss a thing.

  “It took a good year for me to start stomaching most of what I was being exposed to. Khane had arrived a few months before I started training, and the only reason my father left him alone was because he was a toddler. The kind of training I was receiving at five, the syndicate suggested you start at eighteen. My father didn’t care, and my mother loved him more than life itself, so she went along with whatever he wanted. There was no school, no mingling with other kids our ages. We trained with other boys in the syndicate whose fathers wanted them to start early. We were homeschooled, one-on-one tutors, and would end up punished as severely for academic failures as we were for our so-called training.

  “When it was only me enduring my father’s harsh version of training, I could take the punishment. I could take being beaten. I could take being verbally abused, starved, and physically worn out. However, when Khane turned five, and my father started in on him, everything changed. Seeing my little brother suffer, tore me apart more than anything my father could have ever done to me, and he knew it. He hated Khane because he was born out of an affair he’d had with his maid.”

  That explained why their features were like night and day. And Arjen was right. This was the kind of information I would never find, no matter how much digging was done.

  “My father was the one that took Khane’s eye.”

  Shit!

  “When I was fifteen, and he was thirteen, we had let a man we had captured for an execution, escape. One of my father’s men ended up getting killed in the recapture. As punishment for what we had allowed to happen, my father vowed to take something from us, since we had allowed a life to be taken on our watch. He stood us in front of the audience that was there to watch the man’s execution and asked for a volunteer from Khane and me. Of course, I volunteered, but my father’s hate had already made the decision.”

  I wasn’t aware how tense I had become until Arjen brushed a tender caress along the side of my face.

  “He made Khane pick an eye. I jumped in front of Khane to try to help, but our father promised me a month in what he called, the vault, for interfering. He had handed out countless harsh punishments to us throughout the years: brutal beatings, broken bones, burns, and extended periods in a soundless black hole in the ground, he called the vault. To us, of all the punishments, nothing was worse than being locked in that vault. It messed with your mind, and it took weeks, sometimes months, for you to retrain your mind once you came out of there.”

  I strengthened the hold I had around his body, sensing through his tension that he had suffered a great deal at his father’s hands.

  “I watched my brother, just a kid, begging to keep his eye, but that evil devil stabbed Khane in the eye in front of that audience. I made Khane a promise that day, while I placed my hand over his and watched blood running through our fingers, that I would find a way to punish our father. He wouldn’t even let Khane see a doctor afterward, so we never knew if his eye could have been saved.”

  Damn!

  All I had was an uncaring uncle to deal with, and Arjen and Khane were being trained to kill by the devil himself.

  “I was set to take my punishment for intervening that day on my brother’s behalf. Instead of the vault, my father upped the ante. He sat Khane and me across the table from him once a month, with me sitting directly in front of him so I could stare into his devilish face. He would put a bullet in his revolver and give it a spin before he would slide it across the table to us. He made Khane place it to my head and pull the trigger. I was sure I would die every time. Every time he slid that gun across the table,
he would look to Khane and tell him, “You’re the reason your brother is receiving this punishment. If he dies, it’s your fault, and his blood will be on your hands.” Like he hadn’t taken enough, he was still punishing Khane. He knew, that in punishing my brother it would hurt me worse.”

  This shit had me acknowledging a part of my husband that he had kept hidden so deep, I wasn’t sure he had ever truly confronted it. His reputation was one of the deadliest I’d heard about, but tapping into the source of what built it, turned those whispers into something real.

  “I think our father’s goal was to find a way to make us hate each other, but it never happened. Twelve months a year, over seven years, eighty-seven trigger pulls at my head. He promised that he wasn’t going to stop until the day the gun went off. Until this day, I don’t know how I went that long without dying. Let’s just say, despite how we were brought up, my brother and I know the bible from Genesis to Revelation, and I strongly believe in divine intervention.”

  “I’m so sorry, Arjen. Your life was a fucking nightmare, written and directed by your evil ass father.”

  I shook my head, attempting to shake off the image of those two young boys being trained and tortured from child to adulthood. He and Khane were put through hell on earth. No wonder their reputations were the scary shit people whispered about.

  He had gone quiet, and the tension in his face let me know he was sorting through his thoughts. Despite his upbringing, Arjen could pass for normal, but laying in his tight embrace allowed me to feel the depth of the pain etched in his soul, and I knew that he was anything but normal. I could sense the underlying darkness within him that he worked hard to keep hidden.

  However, his eyes had always revealed all I needed to know. The years of hell at his father’s hands, the nightmares bestowed on him, and the chaos he was capable of unleashing was written within the depths of his gaze. Normal, unaware people may not have seen it, but I knew what hell looked like, because I’m sure it sat within the depth of my gaze too.

  “My father had designed much of his training to give us the best skills we’d need for survival in the job that he had chosen for us. He turned us into the most vicious kind of animals, and he siphoned the fear right out of us. The average life span of a security expert in the syndicate is ten years, fifteen for the lucky ones, and those that hit twenty or more, it was a blessing. Khane and I have been going strong for twenty-three and twenty-five years.

  “While most boys were starting their training at eighteen, we had already been taking out targets for our father and the syndicate. My vow to my brother that I would find a way to punish our father became our motivation. After Khane lost his eye, we trained harder and soaked up every bit of knowledge offered to us. My father never saw us coming, because he was too busy showing off the deadly soldiers he’d taught us to be. We didn’t kill him. We set it up so that he was caught in Russia with cocaine and a bloody knife that had killed the son of a Russian mob boss. He is rotting away for the rest of his life in Petak Island Prison in White Lake, Russia.”

  I lifted a brow. “I’ve heard about Petak and I’ve even watched a documentary on it. It’s like the Russian version of Alcatraz and depending on who you ask, a step up from hell.”

  Arjen’s smile was laced with pride. “He’s been there for seven years now. We have recordings of some of his beatings, and my birthday gift to Khane one year, was a recording of him losing his left eye.”

  He tucked me into his embrace, and I held on tight, returning the caress. I was learning my husband well enough to know that he was done talking. After a long while of us locked in a tight hug, he placed his lips to my forehead.

  “Your turn, wife. I’m dying to know what foundation you were built from.”

  His words made me go still. Was I ready to share the damaged pages of my chaotic life-script with Arjen?

  29

  Arjen

  Mecca’s blank stare was focused on the wall, no doubt contemplating how much, if anything, she wanted to share with me. While nestled into me, she had gone rigid at my request to know more about her past. Her deep inhales and exhales had me squeezing her tighter, hoping she was preparing to tell me something.

  “I ended up on Raymond’s doorstep a few months before I turned four. I don’t think the transition of where I had come from was bad even though, I don’t have anything but a hand full of memories of that time. Desiree and I were a few months apart in age, and I remember sharing a room with her. The first thing she did when I arrived was give me a hug. No matter how young my mind was, that was a memory I’d never forget, and one that makes me smile every time I think of it. I remember that we had bunk beds, but she would always crawl into the bottom bunk with me at night.”

  The smile at the memory of her and her cousin made me smile. It didn’t take but a second of seeing the two together to know that they were close.

  “My male cousins were a few years older, and for the most part, we all got along. Despite how he is now, Raymond actually tried to be a good father. He made sure there was always a decent caretaker with us while he worked. He took us to the park, made sure we were clothed, and fed. He’d even sit with Desiree and my cousins and help them with their homework. He didn’t have that same caring spirit towards me as he had with my cousins. There was no helping me with my homework and no kind of extra attention. His lack of attention seemed to make me try harder to prove to him that I didn’t need his help. He was closest to Desiree. She was always his little advisor, reminding him about things he’d forgotten.

  “Raymond had a way with me that always made me feel like an outsider, even though my cousins treated me like I was a little sister. He was tough on me. I figured his behavior was because I wasn’t his biological child. Even though I was the youngest, Raymond drilled it in my head that I was responsible for protecting my cousins when he or the help wasn’t around. It was like he knew I could take the harshness of his attitude, the pain of an ass whipping, and any other emotional trauma that went along with being the protector.”

  He was turning her into his soldier. The lack of showing her emotion and care was the number one sign.

  “By the time I was seven, I was peddling crack, modeling myself after the bigger dope boys. I never received parental guidance or shared any emotional connection with Raymond other than him teaching me how to become a success at the dope game.”

  She paused, and I could tell by the heaviness in her gaze that the weight of that world, past and present, never stopped pressing down on her.

  “I went through every phase, cooking and cutting, packaging, selling, collection, and distribution, and later when I was a teen, I graduated to going with Raymond to meet with the supplier. Out there on those streets wasn’t a place for a kid, especially not a little girl. But, it was the only connection Raymond and I shared, and I was one of the most determined things walking. I got my ass beat so much that they eventually stopped fighting me when they figured it was useless. By the time I was eleven, carrying a gun had become a norm. Seeing people get shot, stabbed, and all manner of death and human destruction was a part of my daily routine.”

  We may have grown up in different worlds, but the conditioning was similar.

  “The longer I was in it, the more desensitized I became to violence and death. By the time I was twelve, I had a body on the gun that Raymond didn’t even know about. All of my friends were years older than me, teenagers between fourteen and nineteen years old. I ended up killing a twenty-three-year-old man who would have beaten my fourteen-year-old friend to death if I hadn’t killed him. He accused her of being a tease and became enraged when she wouldn’t have sex with him. She and I are still close friends, went to college together. I stopped after receiving my bachelor’s degree in business, but she continued and went to medical school studying pathology. Getting my doctorate on the streets was more beneficial for me anyway.”

  The statement made me chuckle and there was a wide smile spreading across her lips also.

>   “None of us had any real rules, just kids taking on adult situations. I had no clear-cut goals in life other than wanting to be the best in the dope game and to someday become a boss. For a female, that was a tall order in that world, but I was never one to shy away from a challenge. I went on soaking up the streets like it was the air I breathed.

  “At fourteen, I reached a turning point. I was robbed and beaten to within an inch of my life. The two guys that did it, assumed that they had killed me because they tossed my battered body in a dumpster behind their building. I don’t know how long I was in that dumpster, praying and hoping that someone would help me. I woke to day light and night fall and with barely enough strength to keep rats from eating me alive. It took people dumping their trash on me for me to scratch and claw my way out of there before I ended up buried alive.”

  She had me so riveted in her world, that I was afraid to move or comment because I didn’t want her to stop. Knowing her past and how she had become so tough and fearless was a piece of history I’d wanted to know since the day I met her.

  “I made my way out of the dumpster and then the alley. I begged for help, but people ignored me, passed by me, jumped over me, one even kicked me, mumbling that I was in his way. The streets were a savage beast that knew no mercy, and the people who grew up in it, absorbed that same savagery. One of my eyes was swollen shut, and the other was not far behind, so I had tunnel vision. I ended up crawling onto the highway where I was almost hit by a car before I received help.”

  I couldn’t help squeezing her to me because the image was so brutally clear in my mind.

  “The guy who was driving the car that almost killed me was who picked me up off the street, tossed me into the back of his car, and took me to the hospital. I had no idea how much damage was done to me until I was in recovery. My jaw was wired for weeks, cracked ribs, broken wrist, and a concussion. I was stabbed twice, once in my left side, and once in the lower back, but was lucky that nothing major was damaged.”