Turning on the engine, I looked in my rearview mirror as I put the car into reverse to make my way home. Seeing the man from before sitting in his car behind me, I remembered what I’d been thinking about before.
For weeks now I’d had the feeling that I was being watched or that there was someone else around. I was probably imagining things, but I was sure that I’d seen him before.
Doing a quick glance in the mirror again as I finished reversing and put the car into first gear, I met his cold eyes and quickly put my foot down on the accelerator.
Maybe Fin could help me?
Brett
It had been almost a week since the incident with Cole and Kali and I was still at the ranch. I could work from here, and my house in Houston just reminded me of Sabine, so I was using the time with my family to pass the days until I could go and get her and explain all of this shit.
“Brett…” Coleman burst through the front door making us all jump. He looked far from the normal calm and put together guy that we were all used to seeing. Walking up to me, he dropped some photos on the table. “Looks like our team in the UK forgot to tell us something.”
Looking down at the photos, I spread them out and smiled sadly when I saw Sabine. She was standing in front of a beautiful property, something that anyone would picture if they heard the words ‘rural Britain’. The smile quickly dropped, though, when I looked at the changes to her, specifically the slight increase to her middle section. I frowned as I looked closer at what she was holding in her hand, recognizing what it was immediately. In fact, the one Ebru had had done this morning was still on the table right in front of where I was currently sitting where Cole had dropped it for us all to look at.
Why was Sabine carrying one?
Did that mean…?
“She’s,” I choked. “She’s pregnant?”
The rest of the family’s chairs screeched across the floor as they all stood up at the same time to look over my shoulder.
“I don’t know how the fuck they missed putting this on the reports,” Coleman fumed as he paced around. “And why didn’t we see this in the previous photographs?”
“Dude, it takes time for the…” Cole gestured a huge bump in front of himself looking nervously at Ebru. She was larger than Maya had been by that stage, but she wasn’t exactly huge. “They’re all normal, and then boom.”
All of the women in the room glared at him, but I couldn’t stop staring at the tiny bump on Sabine. I knew that body, every beautiful inch of it, and that bump definitely hadn’t been there before. The fact that the woman that I loved, that I hadn’t been able to hold in what felt like forever, was carrying my baby and I hadn’t been there was strangling me. I wanted to be there for her, I was missing out on so much.
“We’re clearing this shit up, Coleman. It gets finished now and then I’m getting on a plane.”
“Brett, man, you gotta think straight. We can’t just finish it, we don’t know enough about who and where,” he argued.
“Fuck that,” I stood up and leaned across the table. “That is my woman. That is my child.”
We held eye contact long enough for him to know how far past done I was now.
“Okay,” he sighed. “We’ll step up security and I’ll get the guys to dig deeper. It’s impossible Brett, but we’ll do everything to keep y’all as safe as we can.”
“Focus on keeping her safe,” I pointed to the photo in front of me. “That’s what matters.”
“Brett,” Mom started and then quickly stopped when I spun around to look at her. Joining Coleman on the sighing, she turned back to the photographs.
“Wait, who’s this guy?” Cole pointed at a man in the last photo that was standing talking to Sabine with his hand on her stomach. It must have been stuck to the back of another one because I hadn’t seen it before now.
“What the fuck?” I was growling and gripping the table. He had his hand on Sabine and on my fucking baby.
“That’s, uh, that’s her neighbor.” Coleman sounded like it had been choked out of him.
"Meh, he looks like a poo-poo head,” Cole shrugged, as he picked up the photo. “I wouldn’t get upset about it. I mean, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and all that shit.”
“Yup, like radiation,” Tom said around a mouthful of one of the muffins Mom had made this morning.
All of us turned to look at him at the same time, but it was Coleman who eventually asked, “What part of you thought that was a useful thing to say?”
“You just sounded like a cliché’d inbreeder, man,” Cole added. “Who did radiation ever make stronger who wasn’t a television or movie character? I’ll bet you can’t name one person.”
Sitting down and looking through the photos, Tom thought as he chewed his muffin. Finally, he answered.
“Brewse Bannere!”
“You’re full of shit. He was the Hulk and fictional doesn’t count,” I sighed pinching the bridge of my nose. This was almost painful.
“Did too,” Tom nodded. “Look it up on the internet.”
I was about to lose my shit, when the cretin burst out laughing.
“Oh my God,” he held onto the table as he snorted. “You must be dying.” He punctuated it with a slap on my shoulder. “Aren’t you dying?” Another slap and the tears were pouring down his face with the hilarity he’d found in the situation. I was gonna kill him. “Dead!” Slap. “Dead, dead, dead,” each word was followed with a slap. “I mean, look at him,” he wheezed gesturing toward the photo with the neighbor who had his hands on Sabine.
My parents weren’t fools and they knew that I didn’t give a shit that it was my brother, I was getting close to the point where I would kill him. So, Mom quickly dragged him from his chair and yanked him in the direction of the kitchen.
As he was pulled out the room, all we could hear was him laughing and repeating, “Dead!”
“Get the fucking plane ready,” I snapped at Coleman. “We leave as soon as fucking possible!”
Making my way toward the back door, I intended to go and get whatever shit I’d need. Fortunately, that was also the direction that Tom had also gone in, and as he yelled what would be his final, “Dying!” I picked up my pace and launched myself at him.
Just as I hit the back of him, there was a distant cracking noise followed by a burning in my abdomen.
We both fell to the ground, me groaning and Tom squealing. Rolling to the side, I put my hand on the burning feeling in my gut and felt something hard under my hand.
“He’s been shot,” Coleman’s voice broke through the ringing in my ears. “Get out there and find him! Someone call an ambulance.”
There was a rustling as Tom felt for the phone in his back pocket. “I’ll do it…what the fuck happened to my phone?”
Typical asshole. I’ve been shot and he’s moaning about his phone. I was just about to scream at him when Coleman growled, “That’s a bullet hole through it!”
“What the fu…”
“Um, Tom, did you start your period or something?” Tom was interrupted by Cole.
My head hit the ground with a thud as the pain took over my midsection, making me pant. I could hear Coleman on his phone talking to the family’s helicopter pilot instead of the emergency services.
He must have seen something on Tom just as he ended the call, because he said, “What the shit? Bend over.”
“Fuck you, man! I haven’t fallen for that trick since I was fifteen.”
If I could have laughed at the silence that followed that, I would have, but I was pretty certain that I was dying.
"I’m not even going to go down that route and ask you why anyone would tell you to do that, but right now I’m fucking serious. Bend over!” Coleman’s voice was at that deep growl that told me he was now seriously pissed off. There was more rustling and some squeaks from who I assumed was Tom. “You’ve been shot too.”
“I’ve been what?”
“Shot.”
“Where?
Ow, stop touching it. That hurts!” Tom squealed before it must have sunk in. “I’ve been shot?” Coleman grunted as Cole muttered something. “Oh.”
A loud thud and two deep sighs followed it.
"Is it just me who finds the fact that he got shot in the ass funny?” Cole asked whoever was around us at that point. I could hear Mom trying to get to me and being held back by someone else. It was probably for the best that she didin’t see what happened next.
The mental image of Tom being shot in the ass and fainting with the knowledge hit me and I started to laugh causing the hard thing under my hand to move slightly as my stomach tightened. It pushed up against my hand and more of the warm sticky stuff that I’d felt rushed out through my fingers. The pain and the disgust was too much and I joined my brother in la la land.
Eight hours later….
The bullet had only gone into the fat of my stomach so, although it hurt like a bitch, it had been easy for them to remove it and sew me up. I had antibiotics and painkillers to take, but I wanted to keep a clear head so I was adamant that I wasn’t going to touch them.
Tom had also been lucky. The bullet had hit his phone before going through the fat of his ass cheek and hitting me. He’d been playing on his injury after they’d fixed him up, until Coleman came in and told us that the security detail on Sabine had picked up an ‘unknown’ following her.
That had been the final straw for me, and the journey that we’d been planning for first thing in the morning was happening now.
Because we were travelling to the U.K., even though we were on a private jet, we had to clear the normal airport security, so we were all in line waiting to go through.
“It hurts,” Tom whined beside me, shifting from foot to foot. If my side didn’t hurt so much, I’d laugh every time he had to walk. He looked like he’d been Brutus’ cell block bitch as he waddled with his knees bent and his ass padded on one side.
At the moment, I was too focused on the airport security agent who was watching us approach, taking in Tom’s awkward walk and the bulge in the back of his pants.
“Shut up,” I snapped. The more attention he drew to himself, the more likely it was that we would be held up by him getting a fucking cavity search. The little bitch wouldn’t fly commercial, either, so we couldn’t leave him behind. Added onto that issue was the fact that there would be no one there to look after the little shit, seeing as how they had all decided to join me. So, I needed him to straighten his act out – literally!
Just as we got to the conveyer belt, dropped our jackets, bags and shit onto it, and walked up to the metal detector, he broke his twenty-second silence.
“You have no idea how sore my ass is,” he whined, again. “I mean,” he bent over even further, “I took the full thing. You only got the tip!”
The agents in front of us stopped and looked at each other before looking back at us.
“Um, passports please?” The bigger one of them asked, watching Tom as he hobbled behind me.
Handing them over, I waited for the inevitable to happen.
Looking closely at all of the details in the passports, the agent looked back at me and waved me through before turning back to Tom and taking in his bent form. “Could you come with me, please, Sir.”
“I hope they have enough lube!” Cole yelled from his spt behind us in the queue as Tom waddled after the agent toward the ‘special room’.
I fucking hoped that they didn’t. The little bitch deserved it!
And now we’d be delayed until he finished getting fingered by the guy with hands the size of an elephant’s foot. Maybe if I told the pilot to just leave they’d go back home?
Looking back at my family, I noticed that Mom and Gram’s narrowed eyes were watching me and decided that I could face that delay caused by Tom’s pat down. Only a fool would take those two on.
Chapter Five
Brett
I was in a living hell. I’d been stuck on an eleven-hour flight from Houston to Bristol with the family from hell – mine.
The whole time Tom had been bitching about the pain in his ass and had ended up lying face down in the aisle of the plane. Gramps was, once again, moaning about how he shouldn’t have had the left-over pizza in the fridge before we left home. Thankfully there was more than one toilet on our plane so there was no risk of me going in after him.
We were about an hour into the flight when Gram yelled out a question from the puzzle book that she had been playing with.
“What’s the capital of Spain?” I had been too busy focusing on breathing through the pain in my side and planning what I was going to say to Sabine when I saw her, so I didn’t answer. Everyone else was caught up in either the kids, sleeping or shitting. “It looks like it begins with an M,” she pressed.
“Mordor,” Tom slurred from his prone position, blocking the aisle.
“Um? Oh yes, I can make that fit,” she muttered as she scratched the page and scribbled it down.
Cole chose that moment to come and sit next to me, letting out a tired sigh.
“You decided what to say to her?”
Hoping that my shrug was answer enough, I leaned back and listened as he started throwing ideas at me. None of them helpful, including taking Sabine a Happy Meal because that was what worked at the moment with Ebru. Once he realized that I didn’t really care what he had to say, he sat back silently.
“Shut up,” I growled, looking out of the window at the sky. Couldn’t this fucking thing go any faster?
“What?” He asked, sounding confused. “I didn’t even say anything. I was just sitting here minding my own business.”
“You were thinking and the sound’s fucking annoying!”
“Don’t forget the smell of burning,” Ren added as he walked past us on the way to the toilet. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been paying attention to Gramps shitutation and walked into the toilet that he’d only vacated a couple of minutes prior. “You can smell that a mile awa…oh Jesus Christ! What…who…oh my God!” The gagging sounds filled the space. “Oh Jesus, I can’t throw up. I’d have to put my head in the toilet and it’s worse the closer you get,” he got out through the gagging.
I was about to smile when the smell that had escaped through the open door hit me and it took everything in me not to join my brother. I just knew that any retching or puking would make my side hurt even more, and I couldn’t take the painkillers because I needed a clear head.
“Close the door,” Cole squealed, running in Ren’s direction and accidentally standing on Tom’s ass.
Finding the barf bag that was in the storage space beside me, I opened it and started to breathe slowly into it hoping that it would filter the air. It worked, but then so did the entire can of air freshener that the attendant sprayed.
Now, now it was four in the morning and we were waiting for the cars that we’d called ahead for and reserved to arrive. The ladies were all huddled behind us with the sleeping baby Crystal, as the men all stood with the hire guy who had come in specially for us. He had sent three of his men to get the vehicles for us and we’d spent the time while we waited trying to figure out what he was saying to us.
As we all nodded at another question, I watched his goatee blowing in the wind. I could see the heads beside me all moving as the long tentacles of the goatee, that reached his stomach, moved in the gusts of wind. It was blowing behind him, and one of the tentacles broke free of the floating mass and went up his nostril. He hardly registered it as he continued talking to us, gesturing as he spoke with a huge grin on his face. The chunk of beard stayed firmly up his nose the whole time, not budging an inch.
“I think it’s wrapping itself around his brain,” Cole muttered beside me, and I was inclined to agree. It looked like more was going in now every time he took a breath.
Just then, he snorted and the chunk came out and went into his mouth.
I finally discovered how painful throwing up with a bullet wound in my side was as I just made it to the bushes be
side us just as the cars pulled up. I had company in my humiliation though as Tom waddled up beside me and threw up too.
After a lot of dry heaving, I took the bottle of water that Dad was holding out to me and rinsed my mouth out.
“You might wanna chew this,” Ebru muttered, passing me a piece of gum. “Your breath smells like mouldy ass. You’re meant to be winning Sabine back, not melting her face off.”
“What the fuck are these?” Gramps asked, looking at the vehicles that had pulled up in disgust.
We’d been given people carriers, which were the biggest vehicles they did, and there were a couple cars for the security that would be with us throughout the trip. I was leaving all of that shit to Coleman to figure out and deal with. Call me a dickhead, but Sabine and my baby, and it was my baby, were my priority.
Once we’d loaded them up with our bags, and the women had gotten in the cars, Cole decided that he was the driver for ours.
“Right, let me just get the chair adjusted and…” he’d gotten into the left side of the car and had lifted his hands up to grab the wheel, encountering nothing but air as he grabbed around, valiantly still searching for the wheel. “What? What’s happened here? Where’s the wheel?”
“Over there shit for brains,” Ebru snapped from behind him as she ate a bag of chips and opened a Kit Kat. There had been vending machines in the airport and because she was ‘starving’, we’d had to load up for the hour-long journey to where Sabine was staying in Appledore.
Looking over to the other side of the car at where the wheel was, Cole still hadn’t figured out what was wrong. “Why is it there? That doesn’t make any sense?”
“They drive on the opposite side of the road,” I murmured, starting to feel a bit worried about trusting him to get us there in one piece. We were meant to be leading the way for the others. Plus, I was already injured; would I be able to survive a car accident?
After a couple more minutes listening to him discuss how fucked up it was, Cole finally walked around to the right side of the car and turned the engine on. Meeting Coleman’s eyes, he nodded and moved into the front passenger seat as I decided to get in the back where it was safer.
Providence Series Books 5-7 Page 4