Amazing grace …
CHAD
As Jhay’s body went limp in his hands, Chad gently released her. Hurting her, he hated it. Would punch himself in the face if he could. But the girl was a fearless wild wasp.
She’d been beating the useless muscles off Sambo, and Sambo was a big man. Big. Two times Chad. Frankly, he was embarrassed for the guy. No grown ass man with two sagging balls and a dick should allow themselves to get beat down like that by a woman—well, not unless they’re deliberately allowing it to happen, for amusement, entertainment. But muscle-man Sambo here had been giving it his all. And still lost.
Scooping Jhay up in his arms, her pretty head lulling to the side, her lush pink lips parted, Chad looked down at the man still sprawled flat on his back, rubbing his neck, his face bruised on both sides. Quietly, patiently, he waited for Sambo to scoop up his shit-kicked dignity and haul his pathetic ass up off the floor.
When Sambo was finally on his feet, Chad transferred Jhay over into his arms. “Get her out of here. My father is not the best with promises. If I die while she’s still here, I guarantee you he will kill her and you.”
He heard a disapproving sound travel from his father’s direction, but he didn’t look.
Sambo stilled, as if waiting to hear Rafail refute Chad’s words. When Sambo waited long enough for a refutation that would never come, he tipped his chin, then turned and left with Chad’s heart in his arms. They might be enemies, love the same girl, and want nothing more than to see the other dead, but where Jhay was concerned, they both wanted her to come out of this alive. Not because of Org, but because they were both madly in love with her.
Sambo was the one who’d spent years scouring the earth for evidence on whether Jhay was dead or alive, as ordered by Org. He was the one who discovered she was indeed alive, living right under Org’s nose, in his domain, working for Chad’s father. Somewhere along the line, he’d gotten obsessed with Jhay. Which Chad certainly wouldn’t blame the guy for.
Jhay Byrd was a fucking stunner. A rare, colorless diamond, who had absolutely no idea of her worth, or her power. She had no idea how cock-achingly daring her walk was. How heart-arresting that part-smile, part-smirk thing she unwittingly did all the time was. How sexy her fearlessness was. How much of an escapism her eyes were.
She was aware of none of it.
But Chad was.
And apparently so was Sambo.
Chad had detected the man’s obsession the second he had met him. He’d known Sambo wanted what was his. And Chad knew well and good that when a man was set on a woman, he would go to any lengths to get her. Wary, Chad launched his own surreptitious investigation into Sambo, and he’d discovered the guy was dilly-dallying with both Org and Rafail to see which man would give him a benefiting deal that would win him Jhay in the end.
Rafail had won, of course. But that’s because Rafail studied people, searched their minds, learned their cravings, then with a serpent tongue, told them what he knew they wanted to hear, manipulated them. He made promises he would never keep. He lied, he betrayed, he killed.
Sambo was a fool.
Back on the one-way yesterday, Chad had known there wasn’t a second shoot-out. He’d known Sambo was balancing both Org’s and Rafail’s orders. Playing his cards. Testing.
They were all playing their cards.
Chadrick Niiveux normally had control within every inch of his life. It had taken some time to learn exactly how to do such an impossible thing, but as of five years ago, his life usually played out the exact way he sketched it. Like a bestselling book turning into a big screen movie, coming to life.
He’d mastered creating settings and scenes in his head, manipulating people like marionettes to dance right into his traps. Then watch it all play out to a T.
Although he’d pretended to take orders, acted oblivious to the duplicities, teased Sambo with Jhay to lure Rafail here, what Chad never sketched in his plan was Clementine’s death, or Ricardo being found. For the first time in five years, Chad’s sketching got smudged.
He’d envisioned this scene; him standing before Rafail in mock surrender, Sambo thinking he’d won with Jhay…but the setting was supposed to be at his place in Russian Hill. Not here.
Amazing how one small deviation could ruin everything. He’d never planned on sleeping in Los Altos Hills last night. He should have gone home. But he’d wanted Jhay to reconcile things with her brother and his wife.
Now, his chessboard was shambled, and things were heading way fucking south.
He failed.
He fucking failed.
“That girl never ceases to amaze me,” Rafail said, long after, when Chad was still staring broken-heartedly at the open doorway Sambo had strode through. “She was an asset—for me, of course. It is a shame she was cursed by her birth. She cannot live. But you already know this, do you not?”
For the first time since Chad entered the house, he looked at his father. And it felt like he was looking at himself. He wondered if that was the reason he’d never been able to kill him. To kill him would mean to kill himself. Or maybe he simply hated him too much.
Heavy hatred seized his wills. And he rarely ever reacted. He was one twisted, backward motherfucker who deserved the death coming to him now.
“Not happening,” Chad said, calm, easy, settling.
“Oh, but it must, Chadrick,” his father returned, still sitting relaxed. Rafail pronounced his name in its right form, how it’s pronounced back home: Kah-had-reek. “You know if I die, you will supplant me. And if her father dies, she will supplant him. She will rule over you. But since I will be ending you in a minute, my position will still be mine. Then, with Sambo’s help, I will be killing her father next. Do you think I will let her supplant him and rule over me?”
Power.
Money.
Notoriety.
That’s all it has ever been about for Rafail Niiveux. Failing to see that Chad couldn’t care less about power. Care less about who will rule over who in The Organization. He didn’t even want to inherit his father’s seat. He never asked for it. But his father had named him as his inheritor without his permission.
“Have your way, kill me. But Jhay’ll not die, father,” Chad said, taking a step towards the devil, “or I swear to God—”
“What?!” Rafail exploded, shooting up from the couch, taking his gun out and aiming it at me. “What will you do, my son? Do you think you can save her like you did that ninny over there?”
Faster than Chad could react, Rafail swung his gun to Ricardo and popped a shot through his friend’s leg. Ricardo’s eyes instantly overflowed with tears, his cries locked in by the tape over his mouth. Body detained and restricted.
“You will not be able to save him again. You will not be able to save her. And you will not be able to save yourself!”
Anger. Rafail was a slave to it. For as long as Chad could remember, every irrational thing his father had ever done, he’d done it out of rage. He didn’t possess Chad’s skills, the ability to remain calm and unaffected even in the worst of times. Chad got angry, of course, he was a human, after all, but he’d trained himself never to drink his tea while it still had steam billowing from the top.
That kind of control was what kept him alive.
So, even though he felt every bit of Ricardo’s pain, Chad merely threw him and his bleeding leg a bored glance, as though it mattered not at all to him whether Ricardo lived or died.
He took another calculating step to his father, and at the movement, Rafail re-aimed his gun at him. Chad also didn’t miss the man’s slight move backward, his calves hitting the couch behind him, giving the poltroon nowhere to go.
Rafail was utterly afraid of Chad. Chad knew he was the man’s worst nightmare. But the irony there was that Chad had never, ever threatened to kill him.
Three times since he fled Russia, his father had called upon him for help. When he went behind The Organization’s back and broke the rules, became exposed and was endangered, Chad was the one he always called. And a cretinous Chad always went.
Lost all respect for him yet?
He had no idea why he did it. Because he hated the man with every breath he had within him. But inexplicably, Rafail Niiveux, his biggest enemy, was the only person Chad didn’t have the guts to kill.
There was a remedy for that now, however.
And that was the reason why Rafail was standing in front of him right now.
Chad had been ahead of everyone’s plans before they made it. Both Org and Rafail. Powerful as they were, he was smarter. He didn’t have their wealth and he didn’t have their influence, but he had game.
He was a field man. Hands-on. They were men in suits who gave orders from their expensive wingback chairs. Never pulling the trigger themselves.
The dead man behind the couch, Sambo’s partner, Chad had kidnapped his fiancée and two sons, used them as leverage to gain additional information on what was happening on both sides.
He’d known Rafail was coming, but had decided to keep that bit from Jhay. He’d been prepared for everything except Clementine’s death.
And that changed everything.
Calm as a silent river on a summer’s day, Chad locked eyes with his father, and he saw the second the man realized this wouldn’t be ending the way he thought it would.
Even though it was just him now, against five, possibly six. None of those men were in sight, but Chad knew they were there. It was an old trick meant to encourage bravery, only to be taken down by a hidden bullet. These men also were not from The Organization, and if Chad was lucky, they were as amateur as the shooters from the day before. Everything Rafail was doing was of his own accord. Personal shit. So he didn’t have the luxury of using assassins from The Organization.
This house, Chad bought it, so he knew it, every nook and cranny, all the possible columns and walls men could be hiding behind.
The idle cars Chad had passed on the way here were not men of Rafail’s. They were of Org’s. And they’d been ordered, by Chad, to keep tail on Sambo the minute he left with Jhay.
Rafail wouldn’t have come there by car, because he was a fool who thought of himself bigger than he really was. Always drawing attention to himself. Chad knew without a doubt there was a helicopter out the back, pitched on the acres of land surrounding this house. Which explained how they got inside the residence without a code to the front gates.
Weapon in the back of his waist, Chad eyed the gun in his father’s hand, then all the areas he suspected the other men were. Two thick logs serving as decorative columns, parallel to each other. Hiding spot. A bookshelf on the far wall behind his father. Hiding spot. A storage room to the left of him. Hiding spot. An indoor tree plant to the right. Hiding spot…Chad kept eying them all.
When he brought his shrewd, prudent gaze back to Rafail’s, the slight widening of his father’s eyes told him he’d guessed all the spots correctly.
Understanding the peril, Rafail spared no more seconds, and time slowed as he flexed his index finger on the trigger.
With each step Chad had made earlier toward his father, he’d calculatingly, undetectably, shifted half an inch to the left, which manipulated Rafail’s aim a quarter of an inch off Chad’s right temple. Knowing the man would be too unassuming, unskilled, unaware, to even notice what Chad was doing.
Watching the finger on the trigger, Chad concentrated, and one, two, three seconds before Rafail fully pulled back, Chad smoothly tilted his head to the side as if dodging a bee, and the bullet that should have pierced through his temple whizzed by in a glint of heat and grazed the top of his ear.
Without giving Rafail the chance to realize he’d missed, Chad dove to the side while simultaneously whipping out his Walther from his waist, but landed solidly hard on his side before he could fire.
Frantic, Rafail popped off another wild shot as he shouted, “Kill him!”
Before any of the men could emerge from the peep spots, Chad aimed precisely and unambiguously, capped his father in both knees, swift and easy, then quickly rolled behind a long leather couch.
He upturned the thing just as bullets started flying his way. The couch could be his shield for no more than a few seconds.
He had one gun. A Walther P22. A magazine with eight rounds left. Eight rounds he had to use economically and efficiently.
Judging by the gunfire, experience told him there were exactly five shooters. None of those five shooters had hit him yet, which meant they were keeping a distance.
Straight-up cowardice.
Reaching for his mirror aviators hooked on his front pocket, he angled the thing slightly above the couch to check where each man was situated. The nearest shooters to him were the one who’d been in the storage room, and the one who’d been behind the tree plant. The two from behind the log columns were taking baby steps towards the couch, while the fifth was guarding a prone Rafail.
A bullet slapped the aviators from his fingers.
Fuck. He loved those.
Reinforcing his grip on his P22, he decided to take out the two nearest shooters first. With his free arm, he gripped under the bottom of the sofa and flipped the thing over in one direction while he dove in the opposite direction, which landed him by the fireplace.
When the shooters predictably began blasting bullets at the innocent couch, in that split second before they could realize his tactic, Chad fluently took out the man beside the tree plant. Pop—one bullet through the neck. Thud—down he went. Then the other from the storage room. Pop—one bullet through the eye. Thud—down he went.
As the shooter guarding Rafail popped two embarrassingly off rounds at him and missed, Chad decided this rookie didn’t deserve the beloved bullets in his gun, so he instead reached above him for the fire poker from the fireplace and adeptly speared it straight at the guy. The fire poker unerringly pierced right through his heart. Thud—another one down.
Before Chad could think to take cover from the other two down by the log posts, he heard the unmistakable sound of a suppressed gunfire.
Thud—down went man number four.
Another suppressed fire and, thud—man number five down.
The fuck?
Chad hopped to his feet, and all of a sudden Org’s men, who he’d specifically instructed to follow Sambo, were in the house.
No.
The light from the front door shifted, and Chad glanced over to see Org standing there.
No.
If they were all here, then… “Where the fuck is Jhay?”
Org tutted. “Oh, Shadreek. Ever so discourteous. How about you start with, ‘thank you for saving my life, Org’?”
Chad felt like his heart was going to implode into a red splatter of blood and arteries. “You gave me control over them. I told them what to do. Why are they here?”
“To save you,” Org artlessly replied.
“I don’t need fucking saving.”
There were only two people in this world who could break Chad’s calm and make him so fucking infuriated he felt like he would poke his own eyeballs out or bite off his own tongue. And those two people were Jhay and Org.
Like father, like daughter.
Org entered the house, stepped over Clementine’s body like she was just a twig in a dry forest, and headed for the one good sofa chair in the room.
Org was a tall man. Over six feet four, with a full head of white hair and emerald-green eyes, exactly like his daughter’s. Six years Rafail’s senior, he’d inherited his seat in The Organization since age nineteen. Three years prior to Jhay, he’d gotten a son. This foolhardy son had volunteered to be an assassin for The Organization, only to end up dying on his second assignment.
Jhay was all he had left, a daughter he searched a dozen years to find. Never married, he’d only ever loved one woman, Jhay’s mother. Aside from that love, Org was an emotionally detached, heartless, cold, inexpressive man, who had some serious fucking issues. He didn’t care to let his daughter know the truth, that he was her real father. He only wanted her to remain alive and safe, and Chad presumed this was so she could carry on his legacy.
No other reasons. Not because he loved her. Not because he was a father who cared about his long-lost daughter.
“You know, Shadreek,” Org began once he was settled in the sofa chair, “for years you have been acclaimed as ‘the best The Organization had ever seen’. But after today, I have to say differently; you are the stupidest man I have ever known.”
Chad opted not to respond to that, because he knew where he was going with this.
“You told me what you discovered about Sambo and Rafail,” Org continued, “and I gave you complete control of my entire team. Instead of using this power to your advantage, all you did was hand your woman over to another man, and hand your life over to your power-hungry father. I do not understand this.”
Of course he wouldn’t. Because he was a selfish headfuck who thought only of himself, and had he been the one in this position, he would’ve risked Jhay’s life to save his own skin.
Chad, on the other hand, wanted Jhay as far away from this scene as possible. He never told her about this, because if he had, and told her he didn’t want her there, she would’ve told him she wasn’t a little girl and insist on staying and facing Rafail with him. And if he’d allowed her, then she wound up dead in the process, he never would be able to live with himself.
His ordering Jhay to stay in the car was a test to prove to himself that he’d made the right decision shutting her out. Her inability to do as he’d ordered told him he had.
Yes, he knew she was a badass who could fight her boots off and hold her own, but she needed a fucking break. She’d had enough shit handed her already. So if he could fight their war for both of them, that’s what he’d be doing.
Sambo, he would deal with later. The guy had banked wrong in believing Rafail would let Jhay live. Sambo knew Jhay was Org’s daughter, but what he didn’t know was that Org named Jhay as the inheritor of his seat as the Pinnacle in The Organization. Had Sambo known this, he would’ve detected right off the bat that Rafail was spitting shit.
Rafail’s main goal was to steal the Pinnacle’s seat in The Organization. And as long as Jhay was alive, that seat would never be his.
“You don’t need to understand,” Chad retorted. “Where. Is. Jhay?”
Org looked away, eyed a wounded Rafail, who was watching them with obvious confusion, then back at Chad. “I am letting Sambo keep her.”
Wha—?
Faster than he even knew he could move, Chad was looming over Org with the P22 pressed to his forehead. “What did you just say?” His words were a hoarse whisper.
From the periphery of his vision, Chad could see the men around them raising their weapons up and down, up and down, unsure whom they were supposed to defend. And that in itself befuddled Chad.
Why would they question who their commander was?
Org didn’t even flinch, raising his bored eyes to Chad’s. “I am letting Sambo keep her because I am naming you instead of her as the inheritor of my seat. I do not want my daughter in this life anymore.”
Struck speechless, Chad removed his gun. “W-what?”
“That is preposterous!” Rafail barked from the floor. “He is not your blood. He cannot supplant you.”
With a wearied wave of his hand, Org ordered, “One of you, put another in his leg and shut him up for me, please.”
Even as his father’s shout rang out from the silenced slug to his leg, Chad didn’t look. He couldn’t. Just shooting him alone made him feel like a traitorous asshole.
But what he planned for dear old Daddy, was that any better than a cap to the leg?
Ignoring Rafail’s Russian curses, Org continued, “When I get rid of your father, Shadreek, you will inherit his seat. Now, if while alive and in a sound mind I name you as my inheritor with indisputable reasons why you are better to lead The Organization than anyone else within, no one will mind that we are not blood. Reason one, you are the son of a previous Height. Reason two, you were once an unfailing assassin for us. In fact, I have already discussed this with the six high-seats—excluding your father—and they all think you will be perfect for supplanting me as Pinnacle. The gavel is yours.”
Chad tightened his grip on his gun, and if the thing weren’t steel, he was certain it would be crushed to dust.
“You will stay, and govern. The authority I gave you over my men does not expire until you die. My army is now your army. They do as you say.”
“No,” Chad declined, shaking his head and moving a step back. “I don’t want any of this. Let my father live. Let him have it. I don—”
“Your father deserves death!” That was the first time Chad had ever heard Org raise his voice. Like Chad, he was usually calm, cool, collected, unruffled and unemotional. “Time and time again he tries to usurp me and I spare him. Time and time again he breaks the rules, kills innocents, and you save him! Unless you kill me, Shadreek, you cannot save him this time. Why do you want him to live even after you found out he kept my daughter imprisoned for twelve years?”
“He’s my father—”
“A father who has tried a dozen and one times to kill you!” Org yelled, shooting up from the chair.
The tone of his voice, the emotion in it, was what Chad was searching for. Chad had suspected the old man cared for him. He had no idea why, but he knew.
Because the old man was so careful with his emotions, and his pretension that nothing mattered, Chad had decided he would manipulate him right into admitting it.
Org’s reaction right now…he was almost like a father protecting his son, wanting to avenge him. And this whole moment, the emotions, the display of humanity was what Chad had wanted out of him.
Org cared about him like a son.
“He will die by my bare hands,” Org roared on, acerbic, hateful, “for what he did to Isabel, for what he did to Jhay, for what he did to that innocent pregnant woman, and for what he did to you.”
“You are Org,” Chad said. “Your decisions are final.” Then he grinned at the old man, dropping the act, and revealing his true intentions, because fucking with people’s emotions got old sometimes.
“What is with the teeth?” Org asked, giving Chad the wary eye.
“I’ll not allow you to kill my father. And I won’t kill him either. But that’s not because I want him to live.” Chad tucked his gun in his waist. “It’s because death is too kind.”
“What does that mean?” Org asked.
“Don’t worry. You’ll get to watch.”
Ameliorated, Org nodded and sat back down, trusting him.
“But,” Chad continued, “I don’t care to be a part of The Organization.”
Org laughed, shifted his gaze to a resigned Rafail, and then back to Chad. “You already are, son. And when I step down, you will not be a part of The Organization. You will be The Organization. You will no longer be Shadreek. You will be”—a slow, arrogant grin here—”Org.”
As Chad made to protest again, Org pointed a stiff, bony finger at him. “You know how this works, Shadreek. Once you are named as an inheritor, you cannot run from your duties. Wherever you are in the world, you will be found, and you will be forced to assume your seat. Or die.”
Chad realized then that, even though he’d given up his legacy for his freedom, his freedom was never returned in its entirety, because his father had stolen it from him the second he named him as his inheritor.
True, he had no choice in the matter, because with his father out, Chad was already a part of The Organization.
However, if he would be forced to be a part of it, it wasn’t going to be how Org dictated.
Jhay would hold the gavel. It was rightfully hers, not his. She might not be qualified enough to lead, but he would be right there by her side counseling her.
Now, he just had to find her. Org was playing a fucking head game with him, and Chad wouldn’t be the one who lost.
“Okay.”
Org watched him with plain suspicion, questioning his sudden acceptance, no doubt.
But Chad was done on that topic. The clock was ticking.
Walking over to his wounded father, Chad shoved aside the shooter he’d speared with the fire poker, then told one of Org’s men, “Storage room. Red duffel.”
Rafail was staring up at the ceiling, unblinking, like he was already dead, and Chad knelt down beside him, picked up his right hand, and kissed his knuckles. “I’m so sorry I can’t save you this time, father.”
Eyes still on the ceiling, his father whispered, “You never stop loving, son. It is your weakness.” Then he brought his dewy gaze to him. “Be the best leader The Organization has ever seen. Make new rules. Get rid of the ugly. Save the world from people like me.”
Chad thought those words were prudent, even coming from someone as nefarious as Rafail Niiveux.
The red duffel bag dropped with a thud beside Chad, and Rafail’s chest began rising and falling at the sight of it. “What will you do to me, son?”
“Punish you.” With a swift, deliberate flex, Chad snapped Rafail’s wrist backward, breaking the joint.
Rafail howled at the sudden pain, and his hand dangled uselessly from the wrist like a bobble-head doll.
Taking delight in the sound, Chad turned and opened his duffel he’d parked in Ricardo’s storage room the week before. Everything he thought Ricardo would need to defend himself should trouble strike, a couple of torture tools. But Chad only need two things from it at the moment.
His well-sharpened machete, and his scalpel.
He took out the two items and carefully set them aside.
“Three men,” he said out loud. And within seconds, three men were looming.
To one man, “Pin his feet.” To the other two, “Each of you pin an arm.”
Picking up the machete, Chad stood up and walked slowly around the men and his father. His father was shivering, but not begging. Rafail was foolishly prideful like that. There was tape in the duffel, but Chad wanted to hear his screams.
Stopping next to the man pinning Rafail’s left arm, Chad wagged his head at the sweat breaking out on the man’s forehead. “You don’t have the guts for this,” Chad told him. “Move.”
The male scurried off and another one immediately replaced him, chest high, shoulders squared, trying to impress Chad as he repinned Rafail’s right arm.
Slowly circling them again, Chad began rambling, as he ditched his cool and allowed the Devil to take full control of his mind and body. “It can be as messy as you want it, or as clean as you want it. I like clean. Blood and bone everywhere doesn’t appeal to me.” He stopped at his father’s right hand. “It’s much like cutting up a chicken for Sunday dinner. You find the joints, and you disconnect…like this.”
Whoaap!
That was the sound of the machete slicing through the air and disconnecting his father’s hand from the wrist.
Rafail’s cry rang rich and loud, but it was merely music to Chad’s ear as he circled again, and—Whoaap!—off went the other hand.
Smooth. Clean. Easy.
“Chadrick…son, please…” his father cried, head whipping from side to side as he looked disbelievingly at his disconnected hands. “Do not do this. Kill me instead. The legacy, it is to be passed on to you when I die. You…you are my only son. Kill me. Kill me!”
But at that point in time, Chad was out and the Devil was in. One doesn’t beg the Devil mercy. Mercy was associated with heavenly things.
Chad rambled on, moving to his father’s feet. “The ankles are a bit trickier with joints. Painstaking. So to save yourself the time, just go half an inch above the ankle, and…” Whoap!
Even louder cries now from Rafail. Blood gushing now because he didn’t disconnect from the joint. Body jerking. Shouts piercing.
In the next minute, Rafail’s other foot was clean off.
“Pull down his pants.”
As one man hurriedly did this, Org started in a careful, placating tone, “Shadreek—”
“Shut up!” Chad barked, rattling. “SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
Org shut up.
“Did you hear her story?” Chad ranted, losing it. Totally losing it. “What he did to an eleven-year-old girl? No, you didn’t. Do you know what Isabel looks like dead, with blood leaking from her head? No, you don’t. You only remember her beautiful, naked, and riding your dick. I remember her wide-eyed dead! Did you know my aunt? No. She was a good woman. A really good woman. Who didn’t deserve having her throat slit from ear to ear for the selfish purpose of getting custody of her fucking daughter. And Clementine, what the fuck did she do to deserve this? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
Chad pointed his machete at the old man. “So get over your nausea, Org, and watch what happens when a man is pushed until he fucking breaks.”
Switching the machete for the scalpel, Chad knelt down, and with a surgeon’s precision, removed his father’s flaccid cock.
“That’s for Jhay,” Chad announced, then dropped the scalpel along with the dead flesh.
Rafail’s body broke into violent trembles, his cries hoarse, his skin growing paler and paler from all the blood he was losing.
As Chad snatched up a couple of Clorox disinfecting wipes from his duffel to clean his hands, he could practically hear the discordant gulps from all the qualmish men around the room, some looking anywhere but at the bloody scene.
Torture wasn’t The Organization’s style. Clean hits were. But Chad wasn’t The Organization. He was a man who’d been pushed over the edge. A man in love with a tight, twenty-two-year-old, green-eyed girl who needed avenging.
“He will bleed out and die, Shadreek,” Org reminded him. “I thought you said you did not want him dead?”
Chad said a lot of things.
“Well I suggest you call in some medical help and make sure he doesn’t,” Chad icily returned. “In the meantime, Raymond over there has a medical background.”
Org’s eyes shot to the man who’d held Org’s feet. “You do?”
“Ah, Org,” Chad laughed, “don’t tell me I know your men better than you do?” To Raymond, “Left wing, first door on the right. It’s Clementine’s office. She was a registered nurse. You’ll find medical supplies there.”
As Raymond nodded and bounced off, Org blinked at Chad, as though seeing him for the first time.
Chad was done with this episode. He made his way over to Ricardo, retrieved his pocket knife, and freed him of the ropes, then ripped the tape off his mouth.
Due to being shot in the leg by Rafail, Chad had to help Ricardo off the chair and support his weight as he started with him out of the house.
He knew Org would have this place clean like new in less than twenty-four hours, so as he carried a hobbling Ricardo out, he announced, “You haven’t won.”
Translation for I’m gonna play your game to the end until I find my fucking woman.
When Chad had Ricardo in the car, gearing up to hot-wheel it out of there, Ricardo stunned him by saying, “I don’t feel sorry for him. And you shouldn’t regret it.”
“I despise myself and every bad thing I do, Rick,” Chad said in an extremely quiet voice. “But I never regret anything. From every bad, something good always blooms.”
As Chad started to reverse, Ricardo spoke again. “What did you say to her?”
Braking, Chad paused. “What?”
“My mother,”—coughcough—”before you shot her, you whispered something in her ear.” He slashed a fresh set of tears from his eyes. “What was it? What did you say?”
Closing his eyes, Chad inhaled deep, then exhaled, loath to delve back into the memories of that terrible night. “I said, ‘Isabel, I love you. And I’m sorry I can’t save you. But die in peace knowing Rick and Jhay will be saved, cared for, and live to see a ripe old age. If I don’t keep this promise, then beat the fuck out of me when we meet in Hell.’”