We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise,
Than when we’ve first begun.…
The end is now, a voice whispered in my head.
I had a bad feeling. The second we drove through my brother’s open gates and saw the red sports car from yesterday belonging to Org’s men, I knew today was either the end or the beginning.
Even if Org’s guys were supposedly protecting me, finding their car parked inside my brother’s residence was off. One, I wasn’t in there. And two, the residence was gated, so how could they have gotten in, unless with coercion?
“What are they doing here?” I asked Chad.
His tone and entire demeanor weren’t of the man I knew. “I lost them in the hills last night before I drove to my right address. Didn’t want them knowing of that place. They’re just here to find out your whereabouts.”
I leaned forward and opened the glove compartment, took out his handgun and readied it with more aggression than needed so he’d know I was irritated. “Don’t talk to me like I’m a little fucking girl. You know that’s not why they’re here. You know we can’t reverse out now because we’re trapped. I know you counted three suspiciously idle cars parked five blocks within each other on the way here. You know like I know that something is up. So fuck you. Stop trying to spare me.”
Nothing.
Then, “Five. I counted five idle cars.”
“Then why didn’t you turn around?!”
Rolling up beside the sports car and easing the gear in park, Chad turned his head and gave me a look like I was the most inhumane person alive. “Because your brother is here.”
“But these are Org’s men. What do they care about Ricardo being alive or not?”
Providing no answer, Chad reached under his car seat and came back up with a Walther P22 semi-automatic handgun, then opened the door to get out. “Stay in the car.”
“That’s it?” I asked, mouth agape. “You’re just going to march in there with nothing but a handgun? You don’t have more weapons in the trunk or something?”
He was irritatingly impassive, eyes stark and accepting. “I can smell him. Just…stay in the car, Tweety Byrd.”
Unfolding smoothly from the low sports car, he shut the door with a simple backward flick of his hand, then strode without falter or uncertainty up to the house, gun held loosely in his hand like it was a cheap accessory he didn’t care for. He seemed resigned, convinced that this was the end.
And what did he mean he could “smell him”? Smell who?
Surely, Rafail wouldn’t come here himself. Rafail did nothing himself. He hid behind threats and manipulations, orders, and money power.
Suddenly I realized it: Chad, if not afraid of anyone, was afraid of his father. If Rafail was really inside that house, Chad would not put up a fight. He would let him kill him. He would let Rafail win.
The prime reason he wanted me to remain in the car. Because if Org’s men were inside, too, they were there to protect me, not him. They would do nothing to stop Rafail from killing Chad.
Stay in the car…
He knew today was not my day to die.
It was his.
Fuck staying in the car!
Renting the passenger door open, I leaped out of the car and tore up to the house.
The front door was wide open, and someone was standing in its frame, facing inside, back facing outside. I made out the overly muscular figure and the military haircut. Sambo.
Walking up to him, I poked him in the side with my gun—not threateningly—and asked, “What the fuck is going on?”
Sambo turned to me, never minding my weapon. Expression one of victory and complacency, he scanned my face and then my body for a minute, before he stepped aside and held his hand out in a gesture for me to enter.
I brushed past him into the house, and the first thing I saw was Clementine’s petite body in pink pajama bottoms and a blue tank top soaked with blood, her stomach riddled with bullet holes, like the person who did this emptied an entire magazine on her, with the intention of ensuring the newborn’s death.
Second thing I saw was Chad kneeling beside Clementine, the upper half of her lifeless body propped up in his arms, while he rocked to and fro, to and fro.
The expression he wore, remorse and anguish, told me Clementine meant more to him than I’d imagined. Her death had a shattering impact on him, because I’d never seen him so enfeebled before. Either that, or he was breaking. Breaking under his father’s cruelty, of eliminating all the women he loved from his life.
Third thing I saw was Ricardo. Mouth duct taped, body tied to a chair just a few feet away from his wife’s body. Helpless. Unmanly tears streaming down his face. I didn’t even have to guess that he was subdued and bound first, then forced to watch his wife and unborn child get murdered.
I slid my eyes from Ricardo, only to have them land on him.
The Voice.
Rafail Niiveux.
He came himself, after all.
Ensconced in my brother’s lavish, exaggeratedly large sofa. Completely relaxed. Looking like any normal, clean-hearted human being. No evil arched brows, no smarmy smirk, no threatening eyes. Just…normal.
In a slick, three-piece suit, dark blond hair gelled back from his face, black eyes watching me, he coolly greeted, “Hello, little Byrd.
Goose bumps raised all over from his voice alone. That voice… Had ruled me and ruined me. That voice was chilling. Creeping with claws down my spine.
I took a breath and counted to ten. I refused to fear him. I. refused. To fear. Him.
Rafail was somewhere in his sixties, but could easily pass for someone in their early forties, he was so fit and ageless. Lean and tall like his son, with eyes as black as their incorporeal souls.
I noticed there were two stiff pairs of legs sticking out from behind the couch he was sitting in. Another dead body. But of who? No one else was in the room. At least no one deliberately visible.
My heart ran around dizzily inside my chest, my mind advising me to hotfoot it out of there. But instead I gripped my gun tighter and dipped in a curtsy. “Rafail. I see you’ve grown some balls.”
Rafail’s soul-shivering laughter rang out. “Well, I suppose someone had to get the job done.” He tsked. “You have turned out to be such a failure for me, Jhay. You were my next-best, but you have let your heart choose your path.” His accent had his words all curled and twisty, like he was having a hard time speaking straight English. He could speak to me in Russian, but I guess Sambo would be left out of the loop.
“Chew a bullet, Rafail,” I spat like venom from a snake. “You were planning to kill me the minute I killed your son.”
“Lies.” Lips compressed, he shook his head. “So many lies. But it does not matter now. You must know, my son will not kill me. He has had plenty of opportunities, but he has not. He will kill anyone. Even the ones he loves, yes? But he will not kill his Rafail. He is the best assassin The Organization has ever known. Think, Jhay, if he wanted me dead, he would have killed me a long, long time ago. I am his father. He is me. So he will not kill me. Even now when he knows I am here to kill him, he will not. He is ready to die. Look, see for yourself.”
I didn’t need to look. I’d already deduced that much the second Chad exited the car.
I raised my gun at him. “I’ll gladly pick up the slack where he falters.”
Yet somehow, I couldn’t pull the trigger without Chad’s consent. If he was unwilling to kill the man who ruined his life, what if I killed him and then he ended up resenting me. I was barely forgiven for killing his aunt. What would it do to us if I pulled the trigger on his father?
My love for him had me putting revenge on the back burner, even if it meant my death. I couldn’t do it.
Rafail waved a hand in the direction of the doorway. “Sambo, come get your Byrd in its cage before I end up breaking my promise.”
Lowering the gun, I looked over at Sambo who had pushed away from the door jamb and was moving toward me. “Promise? What promise?”
“Oh, you did not know?” Rafail said, bringing my attention back to him. “Sambo and I made a deal. He leads me to my son, I do not kill you, and he gets to keep you for himself.”
“What?” I swung my gaze back to Sambo, who was right beside me now. “Does Org know you’re double-crossing him?”
Stupid question. Of course he didn’t! Neither did that dead man behind the couch who I was now realizing was Sambo’s partner. Org didn’t know, so he wouldn’t be coming to ‘save’ me.
Fuck.
“He is in love with you,” Rafail informed me. “So like you, lovely Byrd, he has allowed his heart to choose his path—albeit the right path this time, yes?”
“I thought I told you to stay in the car, Jhay.” This was from Chad.
I whirled around and found he was still kneeling by Clementine’s body, his eyes on her wide, vacant ones.
“Are you seriously just going to sit there and let him kill you?”
“He’s my father.”
“Oh, so you just kill the people you love and pardon the people you hate?”
Nothing. He just kept staring at Clementine.
Rage had me pointing my gun at him. “Why don’t I just complete my assignment by killing you my fucking self, huh? You’re a waste. A waste of my fucking time.”
Glancing up at me now, he responded, “I hate you.” So quiet I almost missed it.
“Fuck you, you fucking coward!!!” I shouted, repositioning my aim above his head right before I fired off all the rounds in my gun, a fusillade of shots blasting through the wooden wall across the room.
Even when the clip was empty, I kept pulling the trigger out of anger. Click. Click. Click. While Chad just watched me with that ever-calm expression of his, completely unfazed by the loads of bullets that’d whizzed mere inches above his skull. He never even flinched. The sonuvabitch was so resigned on dying. How could someone be so at fucking peace with death?
To Sambo, he said, “You wanted her. Now get her the fuck out of here, and keep her safe. Or even in death I’ll find a way to fuck you up.”
Just like that, he was passing me off to another man. No more “it’s me, or no one.”
I regretted becoming straight. This kind of fickle shit didn’t happen with women.
Sambo started to close in on me, but I whirled and butted my gun against his temple, and he reflexively knocked the thing from my grasp. Spinning in the opposite direction this time, I drove the back of my elbow into his jaw, hoping for a crack. But Sambo was built like a brick house, he wasn’t that easily defeated.
I had to initiate a real fight. So I rammed a back-kick to his shin, and we engaged in a good old combat. In which I had to whip out everything I’d ever learned in fight training. Best believe I was beating Sambo down. He might be big and ostensibly indomitable, but he didn’t have half the tricks and agile dexterity I had. Which meant I was winning ten points ahead, wounding him in the small places he didn’t know to protect because those small places had big impact.
I had him. On the ground. My legs locked tight around his thick stomp of a neck. Just about to flip my whole body over so I could easily break his neck, when I was restrained from behind in a sleeper hold.
The powerful, masculine arm tightened, but not to kill me, only to ease me into unconsciousness. And with each breath that got blocked from passing through my lungs, I drifted, and drifted, until the darkness won.