Fucking forever her.
“We’re good,” I said against her mouth, hearing her exhale of relief. “More than.”
“We’re going to the Cotswolds?” she asked, reading my fucking mind. She knew me. She’d lost people. She knew what I was feeling right now. I nodded and kissed her head as she curled against me. I thought she’d sleep. But she stayed wide awake as we travelled the couple of hours it took to get to my mum’s favourite part of the English countryside.
Cheska took my hand, holding me tighter when my body tensed as we drew close to the cottage, and familiar narrow, winding country lanes came into view. The trees created tunnels around us, their branches bare, ice sticking to the bark.
It was still dark as we arrived. I wanted to be back at the church by mid-morning. I wanted the fucking witch hunt to begin immediately. I wanted these cunts, these circle-branded cunts, to be found.
But I needed this moment of calm before the storm.
Cheska sat up and turned my head to her. “I’m with you.” I nodded, then let her kiss me. Let her clutch my hand as the driver drove up a private dirt road. I glanced out the window. The Tudor cottage with dormer windows should have been visible over the bushes. But there was nothing, just a mass of stars in the sky above the quiet village, and crows circling up ahead, like they knew murders had taken place here. Like they knew a fucking crime against my family had been carried out and I was here to see the ghost of the reaper who’d collected them.
The Bentley stopped, and Cheska searched outside the window. Wings beat in my stomach, great fucking wings that belonged to a condor or some shit. I saw my men flood the property, guns and knives drawn, checking it was clear. Jim, the head of this regiment, nodded at me as he came back from the shelter of trees.
All was clear.
But I couldn’t move. I couldn’t bloody move. I stared out the window at the ground, the previously torched ground where grass and weeds now grew. The fucking spot where my mum and sister must have screamed and clutched each other as the fire swallowed them whole.
“You ready, baby?” Cheska squeezed my hand. I locked up. My mouth sealed shut and I felt myself shutting the fuck down, drowning the feelings that were trying to suffocate me. They were forcing me into an iron lung, and I wasn’t going to do it. Wasn’t fucking going to rip open my chest and let the demons take control.
But then Cheska kneeled before me on the car floor and lifted my head to her. “You can do this. You can get out of the car if that’s what you want.” She kissed the back of my hand.
Staring at her stunning face, I forced my muscles to relax. I forced myself to let the fucking grief sink into me—grief that had been trying to live in me for years, to take its rightful place in my half-dead heart. To consume me until I couldn’t fucking breathe.
I closed my eyes. My head throbbed. It had fuck all to do with the hangover I was diving headfirst into. It had to do with the fact that my sister’s and mum’s screams were locked in the trees around us, their cries still flying in the fucking wind that blew in a gale-force speed around the clearing.
“I can’t,” I choked out, seeing the cottage so clearly in my mind. Seeing the front door open and Pearl run outside to the wooden swing on the tree. I saw my mum walk out behind her, tea and biscuits on a tray. Then walking to me as I sat on the bench under the window. Sitting beside me. Just fucking being there.
Just being my mum.
My fucking perfect mum, who those fuckers had barricaded inside and torched.
“I’ll be with you,” Cheska said, and I turned to face her, her green-brown eyes telling me how much she fucking loved me. Me. A fucked-up murderer. But this bird, this posh and stunning bird loved me.
Cheska smiled at me—it was soft and fucking stunning. “Show me the place you loved before the fire,” she said, and I turned my head as I heard the fucking phantom echo of Pearl screaming in laughter as I chased her with my water gun. Too young yet for Dad to have put a real one in my hand.
Artie! No! she screamed and dived through the front door so Mum would protect her.
I wanted to show Cheska that place. I wanted her to see that I hadn’t always been so fucked up. I hadn’t always been plagued with darkness and demons with fucking razors for teeth. I hadn’t always been the killer she knew me to be. I had been innocent once. My soul unbattered and clean. My heart not always black and surrounded by my personal Hadrian’s Wall.
I gripped Cheska’s hand so tight, I worried I’d hurt her. But I opened the door, the frigid wind slapping our faces, and led her from the car. Cheska wrapped the blanket around her to stave off the bitter cold, and I felt the familiar soil underneath my shoes and breathed in the fresh air. There was no smog and pollution in this air, not like in London.
“So peaceful.” Cheska leaned her cheek against my arm. “Show me,” she said. “Show me why you loved it so much. Why she loved it so much.” My mum.
This was Cheska fucking meeting my mum.
“This way.” I walked with my bird around the few acres we owned. Through the grove of trees and the kitchen garden that Pearl and Mum had planted long ago, now overgrown and wild, the planters rotting and faded in colour. Cheska never let go of my arm. And with every step, I felt the fucking loss of my sister and mum pierce deeper and deeper. Like it should have years ago.
We came back from the path that led to the garden, and I stopped dead at the place where the cottage once sat. My lungs squeezed like someone was crushing them in their fist. My heart thudded faster and faster, as if it would burst from my chest, and my stomach clenched so tight I thought my muscles might rip in two.
Kissing the back of Cheska’s hand, I let go of her fingers and took a step forward. My legs felt like lead as I forced them to make it to the centre of where the house once stood. I tipped my head to the night sky and could smell the smoke that would have engulfed the space. Thick, black smoke wiping out the heavy scent of the roses my sister and mum had planted around the borders.
Roses … Cheska always smelled of roses too.
I opened my eyes and blinked, every move of my eyelids dropping a tear to my cheeks. The wind took them away as quickly as they came. So I fucking shed more. I shed more and more, damn sinful Adley holy water cleansing the air for my mum and sister. Tributes to their lives. Lives taken by our dark underworld, by some branded fuckers who had been secretly tearing apart my family for too many years to count.
I dropped my head and bent down. My hand raked though the patch of mud under my feet. The earth fell through my fingers. Tears ran down from my cheeks and dripped onto the soil, joining the unseen ash of the family members I loved most of all.
Artie. I closed my eyes as I heard my mum calling my name like she was right behind me. I could feel her hand on my shoulder. Smell the strong, expensive perfume Dad used to buy her every Christmas. I love you, my boy, she whispered in my ear. My sweet, sweet boy. I’ve missed you.
“I’ve missed you too, Mum,” I whispered back.
And I fucking broke. My shoulders shook as the years and years of grief poured out of me onto the Cotswolds ground. My botched, stitched-up heart was ripping open and bleeding out beneath me, on the very ground that had held my mum and sister’s bodies as they burned, as they breathed their last breaths. My hands and knees planted onto the earth, and I shattered apart.