Diego: (Brighton Bad Boys 3)

by Tilly Delane

  “So, what happens next?” he asks me.

  “I don’t know,” I say honestly. “This wasn’t the plan.”

  Rowan shrugs.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he says. “It is what it is. Give me a hand.”

  The last bit is aimed at Zoltan, and together they shift Cormac onto the bed, while Piotr comes and stands with me.

  Once they’ve got Cormac on the mattress, Rowan secures the shackle on Cormac’s ankle and pockets the key.

  He looks down at the body then puts a reassuring hand on my shoulder. I’m amazed at his calmness.

  “It’s the best we can do, K. Let’s get out of here and get these kids home.”

  But the kids shake their heads.

  “I can’t,” Piotr says, and points at his necklace. “If I go outside the fence, it will explode.”

  “A perimeter collar bomb?” Rowan asks with a deep frown. “Really? I doubt it. They’re a Hollywood myth.”

  “Not to Brian Wells they weren’t,” I hear Diego say in my ear.

  “That was on a timer,” Rowan retorts as he comes over and looks at the metal snake around Piotr’s neck.

  He gently slips his hand under the collar and Piotr flinches.

  “Chill,” Rowan says.

  Zoltan makes a growling sound and bolts over to us but stops dead when Rowan starts running the metal through his hands.

  “The lock is cracked already,” Rowan mutters.

  “Don’t you fucking dare, you arsehole,” Silas’ voice suddenly joins the mix with a panicked undertone.

  I can tell by Silas’ breathing that he’s on the move, to do his thing, and that he’s scared. He can’t see us, but apparently he can hear his brother think. I’ve known Silas for seven months and I’ve never seen him scared. Not even when he was going into a fight that he knew beforehand was supposed to end in his death.

  “You put K in danger, and I hunt you down, arsehole,” Diego chips in. “Also, time’s ticking. R2 will be outside soon.”

  “You two, get up the ladder,” Rowan says to Zoltan and me, completely ignoring his brother and my man.

  But Zoltan shakes his head.

  “I’m not leaving without him,” he says.

  The boys exchange a look before Piotr’s hand comes up and curls around Rowan’s arm.

  “Let’s go up. I can go up, nothing happens,” he says softly. “And I’d like to see the sun.”

  Out of all the things that have happened today, it is this image that burns itself into my retinas. The slight, stark-naked teen curling his hand around the massive black-clad arm of the balaclavaed giant of a man, against the backdrop of a dungeon, telling him he is prepared to die.

  Rowan sighs, and with one last glance around goes to pick up the bolt cutters.

  The muted sound of the dogs barking reaches us as we silently climb the ladder.

  Then they stop.

  Piotr

  I trust them.

  I trust them to take care of Zet after I’m gone.

  I still trust them, even when we come out of the barn and step into the orange glow of the setting sun, squinting at the light we haven’t seen in so long, and I see a third man in a balaclava, kneeling in the kennel with the dogs.

  Or maybe it’s because I see him with them that I start trusting.

  The pair of Dobermans haven’t been here that long. They came a little after the other dogs went, and I’ve never seen those two relaxed, until now. They are lying on the ground, one on each side of the crouching man, being gentled by his hands. They bark again briefly when they spot us, but he shushes them, and they still. Neither óriás nor ròka ever managed to shut them up with just a word.

  The big guy tells Zet and the new kid to stand with the dog guy, but while the new kid goes across without hesitation, Zet remains by my side.

  “Honestly, kid,” the big guy growls at Zet. “We gotta get a move on. Go!”

  I turn to Zet and put a hand on his heart. Tears pool in his eyes, but then he bends down to kiss my forehead and finally moves away.

  I wish I was the kind of brave that meant I was calm.

  I’m not.

  My heart is hammering in my chest when the big guy turns the collar, so the lock is at the back of my neck.

  “I don’t want to accidentally nip anything important,” the big guy rumbles. “So I gotta stand behind you. You ready, kid?”

  I turn my face up into the sun for a moment, before I nod.

  “You gotta bow your head,” he says from a little way off, the lengths of a pair of bolt cutters away.

  “Okay,” I whisper and press my chin to my chest.

  I feel the cold metal of the cutter’s mouth slide between my skin and the collar.

  And then I wait.

  Diego

  I was supposed to stay in the van, but there is a point when stuff goes sideways where you don’t give a fuck about the plan any longer.

  That moment came for me as soon as I realised why Silas was getting so agitated with his brother. I spent so much time with those two arseholes in my life, I can read the subtext and all.

  So I left the van and entered the house to join the party. I arrive at the back door to the yard just as Rowan turns his face away and squeezes the bolt cutters shut.

  Nothing happens.

  Literally.

  There may be a break in the collar now, but it stays on the boy’s neck.

  Rowan lets the cutters sink and steps back up to Piotr. I see Zoltan being held in place by Kalina as he tries to move across to his...what?

  Friend?

  Lover?

  Cellmate?

  Across the yard from us, Rowan examines the gap in the collar and after a minute gently slides it around, so the opening sits at Piotr’s throat.

  “One more time,” I hear him rumble quietly in my earpiece, and I see the kid nod.

  The boy is shaking like a leaf and a thin stream of pee has started trickling down his leg.

  They assume their positions again.

  This time, Rowan doesn’t just avert his eyes when he pushes the cutter handles together. Through the eyeholes in his mask, I can see him scrunching his eyelids shut. And then he cuts.

  The collar falls away in two pieces and they clonk onto the ground.

  Zoltan rips loose from Kalina and runs across to Piotr and scoops him up in his arms.

  I catch Kalina’s eye as we all unfreeze, and she points resolutely into the direction of the exit.

  I think I might get a thorough bollocking from my girlfriend later for breaking protocol.

  But as I wipe a tear from my eye while I move back through the dark hallway, I know it was worth it.

  Kalina

  Diego disappears from the back door porch and a minute or two later, I hear him in my ear.

  “Good job, guys. Idiot check. Get out. R2 is here.”

  Silas is the first to move and already gone by the time I have collected my bicycle from where Cormac dumped it outside the back door. I join Rowan, Piotr and Zoltan where they are still standing. Rowan is looking at the two pieces of the collar, which he’s picked up off the floor. Zoltan is still hugging Piotr, soothing him with long strokes over his naked back, while Piotr carries on shaking.

  “Let’s go,” I say to Rowan.

  Still nobody is moving.

  “Come on, kids, time’s ticking,” Rowan says, pocketing the collar pieces. “There is a car outside for you. And clothes. Time for you to put some fucking clothes on.”

  Zoltan gently pushes Piotr off him.

  Piotr just stares at Rowan, frozen.

  I can’t even imagine what’s going on in his mind right now.

  It’s Zoltan who snaps him out of it.

  He cups his face and tilts his head away from Rowan until he’s got eye contact. Then he leans down and presses his forehead against Piotr’s.

  “Let’s go, Guppi. We’re free,” he whispers against his lips.

  But as I watch their naked backs, wheeling my
bicycle behind them through the hallway of a dead pervert and his dead goon brother, I can’t help but think that they’re never really going to be free.

  Diego

  Those fucking dogs.

  In the preparations, we had the most disagreements about what to do about those fucking dogs.

  Nobody wanted to kill them, nobody wanted to leave them behind to potentially starve if the O’Brien brothers weren’t found any time soon, but nobody knew quite what to do with them either.

  The only one out of us who was even prepared to go near them was Silas.

  Silas has always had that Riddick thing going on. He can basically communicate with animals, though he’d never be dickhead enough to say so. I have no idea how he does it, but by all accounts, it took him exactly two minutes to convince those hounds of hell to roll over. So now they’re sitting with him in the van behind Rowan and me, yapping happily as he gives them treats and gushes over them.

  Like we don’t have enough other problems. Like we don’t have a whole load of other, inanimate evidence to get shot off, we now also have a couple of, presumably micro-chipped and registered to either Cormac or Callum, live dogs on our hands.

  I fucking hate my best friend sometimes.

  But that’s only the half of it.

  While we waited for Raven, Kalina and the boys to clear away and put sufficient distance between them and us, we’ve been sitting in the van and Rowan’s filled us in on everything that didn’t work out like it was supposed to. Which is almost everything, other than the Callum part.

  Rowan seems totally chilled about it, though.

  “Stop stressing, Diego,” he says, twirling one of the pieces of Piotr’s collar in his hands. “With a bit of luck, they won’t find these motherfuckers until they’re already goo. And then they can draw their own conclusions. If they can even be bothered. One brother shackled up and strangled with his own chain in the basement, another overdosed. And what I know of the people, they won’t want the police to dig deeper, and they won’t go after us. There are thousands of Zoltans and Piotrs. Somewhere in the world, another boy is getting put in chains right about fucking now and a little girl is getting raped for the first of a thousand times.” He sighs, before he grins, cynically. “And, honestly, if the people ever find out about your girlfriend’s skills, they’re more likely to recruit her to do more jobs like this. She’s good.”

  I nod.

  “She’s a keeper,” I admit, more reassured by his words than I will ever admit.

  “Yup,” Rowan and Silas say in one breath and laugh.

  Rowan puts his seatbelt on and nods to indicate I should start the engine.

  “Come on, last leg. They must be nearly at Sheena’s now. Now where are those dogs going, Silas?”

  “Arlo,” Silas responds, thoughtfully. “He lives out in the sticks by Lewes somewhere, in a yurt in his nan’s garden. It’s his big dream, a yurt business. It’s perfect. I’m sure he’ll sit on them for us for a few weeks, until we tell him to take them to a rescue. He can claim he found them in the woods.”

  “Living in a yurt? Fuck me. Well, that explains why he was so happy camping out in a sheep barn. He was practically going up in the world,” I quip, relieved that we have somewhere to dump them. “You asked him already?”

  “Nah, I only just thought of it.”

  I groan.

  “You kill me, guys!”

  “Come on,” Rowan nudges me. “Let’s get rid of stuff and things and then go home, order some pizza. Or Chinese. Or whatever those boys fancy.”

  “Yeah, let’s definitely make sure Mum doesn’t cook for them,” Silas leans in from the backseat. “Imagine surviving two years of hell, only to be poisoned by Sheena O’Brien.”

  It’s a lame joke, but we laugh about it until our eyes leak water as we drive away, quite literally into the sunset.

  Epilogue I - 9 Months Later

  Diego

  In hindsight, I think we had more luck than sense last summer.

  Rowan’s predictions were exceeded beyond our wildest hopes. Nobody missed Callum or Cormac for three months. Not even their mothers.

  And the people truly didn’t appear to care or didn’t have a clue where their pervert show had been coming from.

  By the time a postman finally became suspicious of the house, Callum and Cormac weren’t goo, as Rowan had so delicately put it, but mostly dried up bone soup.

  It wasn’t possible, the coroner said, to conclusively determine cause of death, or even time of death, on either of them, though he put forward some very accurate guesses.

  Due to the paraphernalia, both sexual and drug-related, that the police found on the premises, the presumption was made that the brothers had been in an incestuous relationship with one another with sadomasochistic tendencies, and that Cormac had died in a sex game gone wrong, before Callum overdosed on a lethal mix of meths and morphine. It helped that on top of a substantial amount of meths, the cops also found GHB and poppers at the house, and that there wasn’t a single witness statement that didn’t call their relationship ‘weird’.

  The case ran in the national gutter press for a couple of days, but it was mostly the local paper that ran story after salacious story on the O’Brien brothers.

  The legitimate sides of Cecil O’Brien’s business dealings suffered so badly in the fallout, no matter how often he publicly distanced himself from his sons, he eventually sold his gym and left Brighton, taking most of the rest of his brood with him. If he still has dealings with the people, nobody knows. But my city has been a better place since.

  Though we will never know how deeply the corruption here truly runs.

  The police must’ve swept the old air raid shelter for fingerprints and DNA, and part of me believes that somewhere in forensics someone must know that Piotr and Zoltan were there at some point. That the chain Cormac was strangled with had Zoltan’s DNA and prints all over it. But such evidence hasn’t surfaced, and the boys’ names have never been mentioned in connection with the case.

  I hope it stays that way.

  For the boys’ wellbeing.

  Piotr is with his parents, slipped back into his life in Germany three days after his rescue and with the least amount of fanfare possible, as organised by the genius I was honoured to share my bed with for a while. I don’t know if she ever told his parents the full extent of his suffering, but I hear he has regular counselling sessions, and is going back to school.

  Zoltan refused to go home.

  He prefers for his mother to think he is dead. In the two days after our rescue op, Kalina and Piotr tried their utmost to convince him otherwise, but he was adamant that his mother was better off with a dead but perfect son than an alive rapist of young boys. It’s such a distorted view he has of himself, we all feared he would commit suicide, if we just let him go. Plus, we didn’t know how high his recognition factor is. We have no idea how many people around here watched the boys’ plight. It might be none, it might be many. So we held on to him.

  He stayed in Kalina’s old room in Sheena’s house for months on end, going out rarely, and when he did then always in disguise. We all learned a bit or two from the woman that owns my heart.

  This went on until the day Arlo rang, saying one of the dogs had a cut and he didn’t know what to do with it, because we’d told him strictly no vet visits. It was way past the point Callum’s and Cormac’s bodies had been found, and Arlo had already told us he wasn’t giving the dogs up, ever. I think he’d already put two and two together by then ─ he’d be blind as well as deaf not to ─ but he is loyal to the bone and has no love for the O’Briens either, so I’m not worried.

  Especially not after what happened next.

  We sent Raven out to Lewes to try her hand at vet nursing and patch up the dog, and for the first time in months, Zoltan showed an interest when he heard what she was doing. So she took him with her, and when he met Arlo something clicked. Raven says it was like somebody who’d been sleep-walking sudden
ly waking up.

  So Zoltan also lives in a yurt in a garden in Lewes now, next door to a half-deaf guy, who may or may not one day become his lover, and with two dogs that somehow reconnect him to the most traumatic period of his young life. And apparently that’s exactly what he needed. It works. I’m past the point of questioning these things.

  While I’m dead sure that Arlo knows exactly by now how, and why, Callum and Cormac died, Julian is another story. If Julian ever did wonder how come the very people I was hoping to set up with a drugs charge ended up dead as a national horror story, he never said.

  We didn’t part ways in the end.

  Once the dust settled that week, Silas persuaded me to rethink, and I’m glad I did.

  In actual fact, Julian, Silas and Rowan are kind of running Santos-Benson security for me now, as a team. Grace has just started filling in at reception, because Lila is finally pregnant and past the miscarriage window, but half the time I find Grace downstairs in The Cockatoo instead, giving the barmaids hell for being shite.

  I offered Raven a job, too, but she declined, her exact words were ‘not a fucking chance’. She says keeping Rowan on the straight and narrow is enough involvement for her for now. She’s still waiting for the Rothman case to kick off and is volunteering at The Martlets in the meantime. But though she’ll deny it, she does unofficially keep an eye on the medics that supervise the fights in TripleX now for me.