by Tillie Cole
“Ronnie!” Vera ran for her girlfriend.
Cheska and Ronnie were dragging a girl from the cage, the bird’s limbs limp and weak. Cheska looked back at me but continued trying to drag the trafficked woman out. I started running, overtaking Vera just as something on the side of the container caught my eye.
“CHESKA!” I screamed, seeing the casing of an explosive on the container door.
“No! NO!” Vera spat when she saw what I was fucking glaring at. Cheska grabbed Ronnie’s arm and tried to pull her away, knowing something was wrong. But Ronnie wouldn’t move. She fought to get Cheska to stay near the girls, to help her open more of the cages.
Like fucking slow motion, the world tripping into half speed, I saw the fire ignite at the back of the container as I reached Cheska. I threw her to the ground, covering her with my body as the fucking thing blew. A thunderous boom took out the dumped container and all the trafficked women inside, the smell of burning flesh immediately lashing around us.
Cheska was still beneath me. I reared back, turning her over. I hadn’t been quick enough. She took too much of the fucking blowback. Scratches and cuts covered her skin, dirt from the ground. “Princess,” I said, pulling her into my arms. The fire from the burning container singed the back of my coat. I didn’t fucking give a shit. “Princess, wake the fuck up!” I snarled and felt my stomach sink. A fucking great big hole burrowed in my chest, caved in my fucking bones as I stared at Cheska’s closed eyes.
Emptiness chased everything else out of my body as I pulled her closer to my chest. She was dead. She was fucking dead …
Someone touched me, and I lashed out, grabbing their fucking hand. I yanked them to me, ready to rip out their throat for coming too close to me and my bird. “Artie, it’s Charlie. You need to move from the fire.” I stared into my cousin’s brown eyes, letting my brain calm the fuck down and back off from slitting his throat.
“She’s gone. She’s fucking gone!” I roared. The need to destroy whoever did this consumed me, became all I fucking was. I held Cheska tighter. She still felt warm. Still felt perfect in my arms. My Chelsea girl. The only fucking bird who had ever got through the darkness, the blackness plaguing my fucking half-dead heart.
“Artie, move.” Charlie took my arm, dragging me to my feet. I held Cheska tighter as I moved toward the cars, my vision blurred with red. I couldn’t breathe, every fucking inhale like taking in boiling-hot air.
I looked up and saw Vera holding Ronnie, Ronnie’s fucking stunned eyes on Cheska in my arms. I scanned the yard, the fire raging and the bodies on the ground. Freddie and Vinnie running around, dragging men from the flames. Eric, arms around Betsy and Gene. Cheska limp in my motherfucking arms.
All the life fled from my veins and, in that moment, I became death. I became nothing but evil, revenge all I could crave, the bitter, addictive taste of bloodlust filling up my mouth.
A noise travelled to my ears and I looked down. I fucking froze when Cheska’s eyelids started to move, when her arms and legs shifted. “Cheska,” I rasped, and her eyes finally opened. She blinked, and then those fucking green-browns fell on me.
“Arthur,” she said, dazed, but I saw the fog in her mind clearing by the second. Then her eyes widened and she looked back at the container, at the flames clawing higher, the last of the night’s fireworks fizzling out in the sky above us.
“The girls,” she whispered, kicking out of my hold until her feet hit the ground. “The girls.” She tried to get back to the container. But my arm was a fucking iron cage around her stomach. She was back. She was bloody breathing. And I was never letting her fucking go again. “Arthur!” she cried, trying to break from my grip. “The girls!”
“They’re dead,” Betsy said from behind us. I heard a fucking agonised wail from Ronnie. She was in her girlfriend’s arms, sobbing, clutching Vera like there was no bloody tomorrow. “None of them survived the explosion,” Betsy said as vans came racing up the road, our soldiers coming to contain this shitshow. To find me fucking evidence of who it was so I could decapitate the fuckers who were attacking us, once and for all. So I could destroy them and tear their organisation apart.
No one fucked with what was mine.
No one fucked with my fucking woman!
“We’re leaving.” I dragged Cheska, kicking and fighting me, back to the car. I pushed her inside, nudging my chin at Vera to bring Ronnie in our car too. The soldiers piled out of the van, their eyes turning livid as they saw the carnage. I would be speaking to Old Sammy tonight to find out what he knew.
The soldiers looked at me as I stood by my car. “Clean up, but search the grounds for any evidence of who did this. I’ll pay any of you who get me leads or any kind of answer a truckload of money.” I met each one of them in the eyes. “Someone is trying to fuck with our firm. Now they’ve fucked with my family, and that’s taken this from fucking child’s play to an out-and-out fucking war. Keep your ears to the ground and find me the fuckers who thought it would be wise to mess with me.”
I got in the car and got on the phone to Charlie. “Get men stationed around our house. No fucker but family gets in and out. We’re staying together—tell everyone to get their bags packed and get their arses to the church.”
“Got it, Art.” Charlie hung up.
Cheska was staring at the flames of the container through the window, her eyes fixed on the one bird they’d managed to pull out. She was already dead, fucking died alone, naked in a cage. I threw my arm around Cheska’s neck and pulled her close. I turned her face to me, gripped her cheeks and kissed her shaking lips. Tears fell down her face, and I tasted the salty water on my tongue.
“You’re alive,” I said, feeling some of the molten anger inside me turn to smoke at the fact that she was here, beside me, fucking alive.
“Those girls …” Cheska said, her breath hitching. She shook her head. She took my hand and fucking squeezed my fingers with all she was made of. “The one we pulled out …” She closed her eyes, more tears falling. “She looked like Freya. For a minute …” Her mate. Her mate whose throat had been slit in front of her. “I tried to save her. I needed to save her.” Cheska looked up and found Ronnie. She reached across the seat and gripped her hand. “Ronnie …”
“They had the brand,” Ronnie said to all of us and no one at the same time. Her dark eyes were like fucking glass, her deep skin paling. Vera held her girlfriend closer, kissing her forehead, but Ronnie was fucking lost to the past. Locked in the days when she’d lived in a fucking cage, been branded just the same as those birds who were now nothing but ash and charred remains.
“I met them at a nightclub,” she said, and Cheska tensed. Ronnie met Cheska’s eyes. “I snuck in underage. I met them at the bar. They bought me drinks. They offered me a job, saying they didn’t care that I was too young.” Ronnie’s voice was tight and weak, but she was speaking. She was fucking exorcising her past in the Bentley’s back seat as it took us back to the one place no one would dare come for us. The one fucking place I could keep us protected.
My fucking family’s fortress.
“I was young,” Ronnie said. “I said they’d need to speak to my parents.” Ronnie swallowed like she was choking back a lump made of stone. “I didn’t know my dad had gambling problems. I didn’t know he had racked up thousands of pounds in debt with a loan shark.” She shook her head. “Only, it wasn’t a loan shark. It was a group, an organisation.” Ronnie looked at Cheska’s focused face. “A pack of demons pretending to be good people.”
“What did they do?” Cheska asked.
Vera pulled Ronnie close, and Ronnie continued. “They came to our door. I thought they were there to get permission for me to work for them, so I could help bring in cash to the house. We were poor.” Ronnie gazed out of the window. “But we were happy. When my dad opened the door, I knew something was up. His voice started shaking, and my mum could see something was wrong too.”
Ronnie’s free hand fisted on her thigh. “They were
there to offer my old man a deal—all his debt wiped if he handed me over. If they’d let them take me away.”
“How old were you?” Cheska asked.
“Seventeen,” Ronnie said. “He said no, of course. My mum was screaming and praying to God to save us from their evil. He didn’t.” Ronnie’s voice grew hoarse. “They shot them.” The air in the car became charged with hatred and rage. Not just from me, but from Vera, from Ronnie, and by the tightness of her lips, Cheska too. “They brought them to their knees and killed them. Shot them for refusing to sell me.”
“Who would do that?” Cheska asked, her greenness to this life showing in spades. “What kind of loved one would sell their child? Their family?”
“I’d say at least half of that container were debt payments made by desperate or dogshite parents,” Ronnie said coldly.
“No,” Cheska said, but Ronnie nodded.
“Kidnappings, debt payments, runaways, prostitutes. You name it. They make people vulnerable, or prey on the already weak.”
Cheska looked at me and saw by my unmoved face that it was true. We stayed the fuck away from that kind of work, but it was fucking thriving in the London underworld. Dealing in sex and human trafficking was a one-way ticket to money. Lots of fucking money.
“Where …” Cheska straightened her shoulders. “Where did you go? What happened to you?”
“I was sold. Sold at a market—”
“A market?”
“Like cattle,” Vera spat, drying Ronnie’s cheeks with her hands. “Paraded in a ring for people to buy as slaves—for cleaning, fucking, or whatever they fucking wanted.” The famous Adley anger pulsed from Vera’s voice. She was pissed at what her girlfriend had gone through.
“Where did they take you?” Cheska asked. “Abroad?”
Ronnie made sure Cheska was looking right at her when she said, “Knightsbridge.”
“But … what?” Cheska whispered.
“I was kept in a cage, in a basement in Knightsbridge. I was fucked and beaten by a couple who had a thing for pain. For years I served them, gave them whatever they wanted from me. Until they went away on business and the person watching their house had a heart attack and died in front of me.”
“You ran,” Cheska said, pride for Ronnie in her voice.
Ronnie nodded. “I was from the East End. I knew only one family who could help me. Knew only one group of people who could keep me safe and maybe help me bring my captors to justice.” Ronnie smirked and looked right at me. I remembered the day she landed on our doorstep, nothing but skin and bone and covered in bruises, but telling us she’d do anything for us if we helped her. “I knew the Old Bill wouldn’t help me.” She smiled wider. “So, I came to the good guys.”
“The good guys,” Cheska echoed, and met my eyes. The look she was throwing my way made my fucking lungs burn. She knew. My bird knew because she’d done the fucking same.
“And they helped me. Helped me find the couple and let me get my revenge.”
“The couple … they didn’t tell you who sold you to them? The group?”
“It was a front,” Vera said. “A fucking labyrinth of cover-ups and dead ends. A well-oiled machine of deception.”
“My old man took her on and gave her work in one of our factories,” I said, and the colour slowly came back to Ronnie’s face, the fucking life. “Rose to intel when he found out she’d been a hacker as a kid. Vera’s old man took her under his wing after that.”
“She quickly caught my eye.” Vera kissed her bird on the lips. “Then I won her over.”
Cheska sighed, and it was heavy. “That’s what they would have done to me?” she said, the reality and gravity of her situation hitting home. “Those girls, if I hadn’t found you, if I hadn’t made it to you at your club …” She turned to me, and the expression on her face, the fucking look she was wearing, carved the fuck out of my soul, wrenched that crack in my chest wide open into a fuck-off gaping canyon. “The good guys,” she said, using Ronnie’s words. She shifted closer and pressed against me like she could melt us into one fucking person.
“They shot my dad and Hugo like they shot your parents,” Cheska said to Ronnie. She pressed her hand to my cheek. “But you saved me, Arthur. You saved me from that awful, heartbreaking life. You saved me from what Ronnie had to endure for too many years.” Cheska reached out and took Ronnie’s hand. “You are an inspiration.”
Ronnie kissed Cheska’s hand and then sat back, the fight leaking out of her. Ronnie met my eyes. “They’re stepping it up,” she said tiredly, referring to the traffickers. Ronnie darted a glance at Cheska, and I held my woman so fucking tight I thought she might not be able to breathe. They wanted Cheska.
They knew she was with me.
I didn’t know how, but they fucking knew she was with me.
Vera and Ronnie must have thought the same thing because the looks on their faces were thunderous. They liked Cheska. Fuck, they loved her, and not just because she was mine.
They wouldn’t get her. I fucking vowed to myself that they would never get her.
Cheska stayed glued to my side as we pulled up at the church. I held her fucking close as we went inside and sat down in the living room. One by one my family returned home, bringing their bags with them. We were all staying under this fucking roof until the cunts messing with us were caught.
No one spoke as we all sat around the room. Cheska sat on my lap. But it was the hairpin blades in her hands I watched, as she studied the gift Ronnie had given her. Her fingers danced over the steel and over the intricate filigree handle.
“I have braces for you too,” Vera said, nodding to the blades in Cheska’s hold.
“Braces?” Cheska asked.
“To conceal them.” Vera gestured to her sleeves and the bottom of her trousers. “They lie flat so no one will know you have them on you. Giving you time to plan your escape.”
Cheska nodded, but her eyes widened. Then I saw something flit across her face. Something I’d never seen on her before—a shadow of fucking black, a spiral of darkness.
Darkness that matched my own.
My phone sounded in my pocket. I pulled it out, expecting to see a message from Mikey telling me the police were bought off and the yard was cleared. Instead, it was a message sent by an encrypted number.
I opened it up as Eric and Charlie talked of what Mikey had found so far and the others listened. Cheska was busy turning her blades over and over in her hands, and I focused on the video that had been sent.
The video was silent and the quality was grainy. It took me a while to realise what I was looking at. But when the camera panned out and I saw a familiar thatched roof and manicured garden with a wooden fence, I knew.
I tensed, every fibre in my body braced to fucking snap. Cheska whipped her head to me, obviously feeling something in me change. My breathing came fast and hard as I watched some fucker in all black walk to the house that held every good childhood memory I ever had. And I watched as the cunt circled the cottage and poured petrol over the walls and the sides.
And I fucking watched as my mum walked out, checking a noise or something that she must have heard. I didn’t move a fucking muscle as I watched the cunt charge at her from his cover of darkness and slam her back into the house, locking her inside, barricading the door with a metal bar. My mum hammered on the glass in the door as they backed away. Then she ran to the living room window just as the flames ignited, trapping her inside.
“Babe?” Cheska’s soft voice said, but all I had was white noise in my head as the video showed the cottage starting to burn. Showed my mum running from the window when the heat became too much. Showed me her fucking terrified face as she backed away, the flames swallowing the house like it was being devoured by the jaws of hell itself.
The camera shut off and the room was plunged into silence. But my mum’s and Pearl’s voices were screaming in my head. Screaming for help, for the fucking help that never came as the house was torched, as my l
ittle sister, who was no doubt in bed, found my fucking mum in the thick black smoke of the cottage and held her tightly as the place burned and fell around them. As it fucking ripped the life from their lungs.
It wasn’t an accident.
Arson.
It was fucking arson.
They were murdered. Mum … Pearl … they were fucking murdered. I didn’t even feel myself pushing Cheska off my lap. I didn’t think anything as I gave myself over to fury and started ripping the room apart, bottles from the bar smashing as I wrenched them down, overturning tables and chairs and slicing them open with my knife.
They’d been murdered. My mum … my sister … Some fucker had—
I searched for my phone, finding it on the floor. I replayed the video, and …
There.
I dropped the fucking phone when I saw it. When the cunt holding the camera went to shut off the video … That circle. That bastard circle with the weird-as-shit V shape in the middle.
The brand.
I was shaking, shaking from the pure rage consuming me, drowning me in flames, from the fucking crack that Cheska had cleaved in me when she burst through the door of the club. The crack that had let the feelings seep into my blood and poison me with emotions, too many fucking emotions that I shouldn’t be feeling, that I didn’t want to ever fucking feel.
“Babe, please, you’re scaring me.” Cheska’s voice cut through the noise in my head, all the fucking noise of screaming, of my blood rushing around me in crushing rapids, and I could hear her, Cheska … Cheska … Cheska …
I threw my head back and roared, fucking roared, trying to get this cement from my stomach, the fucking tar in my blood that was sucking the life from me. I needed it all out. I needed the emotions and the feeling to fucking stop so I could take these fuckers out. So I could do my bloody job and not be swallowed up by the pain, the guilt, the fucking ripping apart of my soul.
Hands on my face wrenched me back to the present, to the room, trashed around me, and my family looking at me with concerned faces. Then—
