I never turned my gaze away, watching and smoking as the turncoat prick fought to stay alive. He didn’t fight long. He reached out toward me, one final move for mercy.
I kicked his fucking hand away, snapping his wrist, and the arsehole toppled over, his eyes retreating behind the glaze only death could bring. I lifted my hand to my mouth, pulled one last drag from my cig, and flicked the ash on his still-warm corpse.
In that moment, I thought of Cheska’s ivory queen and the ash stain that had smudged across her pristine chest. I looked up at my family and sought out the only one I needed to see. She was already watching me. She’d lost some colour in her face, but her shoulders were still high, that regal fucking toffee nose still in the air, daring me to bring on more darkness.
I smirked at her challenge. She didn’t know fuck all. Because the twat dead at my feet was just the starter course.
I clicked my fingers at one of my soldiers. Still holding Cheska’s confused gaze, I moved to the table, picked up a medieval cat o’ nine tails and said, “Bring me the next.”
Chapter Eleven
CHESKA
This is Arthur Adley, I silently said to myself as I watched yet another man die at his hands. His very fucked-up and sadistic hands. The sand he stood on was no longer beige but a crimson carpet. Arthur’s skin was no longer lightly tanned; no natural colour could be seen under the evidence of his insatiable appetite for death. His tattoo of the Victorian London skyline was now sullied with bits of flesh and bone that he had torn from his victims. Victims who had screamed and cried and pleaded for mercy.
No mercy was ever given. In fact, if they begged to be spared, their death and the pain Arthur inflicted was only drawn out more.
This was him pushing me.
Ronnie, Vera and Betsy had told me it would be the case. Arthur had brought me here to see the very darkest side of him. He wanted me here so I would run away, leave him to his festering wickedness and the evil that had become his safety. Leave him in the sinful cage he locked himself inside.
I kept my eyes on the pit as he struck his fourth “traitor” with a sword to the top of his skull. I forced back the nausea creeping up my throat as the man fell backwards to the ground. Arthur turned, sword in hand. King Arthur. I couldn’t help but make that comparison as my fucked-up king’s blue gaze bored into mine. As he stood, torso exposed, but wearing armour of his victims’ lifeblood and lies over his bloodthirsty heart.
And in his murdering hands, he held his very own Excalibur.
Betsy squeezed my knee in support, a silent request to be strong. When we’d entered these pits, I had not been prepared for how the night would end. The blood, the fights, the death.
So much death.
And then there were the “associates”. The infamous bikers that rode through London like they were a law unto themselves. The Irish and Romani mafias that everyone had heard of but no one I knew had ever had dealings with. All of them terrifying in their own right, and all of them looking down at Arthur like he really was the dark lord he had been titled.
Royal, the man Betsy told me was the president of the Hangmen, got to his feet. “A fucking show as always, Adley.” His men started heading for the exit. “Until next time, mate.”
Arthur nodded at each of his “mates” as they left, leaving only the Adleys. But Arthur hadn’t moved from the pit. His wild eyes stayed on mine, and I couldn’t move. I was a rabbit in his snare, locked in place.
“I take it that’s our cue to go,” Eric said sarcastically, then pointed in Betsy’s face. “You and me have an appointment, treasure.”
“Fuck off, Eric,” Betsy bit back, but there was a hint of something like excitement in her voice, and she got to her feet, her lips curling up. Eric grabbed her and spun her around. “You’re fucking riding my dick the minute we’re in that car.” He had put his shirt on over his bloodied chest, and red seeped through the expensive material. “It’s been too fucking long.”
“If you can even call it a dick,” Betsy snapped back. But her pupils had dilated, and her skin was flushed. Eric growled, then dragged her from the warehouse.
Just as they reached the door, Betsy shouted back, “Vera, Ronnie, I’ll see you back at the church. Seems like we might be taking the long way home.”
I didn’t pay any mind to everyone else leaving around me. I was too focused on breathing, on calming my skin, which felt as though it was setting alight as Arthur’s chest rose and fell in the pit and the air clogged with tension. I saw the blood on the ground and on his skin.
An Adley soldier dragged the final body from the pit and disappeared out of the warehouse. I tried to find sorrow for the men Arthur had so brutally murdered tonight, but all I saw in their places were my attackers. The men who had killed my father and Hugo. The men who had so easily slit Freya’s throat and stabbed Arabella right through her heart.
“Arthur had protected these men, provided for them, given them a place at our family’s table,” Vera had said as Arthur toyed with the men in the pit like a lion playing with his prey. “The fuckers betrayed him. Fucking Judases, the whole lot of them,” she spat, anger lacing her raspy voice.
“They knew what they were signing on for,” Ronnie had said as Arthur stabbed a man in the ear. “Their greed and lack of loyalty brought this to them. Stupid fucking tossers. They deserve to die. They knew the contract when they joined the firm. They broke it. They invited their own deaths.”
This was the world he lived in, a world I thought existed only in nightmares. In truth, it was at all of our doorsteps, just waiting to catch us off guard and drag us down to their fucked-up level. I had lived a “normal” life, and yet I’d found myself at the mercy of traffickers. Evil waited for any opportunity to sink in its claws. At least in Arthur’s cruel kingdom, there was some semblance of code and honour.
I knew something depraved must have burrowed its way into my soul when I realised I yearned to see the men who had murdered my family on the end of Arthur’s blood-soiled sword. I craved to see them beg at his feet for mercy and be prescribed pain and agony instead.
I heard a door shut. Casting my eyes around the warehouse, I realised we were all alone. Arthur still hadn’t moved. He still stood with a cigarette balancing on his bottom lip, his muscles ripped and shredded from the fights, his skin smothered in cooling blood.
And he was still watching me. He was waiting for what I would do.
This is it, I thought as I got to my feet. The choice. The decision I had to make. Arthur or my old life.
There was no contest.
I walked to the stairs that led down to the pit. Arthur scanned me the entire way down. I saw myself in his glasses as I approached, not even flinching when my stiletto heels landed on the pit’s sandy floor and the coppery stench of blood and cigarette smoke permeated the air.
The pit seemed much bigger when I was standing inside it. The table of weapons was beside me. I ran my hand along the weapons, most of which I had never seen before. It was like something from the Grand Inquisitor’s torture chamber.
I circled the pit, Arthur tracking my every move.
Finally, I drew to a stop in front of him. Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out the ivory queen piece from his chessboard. I had taken it last night when he had left the study. After he had provoked me and I had provoked him right back, setting off tonight’s chain of events. The smudge from the cigarette still stained my queen’s chest.