This time, when he walked inside his place, there wasn’t a stale odor from being locked up for so long, or decades-old furniture that should have never been bought in the first place. The furniture was modern and clean, including a fucking rug that she had spent a fortune on just because it looked nice.
But if it made her happy, that was all that mattered in the end.
The crackle of wood drew his gaze to the fireplace, mesmerized for a moment by the flames licking at the iron cage, but before he could get too lost in it, Iris came stumbling out of the kitchen, a mixing bowl in her hands and flour covering nearly every inch of her.
“What’s this?” he asked, one corner of his mouth tilting up as he drew closer.
“I’m making cookies,” she said as if the answer was obvious, tipping the bowl in his direction to show him the contents. “Chocolate chips, Macadamia nuts, white chocolate, and a pinch of salt.”
His teeth hurt at the thought, but he had learned rather quickly not to question her food choices. She wasn’t just eating for herself anymore.
Unbidden, he lifted his hand to rest against the curve of her stomach, feeling a welcome sort of contentment as he felt the wee bump. He was almost as bad as she was, wanting to feel every change and watch as the baby grew.
At twelve weeks along, he would have thought he wouldn’t need to do this every time he left and came back, but it was a reminder that he had everything in the world to look forward to when he was home.
“How’re my girls?” he asked, pressing a kiss to her forehead, sweeping his thumb across the expanse of her stomach.
“You’re still convinced it’s a girl?” she asked in return, smiling up at him, shyly tucking her hair behind her ears.
Pregnancy was a good look for her. It did crazy things to him. “Let’s hope for your sake. I couldn’t imagine how you’d handle two of me.”
He had meant the words as a joke, but Iris set her cookie dough mixture to the side before reaching for him. “I would love to have a miniature you walking around.”
“Yeah?”
“Of course.” Her gaze softened as she said, “You’re going to be a great father, Synek. The best. You have all this love to give and he—”
“Or she.”
She rolled her eyes, though she did smile now. “They will know it.”
Synek had thought of a million ways his life would go the day he set out from his childhood home in the East End. He’d expected the pain of the Wraiths, the grueling training of the Den, and the drunken recklessness that followed, but never in all his musings had he ever imagined he would find Iris.
The love of his life.
The soon-to-be mother of his child.
His one.
He wasn’t sure what he had done to deserve her or their life together, but he was thankful. And grateful.
“Let’s go feed you,” he whispered before kissing the top of her head and leading her back into the kitchen.
When the fight was over, and the dust settled, Synek had finally found his happy place.
CODA
The Final Episode
Heavy is the head that wears the crown.
Silence surrounded Uilleam as he sat on the balcony overlooking his property, trying desperately to find solace in his surroundings. Wales was beautiful this time of year. When the frost was beginning to melt, and the first signs of spring started to form.
He was glad, for once, that he had the foresight to restore Runehart Castle to its former glory, that his solitude wouldn’t be as miserable as he’d first expected it to be. This was the one place in the world that no part of his Den had touched. Even Skorpion, who had been with him from the very beginning, had ever stepped foot inside this place.
Until a year ago, the castle had remained abandoned and collecting dust, the walls crumbling and vines climbing up the sides. A reflection of what the Runehart family had become.
Now, it was all he had left.
Three days.
It had taken her a matter of three days to destroy everything.
Three days when he hadn’t been thinking clearly and had forgotten who he was. But that had always been his conundrum with Karina—he didn’t think when he was with her. He wasn’t cold and jaded and lacking empathy.
He felt.
And she had used that against him. It was laughable. Had he been anyone else, knowing that should he have listened to her, he wouldn’t be here, run off to lick his wounds in private. If he had left her be instead of having his mercenaries—former mercenaries—bring her to him, he might not have called them all in and given her exactly what he hadn’t realized she needed.
Opportunity.
With her finally in his grasp, he hadn’t considered anything else.
Like how he’d needed to have Winter track any incoming flights for passenger manifestos that didn’t match.
Or that he’d need more security to watch over his business properties to ensure no one who wasn’t supposed to be didn’t carefully walk the ground until an optimal spot for a bomb presented itself and it was planted without anyone being the wiser.
If he had listened, she wouldn’t have set fire to it all.
Every property he owned, over various cities, in three different countries.
She burned it all.
If that hadn’t been enough, the act had brought so much attention to him that he’d had to shut those locations down permanently, and no amount of money or prestige would get them up and running again. Their covers were blown.
And because of the scrutiny on the bombs, it had driven the few mercenaries still left working for him underground and unreachable.
For the first time in a long time, Uilleam had no protection. No one to call and aid him. No one to barter and call in favors to do his bidding.
He was back where he began all those years ago, except now he had far more enemies.
And worse than the enemies he knew were the enemies he didn’t.
It was a game well played.
But even as he knew it was probably in his best interest to avoid New York for the foreseeable future, he couldn’t bring himself to stay away. Not when the answers—the truth—still eluded him.
Uilleam stepped out of the back of the cab after tipping the man, watching him drive off and disappear around the corner before he approached the brownstone with police caution tape tied off in front of it. He barely spared it a glanced before slipping beneath it and twisting the knob with one gloved hand to let himself inside.
The acrid scent of soot still hung in the air, but Uilleam ignored it as he ventured farther into the house, his gaze scanning over the charred remains of what had been inside.
But even as he looked around, he didn’t see the present; he saw what once was.
He remembered the jewel-toned armchairs that sat perpendicular to each other, a dark-stained coffee table dividing them from the velvet couch that had once sat there.
That was one of the aspects of this place she had been most excited about, his Karina. She had talked fondly of the decorating she wanted to do, of how she had always envisioned their home. Now, he wondered whether that excitement had been real or had it all been a part of the image she’d created to trick him into loving her.
He remembered the very first night they’d spent in the kitchen, the cake she’d set in the oven baking while he fucked her on top of the dining table, both of them covered in flour.
It almost felt like a lifetime ago that he had been that carefree.
That he had been happy.
Uilleam hadn’t been happy for a long time, just fleeting moments of contentment and usually at someone else’s expense. But in all this time, there was only one thing his unhappiness hadn’t touched.
Here.
Their home.
The one place he could never bring himself to destroy. Though the living room floor had been desecrated, the rest of it had held such fond memories that he couldn’t bring himself to burn it as he did everything else
that brokered such strong emotions in him.
Uilleam walked through each room on the ground floor, following the fire from the back door upstairs and through each of the rooms on this floor.
But as he came to the last room, he paused. Unlike the others inside the brownstone, this one’s door was closed. Curious considering every other door had been open to cause as much damage as possible.
It only took a moment for his mind to conjure what this room had been—or rather, what it would have ultimately become in the future.
Was that his own heartbeat he heard in his ears?
Echoes of the past?
Was his hand shaking?
He started forward, drawing in a noisy breath as he twisted the knob and let himself inside. Though soot scorched the floor, the room itself was left mostly untouched by the damage done outside it.
The light gray walls were nearly flawless, the floors that dark shade of brown that was missing from the rest of the house, and sitting right in the middle of the floor was a stuffed white rabbit.
In any other room here, he might have thought it was merely a token, that she had left it to ensure that he knew she was responsible for the wreckage. In any other room, it would have meant nothing.
But here, it told him everything.
And even as he thought it couldn’t be possible, he heard her voice whispering in his ear.
“What do you think of this room?” she’d asked as she walked in ahead of him, a brilliant smile on her face as she spun a quick circle, her arms outstretched.
Uilleam had been on his phone at the time, lost in whatever deal he had been making. “It’s as nice as any other room.”
“Nice enough for a nursery, do you think?”
That one word had managed to grant her his undivided attention. And even as he knew she was joking from her light laughter, the seed had been planted. He was imagining what their life would be like, and even with a little one that would be theirs.
A family.
“If we did,” she’d said with a mischievous wink, “I’d have the crib right here in the very center of the room. D’you want to know why?”
He’d smiled, walking to her before pulling her into his embrace, lost in the fantasy with her. “Tell me,” he said.
“Because they would be the center of our universe. And you know what my first gift would be?” she asked, her voice gone softer now, and maybe … maybe the idea wasn’t just a wistful thought but rather something she desperately wanted. “A little white rabbit.”
He refused to believe his own memories. It was merely his mind trying to attach meaning where there was none, but whether half of him refused to believe what was right in front of him, it was still there.
Within his reach.
Uilleam counted every step he took until he reached the center of the room where the animal was sitting. He counted the breaths he took as he bent to pick up the stuffed toy and held it in his hands.
It just wasn’t possible.
If the blood hadn’t been swimming in his ears, he might have heard the front door open, or the soft footsteps that brought someone to the very room he was in.
Had his time finally come?
Was this where he was meant to die?
“Guess she kept her promise.”
Uilleam turned to face the man in the doorway, taking in his bruised face, the evidence of a recent shave, and the slight gauntness to the man’s features. He might have looked older, but the years had been kind to him during his captivity.
“She said you were dead,” Uilleam said, too exhausted and too dead inside to say much more.
He was dangerously close to thinking he was balancing on the precipice of his own sanity, and if what he held was what he thought it meant, he would topple over face first and no one would be able to save him.
Grimm shrugged, stepping farther into the room before he placed a cigarette between his lips.
“Yeah, well … she probably wishes I was.”
Clutching the rabbit in his hands until his knuckles blanched, Uilleam stared at the mercenary he hadn’t seen for nearly half a decade. After everything she had done, and everything she had taken from him, he still didn’t understand her end goal.
Had it been him, Grimm would have never walked out of wherever he’d been held. He would have died for the cause.
And considering she had taken Grimm from the very beginning and left him alive for so long … it didn’t make sense.
What was the reason?
“Why?” Uilleam asked, unable to voice the jumbled mess of his thoughts. “Why did she take you?”
Grimm pulled out a lighter, his expression unreadable, but there was something lingering in the man’s eyes—the way he too stared at the white rabbit in Uilleam’s hand as if it held all the answers. “I tried to kill her.”
Such beautifully poisonous words. Even as he was eager to hear anything she thought to tell him, he wasn’t sure he was capable of having her taunt him any further. He was already standing on the precipice. He wasn’t ready to tip over.
Uilleam flinched, the only thing he was capable of doing at hearing those words, even as rage followed on its heels. But he knew, though Grimm had yet to say, that it didn’t end there. And by the time the man finished, he was sure he wasn’t going to like what he heard.
“The Omerti job,” Grimm went on, his tone flat. Resigned.
He remembered the job well. It was his first after the “Kingmaker” had made its mark in the underground, and he was becoming known as the man who could fix any problem. But on the same token, he’d had to prove even more that he was formidable.
That no one would be able to walk all over him.
Respect could be earned later, he’d reasoned back in those days. It was people’s fear he wanted.
Yes, Uilleam remembered Douglas Omerti very well.
“What about him?” Uilleam asked, trying to remember the details of that day. Of what he’d been doing.
Grimm might have been able to provide some clues as to what happened, but it was doubtful that Karina had shared with him everything. No, she wanted Uilleam to remember. She’d demanded it constantly.
What? What did she want him to remember?
“He was at the restaurant, like you said,” Grimm went on before dragging in a lungful of smoke as only a nicotine-addict could. “But he wasn’t alone.”
I called you, and you didn’t answer … you said you were busy.
He could hear her voice in his head, loud enough that she might as well have been standing across the room from him, watching as he discovered the truth that had eluded him.
“I was a different man then,” Uilleam muttered to himself, shaking his head.
Rejecting the truth that was fast approaching.
Grimm continued, as if the words being uttered had weighed heavily on him. “The rule back then was no survivors. No witnesses. But she wasn’t like the others …”
Uilleam’s stomach twisted, his thoughts racing, blood coursing through his veins.
August fifteenth was the day she said she called.
The day he hadn’t been bothered to hear what was so important for her to say.
Eight months, nearly, from the last time he’d seen her.
He held that rabbit tighter in his hand.
And the truth … the truth was so much fucking worse.
“She was sitting when I pulled the trigger, her back to me—that’s why I didn’t realize it was her until she fell.”
“Don’t,” Uilleam said before he could continue. “She wasn’t … she couldn’t have been preg—” The word was lost somewhere in the back of his throat, trapped behind a knot of emotion swelling so big he could hardly take a breath.
He couldn’t even bring himself to look in Grimm’s direction, knowing what he would see in the man’s gaze.
Pity, most likely. And a pain that Uilleam wasn’t quite ready to face.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Two word
s that meant nothing.
Two words that only brought a pain so acute to Uilleam’s chest, he leaned against the wall, afraid his legs would give out from beneath him.
Grimm didn’t have to go on for him to know what came next.
He’d lived it.
He was now suffering the consequences of his actions.
And as he looked down at his hands where he held the little white rabbit and understood the gravity of what it meant, Uilleam broke.
*
“You do not allow something as trite as love stand in the way of your goal. We are Ashworths, Karina. We take what is owed. We don’t bargain.”
When Karina was just a girl, Mother always said weakness was for those who didn’t know any better. In her mind, it was merely a construct of one’s own imagination.
She grew up believing there was no greater failure than someone who allowed themselves to be weakened by something as simple as matters of the heart. Of the flesh.
But she hadn’t known—she couldn’t have known—just how quickly and deeply she could feel for another person.
Then she hadn’t understood what grief really meant.
For a while, Karina had believed that. She believed that only those who weren’t capable of greatness succumbed to feeling helpless.
That was before she understood what grief really meant. How it could claw its way into her insides and ensure she never felt anything other than pain.
She stared at the grainy 3D image in her hands, her name and birthday in the top left-hand corner, as well as the date in which the rendering was captured. It was one of her few prized possessions she took with her everywhere.
After all, the little face depicted in it was the reason she wore white and would until the day she died.
Sitting back with a sigh, Karina watched the seat belt light flicker off a moment before she heard the soft click of heels on the carpeted floor of the jet.
A moment later, the woman they belonged to sat in the seat opposite her. Before the woman could get a look at what she held, Karina tucked the image away, folding her hands back in her lap, her gaze going to the window.
“Yes, Mother,” the woman said, her gaze trained on Karina even as she carried on her conversation with her mobile still to her ear. “I’m bringing her home now.”
Den of Mercenaries: Volume Two Page 76