A Bloody Kingdom

by J. J. McAvoy

  Then he’d met Melody, who was the very definition of the word cold. She was sharp, emotionless, calculating. Out of nowhere, it started: them finished each other’s statements, had private conversations just with their eyes, but most importantly, Melody laughed, openly, truly. She was happy and even though she tried to hide it, everyone could see it. She still snapped at people and was horrible about comforting anyone she hadn’t given birth too, but she was different. She even joked now. Liam’s change was subtle; he still had some of the same childlike tendencies to him…until he got upset. Now, just like Melody, would just stay calm, in an eerie sort of way. His eyes were murderous, but he never spoke unless he had to, and when he had to, blood came afterward.

  “Mr. Callahan!”

  “Mr. Callahan, do you have any comments?”

  “Is the governor alive?”

  “Have the police contacted you?”

  “Are these shootings connected?”

  Chicago and its people were ruthless. Here he was, a husband who’d just found out his wife had been shot on live television, and yet instead of giving him space, instead of letting him breathe, they crowded around like vultures. They didn’t care. He and Mel were objects to be gawked at, not people anymore.

  “Mr. Callahan.” Murphy, Melody’s bodyguard, ran forward when we finally entered the lobby of the hospital. The first thing I noticed was the blood…it had stained his hands, his blue tie, and his shirt…if I noticed, Liam defiantly noticed, yet still he remained calm.

  “Where is she?”

  “Still in surgery, sir.” He led us down the hallway. “We have people searching throughout the area. The FBI is speaking to the other Mrs. Callahan now. There—”

  “Why are you alive?” Liam paused, staring at the double doors of the operating room. They read ‘DOCTORS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT’ in blue letters…as if that would stop him.

  “Sir—”

  “Your job is to put your life on the line for my wife, is it not?” he asked, stepping closer to the doors.

  “Yes—”

  “So why are you alive, and my wife is in there? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”

  “Yes sir, it should be.”

  He nodded slowly, still staring. “But it’s not, which means you failed at your job.”

  “I will not stop until I catch this son of a bitch.”

  For some reason, that was the thing that caught his attention. Ripping his eyes from the doors, he stared at the man.

  “You will catch him?”

  “I swear.”

  “Let’s talk.” He walked from the door to the stairwell. Murphy looked to me and I wasn’t sure what was going through his head. Holding the door for them, Murphy stepped in first, then Liam.

  “Sir—”

  BANG.

  Before the door had even fully closed, Liam had fired into the back of his head. Murphy’s body fell forward, tumbling down the stairs.

  “Boss?” I turned back to find his gun, the mouth so hot smoke came from it directly into my eye.

  “When it comes to my family, I don’t give second chances. You mess up, you die. Are we clear, Fedel?”

  I nodded.

  “Good, have this cleaned up and find the shooter.” He placed the gun back into its holster before leaving.

  “Oh my God!” A female nurse screamed, rushing up the stairs, her eyes glued to the bloody body now at the platform under the stairs. She reached for a pulse before her eyes met mine…

  “You have horrible timing,” I told her, pulling out my gun. Before she realized the danger, it was too late and I fired, her body falling beside his. “So fucking messy.”

  Already the body count was at two.

  This city was going to be dripping with blood and tears by the time he was done.

  I reached into my pocket for my cell phone and they answered on the first ring. “I’m going to need a cleanup…and fast.”

  MINA

  1:05 PM

  “If you know anything else, please call us.” The officer handed me his card and I wondered how in the hell they could help, but took it anyway.

  “Sir.” Another one of them—like rats they all crowded around us—poked his head in the small conference room the hospital had allowed them to use. “Mr. Callahan has arrived.”

  “Don’t speak with him.” I rose from the chair, placing the card in my pocket.

  “Mrs. Callahan, I understand your hesitation—”

  “You understand nothing. If it was your wife, if you were the last person to find out your wife was shot, would you really be in the right frame of mind to speak to anyone? If you would like to question my brother-in-law about anything, we will have our lawyers present. We wouldn’t want the Chicago PD to accidently charge him with murder and throw him in jail…again.”

  They glanced at each other as if they had forgotten, but the Callahans forgot nothing and forgave even less.

  The officer at the door stood back, allowing me to exit. I made it three more steps before having to pause and stare down at my feet…I had lost a heel. I hadn’t even realized until now. Everything had happened so quickly and kept replaying in my mind like a horror movie.

  12:17 PM

  BANG.

  It was wet and warm. Her blood stung when it splatted across my face. Everything in the world seemed to slow, yet my throat burned as I screeched.

  “MELODY!” I screamed as she fell back toward the car. Murphy quickly grabbed on to her as I reached for her. “MELODY!”

  “Get her in, now! Johnston, the eagle is down! Ronny, cover us!” Murphy yelled as I held her hand. Her blood rolled down her olive skinned arm, down onto my hands.

  My eyes followed the blood back up her arm to the splotch in the center of her chest…so much blood. I felt her squeeze my hand. For the first time since I had met her, since I had come into this family, I saw her cry. Her face was pressed up against Murphy’s chest, the other men covering her while we ran into the hospital. Her brown eyes were focused on me and filled with tears, just coming down her face. The most haunting was the smile on her face.

  “GSW to the chest!” someone, a doctor I thought, yelled when they put her on a gurney.

  “We got a lot of blood here!” Another one jumped on top of her, placing her hand on her chest. “Call the OR!”

  “Ma’am! Ma’am!”

  Jumping, I turned to the nurse beside me. “Do you know her blood type?”

  “Huh?”

  “Her blood type!”

  “AB negative. She’s AB negative.”

  Nodding, she went off and I stared down at the trail of blood she left in her wake.

  She was going to bleed out! The moment I thought it, my vision blurred and burned from the tears in my eyes. This couldn’t be the way Melody died. She was Melody. She’d come back from worse. The world revolved around her. She would go out in some epic sort of way, not like this…not…not like Sedric.

  1:06 PM

  “Mrs. Callahan?”

  “Mrs. Callahan?”

  Again I turned and again it was a nurse staring at me. He looked me up and down, a small frown on his lips.

  “Would you like to change? We have some spare scrubs—”

  “I’m fine, thank you,” I replied, reaching down to take off my other heel, walking away from him and toward the OR doors again. Then I saw him: Liam, perfectly dressed, standing right in front of the doors like he was some sort of gatekeeper…

  “Liam,” I called out, but he didn’t move or speak.

  Walking beside him, I placed my hand on him but still he didn’t move, didn’t even blink, just kept staring at the door.

  “Liam, she’s going to be fine. She’s Melody, fucking Melody, no one can stop her. Let’s not panic—”

  “I’m not panicking, Mina,” he whispered. Finally, his eyes moved to me. “I’m dying. I can’t feel her…so little by little, I’m dying.”

  He meant it, and I believed him.

  Dear God, none
of us deserve it—all of us are the worst, of the worst, of the worst—but save her anyway. Save her for the sake of all the people Liam will kill if she dies. If you take her from him, he will take as much as he can from you before he goes.

  FIFTEEN

  “No state, no government exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.”

  ~ Rose Wilder Lane

  LIAM

  2:52 PM

  This felt different.

  Melody and I had a running joke that the hospital was her second home. Between the two of us, she was the one that always ended up there, first when she was stabbed and lost our child, then after her car accident where her mother shot her. After that, there was her pregnancy with Ethan, which led to her kidnapping. She also had issues with the births of Dona and Wyatt…and now this. On her way to the hospital, she ended up in the hospital.

  I would have laughed…if she were beside me. I would have laughed and said she had the worst luck in history. But she wasn’t with me, and for some reason, this time felt different from all those times. The more I thought about it, the further into a black hole I fell. My hearing seemed to be the first thing to go. Everything was silent…then my vision seemed to tunnel, no matter how hard I tried to focus.

  I was dying…and that scared me because it meant she was dying.

  Our kids are fucked.

  Ethan would never smile again.

  Wyatt would just break down. He wouldn’t make it.

  Dona…my princess…with us both gone, I couldn’t even bring myself to imagine the person she’d become.

  Why is it so hard for me to protect them? Why am I always failing her? I should die. A man who cannot protect his family doesn’t deserve them—I should die.

  “LIAM!”

  Glancing up, my blurred vision cleared enough to see the doors opening.

  “Mel?” I whispered, but it wasn’t her coming out. A doctor pulled off his scrub cap, exposing his red hair as he took a deep breath before his eyes locked with mine. “My wife?”

  “She’s stable.”

  I took a deep breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. Fighting back the tears, I nodded. “When can I see her—”

  “Mr. Callahan, I’m Doctor Fortmen. Your wife is stable, but she needs a heart. We have her in a medically induced coma right now and she is being moved to the intensive care unit. Her condition is critical, but we managed to stop the bleeding. However, if she doesn’t get a new heart in the next day or so—”

  “Get her a fucking heart, then! She’s the goddamn governor!” I barked into his face. What was this? If she needed a heart, then give her heart. What the fuck! I’d rip mine out right then.

  “Mr. Callahan, it can’t be just any heart. Rejection is high in critical cases such as these, and on top of that, her blood type is the rarest in the world. It will take time. She is at the very top of the list but—”

  “But nothing.” Fine, they needed a heart, I was going to get her a heart. “The person needs to be AB negative, what else?”

  “Mr. Callahan, I’m not sure what you are thinking—”

  “WHAT ELSE!” I was tempted to kill him right there.

  Stepping right in his face, making sure he saw me clearly, I asked simply, “Do you know who I am?”

  “I know she is the governor, but—”

  “I didn’t ask if you knew who my wife was. I asked if you knew who I am. Me, Liam Alec Callahan.”

  He opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it again, saying nothing at all.

  “I can be your savior, I can cloak you in gold, or I can be your worst nightmare. I can destroy your life, your career, everything can come crashing down around you. Chicago will become a place worse than hell because I get whatever I want when I want it. Those who get in my way never get back up after I knock them down. Nothing and no one is out of reach for me. So doctor, when I ask you what else, speak, and when you speak, don’t waste my time preaching ethics and morality to me…I have and want none.”

  “AB negative, a healthy woman in her late twenties or early thirties, preferably brain dead. Those are the best conditions for her to not reject the heart,” he said quickly and softly under his breath.

  Backing away from him, I shot a look to Mina who was already dialing.

  “After the surgery…will she be all right? I thought heart transplant recipients barely live twenty years after a new heart?” Did a countdown of our lives just start?

  “No,” he said, thankfully. “Heart transplants have come a long way in the last decade. She can live well into her nineties. We will give her everything she needs to make sure she doesn’t reject the heart, but we need one that meets the standards.”

  “Take me to my wife.”

  “This way,” he muttered, leading me away from the OR doors.

  I was torn between needing to see her and being terrified of what I might see. With each step I took, my heart pounded loudly and painfully against my ribcage until he finally opened the door. It took all of my strength not to keel over there.

  “Get out,” I murmured so softly I wasn’t sure they heard me, nor did I care. The nurse adjusting her IV dropped it and backed away as I came forward. “Mel?”

  It couldn’t be her.

  The pale, sickly woman with tubes down her throat and wires sticking out from everywhere…it couldn’t be my Mel.

  “What did they do to you?” My hand shook as I brushed her hair from the side of her face. “Wife…”

  It hurt. Breathing hurt, and soon I wasn’t standing anymore. My legs went out from under me and I held on to her as I wept. I cried as if someone had killed her, as if my world was on fire…because I just needed that moment. Like all moments, it came and went, as did my tears. Taking a deep breath, I got back on my feet, dragged the chair over to her bedside, and sat down.

  “This will be the last time you go to the hospital, Mel.” I squeezed her hand. “You can’t keep putting me through this shit.”

  DECLAN

  3:37 PM

  It seemed simple—find a healthy female with the blood type AB negative between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-five—until you realized this was Chicago and the term ‘healthy’ could only be applied loosely. Within the first five minutes I was able to find three people, the first a chain smoker, the second already in the hospital going through labor which made her impossible to get at the moment, and the third—well, she was ironically our own customer.

  “This one is another bust. Any luck, Mina?” I said, staring at the woman below me, who was half-awake and had a needle sticking out of her left arm.

  “I showed the list to the doctor.”

  “You did what?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Liam put the fear of God into him. He doesn’t believe any of these women will do—”

  “Have you ever thought he is lying?” I snapped the apartment doors shut behind me as I exited the building, which smelled like piss and weed. “Just keep feeding me names, and keep by the computer; the program I set up should keep producing names that fit the criteria.”

  I didn’t wait for her to reply before hanging up. My Aston Martin was surrounded by wannabe gangsters and children alike. As I stepped out into the wind, I hoped the air would smell better, but it only smelled worse. I hated Southbend.

  “Move,” I said to them, and one by one their heads turned back to me.

  “This yours?”

  Dumbass question from dumbass people. Ignoring them, I walked around them toward the driver’s seat when some grabbed my arm.

  “Hey!”

  I stared at his old leather jacket before looking up at his grimy, scarred face. His front tooth was missing, and his hair was overgrown and messy; he was most likely still a teenager, not even an adult.

  “We talkin to—”

  My fist collided with his nose so quickly his head bucked back and his body fell to the ground. They stood there stunned before some of them pulled out knives and all pulled
up their fists.

  “I’m in a bad mood and short on time; you really want to fuck with me today?” I questioned.

  Their answer was to charge at me and my reply was my gun. It would always be a fucking gun. Without mercy, I managed to fire three times before the rest abandoned their “friends,” running for their lives.

  The boy stared at the bullet hole in his stomach, falling back, almost on my car, but missing by an inch and landing to the right. Thank fucking Christ.

  “Gun beats knife. If you live you never forget, if you don’t, you don’t.” I got into the car, closed the door, reversed away from their bodies, and then drove around them.

  I got about five blocks before I realized I was being tailed. It wasn’t the police, and it wasn’t any of our people; the windows were tinted, and by my best guess, bulletproof. Turning onto the highway, they came in close behind me.

  Who the fuck? Hitting the Bluetooth, I waited for the signal beep before speaking. “I’m coming down the Forty-Seven with two tails.”

  “We clearing the way, sir?” he questioned.

  “No.” I glanced into the rearview mirror. “If they wanted to attack they would have already.”

  “Spikes then?”

  “I’ll be passing through in two.”

  Pulling off the highway and down toward Forty-Seventh Avenue, aka Little Italy, I sped up, pushing well past 100, knowing full well they would as well.

  Three.

  Two.

  One.

  Slamming on the brakes and turning the wheel to the right, I spun the car around, the tires screeching and smoke coming up as I faced the two black Lincoln town cars, the tires of which were now blown out thanks to the spike track they’d just crossed over.