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 little 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—
“Babe, shh, it’s okay.” Cheska. Cheska was in front of me, her hands on my face. “I’m here, it’s okay. Let me help …”
But it wasn’t okay. She had done this. She had fucking rammed back into my life with the force of a crowbar to the knees and fucked it all up. She had cut through the darkness that had settled inside me and tried to bring me to the light. I didn’t fucking want the light. I didn’t want the light or the fucking smiles, the kisses or the making love.
It made me weak.
She had made me too weak.
I ripped my head back and saw Charlie pick my phone up off the floor and watch the screen. Cheska’s hands stayed in the air, where they’d just been on my face. Like I’d burned her. Like I’d scalded her skin.
“Get the fuck off me,” I snarled, and Cheska’s face blanched. “You,” I said, pointing at her. I pounded my hand on my chest. I needed to close the crack. Needed to stop the pain that was seeping out of it, poisoning my brain, my heart. “You.”
“What? Please—” She tried to step closer but stopped when I shook my head at her. “What have I done? Arthur …”
I slapped at my skull, at the throbbing in my brain. That voice, her broken fucking voice made me feel things I didn’t fucking want to fucking feel—couldn’t feel to do my job right. “You’re fucking with my head,” I snarled and swiped the bottle of vodka that had fallen to the floor but remained intact. I threw the top into the fire and downed half the bottle in one go. Cheska had folded her arms across her chest, in protection, and was moving toward Betsy. “You fucking crawled into my fucking head, cleaved my fucking chest open and broke me!” I yelled. I saw the phone being passed from Eric to Freddie in the background. Charlie’s and Eric’s faces were fuming with anger as they met my eyes.
Freddie passed the phone to Vinnie. “Artie,” he said, and I saw the fucking disbelief on his face, the fucking moment we all found out my mum and sister weren’t lost in an accident after all, that they were in fact murdered. Murdered by the same cunts who had got Ronnie, who had killed all of Cheska’s family and tried to take her too.
The ones who had dumped a container full of trafficked women on my fucking dock! It was them … it was the branded cunts who were trying to come for me, for all we’d built.
They wanted Cheska. They fucking wanted my bird!
I searched the room for Cheska, but she’d gone. A fucking weight pressed down on my lungs like a torture device. My dark heart taunted me, ordering me to get on my fucking hands and knees and find her. That it needed her back. My fucking queen. The one who controlled the fucked-up chessboard that was my life.
My most important piece.
But I fought it. I fought it all, trying to yank myself back to the numbness I used to live with, the blackness, the fucking void that kept me from having to feel any of this shit, that let me think. Right now, I couldn’t fucking think!
“You fucking prick,” Betsy spat and got right in my face. My jaw clenched as my cousin went toe to toe with me. “Don’t you dare you take this out on Cheska.”
“She did this,” I growled, the rage still pumping through my veins in waves, incinerating every fibre in my body. “She fucking made me feel, made me like this!”
“Human?” Betsy shot back. “A fucking living being, breathing, thriving—not a walking demon with nothing in his soul but blackness and hate?”
“THEY KILLED MY FUCKING MUM AND SISTER!” I boomed in Betsy’s face and looked to the rest of my family. I caught Vinnie’s eyes. They were fixed on the floor, and his body was shaking. Fucking shaking with rage.
“They killed her.” Vinnie lifted his head and met my eyes. “They killed her, Artie. She didn’t tell me they killed her.”
“I don’t think she knew,” Charlie said, placating Vinnie’s fucked-up head, his belief that he still saw and talked to my sister. “When the house went up, she wouldn’t have known how the fire was started.”
Vinnie nodded, grasping onto that lifeline. He studied his tight fists and said, “We need to kill them, Artie.” He nodded, like he was assuring himself it was what needed to happen to make this shitshow okay. “They all need to fall down. All fucking fall down.”
“Just remember,” Betsy said, moving back into my path, ignoring everyone else, “that Cheska lost her entire family too. Not just you. She lost them all.” Betsy laughed without humour. “And she loves you. Right now, I have no fucking idea why.” Betsy moved to the door but stopped and, without looking back, said, “Your mum was like my mum too. And Pearl was my best friend, my fucking sister. You chose to deal with this life yourself. You have people who love and support you, but you chose to remain unfeeling when our dads died. You chose to push us all away and shut down, never letting anyone in. And you’ll die alone if you keep doing it. Just like our dads did. Because I, for one, am fucking over trying to revive you.”