JETT
Ronni was commanding three of her Stilettos down by the dock. Chaz, York, and I stood on the boat, a few of my men surrounding us waiting for Ronni to finish up her little business meeting. I was getting angrier by the minute, the longer we waited, the more John could be doing to Ebony.
“What the fuck is she doing?” I asked Aubrey. He’d come up to me just as Ronni finished up with the girls. Their boat sped off into the night while she made her way over to us.
“Just relax, I want her back as much as you do,” Aubrey said. “Ronni knows what she’s doing.”
I highly doubted it. She was John’s sister. Why was I trusting her? He trusted her enough to tell her where his goddamn boat was, which meant I didn’t know if I could trust her to be on my side when it came down to it.
“The girls will create a diversion…” Ronni jumped down into the boat, “… let’s go.”
I looked over at York, then at Aubrey, who had a stone expression on his face. Ronni was talking to Chaz who was steering the boat out of the marina and following the other boat. I moved to the front of the boat with York. Aubrey stayed back—alone—probably thinking about going back to prison tomorrow. He really had nothing to live for—this had been a mere glimpse of a life he wouldn’t ever be a part of.
“How many guns do you have on you?” I asked York, looking back to the front of the boat.
“Six. You?”
“Four. We need to split up once we get there. The sooner I get to Ebony, the better, but it’ll be me who kills John. You hear?”
York nodded. “Yep. If I find him first, I’ll pull him up for you.”
“Appreciate it. Can we trust Ronni?”
York didn’t respond right away causing me to look over at him. “Honestly, I don’t know her that well. I met her once when I was younger, but she was always a force to be reckoned with. When John turned on her, she conducted business away from the eye of the city, but you always knew she could get to you if you crossed her. I think, for now, we have no choice but to trust her.”
It did nothing to ease my nerves, but York was right, this was our only option. I looked out on the dark water as we approached a boat isolated by the others. It looked like it had been out here for a long time. How could I not have known about this?
I could vaguely see the Stilettos making their way up the side of the ship like cockroaches. We were fast approaching. I moved to the back of the boat and took off my jacket ensuring my guns had their safety clips off.
“Ready?” I asked Aubrey. He looked up at me as if I’d surprised him. He pulled himself up off the seat he’d been on and nodded. “I need the Aubrey Caine who was arrested back then, not the broken prison bitch. You got it?”
He looked me in the eye, something dark coming over him. “You know nothing of my time in there.”
“No, you’re right, I don’t, but I do know your daughter needs you to be the asshole you once were.”
He pulled a gun from his jacket and threw it to the side. Pushing it into his belt, he nodded at me, but I could tell he wanted to pull the damn trigger on me.
Ronni came up to us sensing the tension. “Sixty seconds. Focus on the task and not the hatred. Understand?”
She walked off before I could respond, Aubrey followed after her. York had my back as the boat came up beside the bigger one, one of the Stilettos had run a ladder over the side for us. Aubrey and Ronni were heading up first. My men all knew what to do, so I headed up the ladder after York my mind focused on one thing.
Ebony.
The boat was poorly lit, which I guess was by design. York made his way left while I turned right. Opening a door, I stepped through into a dimly-lit hall, my gun cocked. I jumped at the sudden loud noise of a gun going off somewhere underneath me.
Well, so much for stealth.
I ran down the hall looking in each room as I went. A staircase was at the end of the hall. Moving quickly down the stairs, I came to a level of doors everywhere. York came out of one of them, startling me.
“It’s me,” he said. I put my gun down. “The Stilettos opened fire. John hasn’t been found yet, but Chaz is still looking.”
“Take the doors on the right.”
York ran to the first door while I took off for the left side looking through the round portholes on each of the doors. Finally, there was one door left. A door with no window, unlike the others. I looked over at York who raised his pistol to the door lock and shot until it swung open.
When the door fully opened banging against the wall, I gasped at what I saw. Never in my wildest dreams had I expected to walk in on this. Ebony hung from two chains secured to the roof. Her bloodied body was slumped in a way that showed me he’d relentlessly tortured her, and she was barely hanging on.
Anger rolled through me propelling me toward her. I supported her body against mine to take the pressure off her wrists which were red raw, blood had been dripping down her arms to her shoulder. I felt something on my arm, something wet. Turning around, I gazed down at her back. Horror filled me as I saw the red, bloody, and glossy wounds all over her back from a visible lashing. Her skin was open from constant whipping, blood drying in between the skin and broken flesh.
“Jett,” York came over to me to help me with Ebony. I looked over to the open doorway to see Chaz pushing John to his knees. My father had a cruel smirk on his face as I locked eyes with him.
“Do you like what I did to her, son?”
Fury rode me like a bitch, forcing me to see red as I walked toward him. Hauling him up to his feet, I pulled the gun from my belt and cocked it against his temple.
“You sick fuck.”
“Careful,” he said. “Is that emotion you’re showing? I thought I’d taught you better than that.”
I smacked him across the face with the butt of my pistol. His head whipped to the side blood appearing in the corner of his mouth.
“She was always mine,” he said, wiping the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. “With a few more days, I’d have broken her enough that she’d never speak your name again.”
I dropped the gun and shoved him to the ground kicking him in the rib cage as hard as I could. This asshole deserved to feel pain before I killed him. He rolled to his side, coughing as he laughed. I kicked him again, and more blood spurted from his mouth. Gunshots could be heard firing and ricocheting in the background, but I didn’t care. John was going to suffer as long as I could make him.
York was carrying Ebony past, her head falling limply against his shoulder. I felt sick to my stomach that I’d let this happen to her, but damn if John wasn’t going to pay.
“Get her out of here,” I told him. York nodded and held her up, carefully walking off to the boat we came in on. The room was emptied. John was left with me unable to get up. I looked around the room landing my eyes on a chair in the corner. Grabbing it, I pulled John up with little effort and pushed him down into it, so he was facing me. The whip he’d used on Ebony was lying by the door. I quickly grabbed it feeling the weight of the handle in my hands.
“Ebony will never be yours,” I said, surprisingly calm.
My chest burned with anger, and my hands itched to be punching him, but I didn’t want him to die, just yet. No, he needed to feel some pain for what he did to my girl.
“You couldn’t kill me all those years ago, what makes you think you can do it now?”
“I didn’t have a reason to before,” I honestly said, surprising myself. “Now, I have no problem ridding this world of you, especially if it means keeping Ebony safe.”
“You have no idea what that slut got up to in her teenage years, do you?”
He laughed, croaking from the pain he was feeling.
“I don’t care what you made her do. All I know is when you’re gone, I’ll take over every aspect of the life you fought so hard to build, and I’ll rip everything apart you worked hard to achieve.”
“My clients will never accept you.”
“I don’t want your pedophile clients, you fuck. I’ll put them in a fucking house together and set it alight.”
“You don’t have the guts, son. You were always weak. I broke you. I was the one who created Jett Black.”
“No, you weren’t. The one who helped me create him was Luca. I guess you’ve heard about what I did to him.”
John looked up at me, his eyebrow raised. “So it’s true. I’m impressed. Luca wasn’t someone to easily trust.”
I gripped the handle of the whip harder, getting ready. “It took a few years to get there. He showed me everything, and I used it to get to where I am today. He just didn’t realize how fucking broken you made me, and I applied it to my advantage.”
“So you should be fucking thanking me.”
“You’re right, I should be. Yet, you stole my woman and tortured her. There’s no way you’re making it out of here alive, you have to know that.”
He scoffed. “You’ll miss me. There’s so much I can still show you.”
“That I highly doubt. I’ve already surpassed everything you’ve ever achieved and in half the time. Now, sit back and relax into this.”
He turned his head just as I let the whip land on his lap. A roar of pain ripped out of his throat, and he tried to pull himself up and off the chair. I let him fall to the ground on his hands and knees in pain.
“Oh… does that hurt?” I sarcastically asked. “Hmm.”
Thwack!
Another whip right across his back forcing him further to the ground with a loud thud. He groaned as he tried to push himself back up, but failed.
“I guess you now know what it was like for Ebony… tell me, did she beg you to stop?”
“No.”
“What was that?”
“I said no!”
Ebony didn’t say anything?
She didn’t beg for him to stop torturing her?
Dear God, could I be any more fucking proud and turned on right now?
“So you continued your torture to have her break for you?”
“There was a time…” he began, taking a deep breath before continuing, “… that she would have done anything I asked of her.”
“She’s a Queen, my Queen, why would she ever bow down to you?”
“Don’t get so comfortable with her, boy. Once you let your guard down, that’s when they flay you from the inside out. She’ll do the same, it’s in her genes.”
I hated hearing him speak about Ebony, but for him to discuss her as if he knew her, that was the worst part of all. I pulled my arm back and slammed the whip down over him again. He cried out as his arm twisted out at an awkward angle.
“Just finish me,” he breathed out in agony.
“Why? Aren’t you having fun?”
He tried to move away from me using his one good arm. I pulled the whip back again and whipped his hand. Blood spat out everywhere as two fingers snapped. His arm shook from the shock. He just looked down at the damage I’d done, and from what I gathered, it was partial disbelief and partial horror.
“There is one thing I’d like to know,” I said.
“What?”
“Why did you kill my mother?”
He laughed, I was surprised he had the energy to do it. “You haven’t worked it out yet?”
“What am I meant to work out?”
“She was just a whore that I didn’t need anymore. After she had you, she ruined her body. I didn’t want to play with that slut again, she knew it and was trying to take you away from me. Whether you like to admit it or not, you are my son, and you belong by my side.”
I played with the bloodied lashes of the whip considering his words. I did remember some memories of conversations my parents had, that hadn’t made sense at the time, but if I really delved into it now, I knew I’d get the answer I didn’t want to know.
My mother was an angel, and she had tried to save me. Whether she was a slut or not didn’t matter to me. She didn’t deserve what he did to her that night or at her funeral which I’d never gotten over. She had deserved to be paid respect, not have her very nature ripped apart by doubt caused by my father. No one spoke her name again, she’d been ostracized for the final time.
“And if you’d given me the time, I could have turned Ebony into a slave.”
The words filtered through my mind, and although I knew what he was doing, I couldn’t stop how I reacted. I let my arm pull back, and the whip landed down on his body again, and again, and again. Soon, he was a bloodied pulp, almost decapitated. I hovered over him, dropping the whip to the ground with a wet thud.
“This city isn’t big enough for both of us.”
I pulled the gun from my belt and shot him in between the eyes. He fell back, his head hitting the ground hard.
After pouring some accelerant, I pulled out a cigarette and lit it, taking in a deep breath before flicking it onto the body of my father and walking away.