This man would have killed you. If it was his upbringing that made him, that is no excuse. Just as it was no excuse for you to treat the one you loved like shit.

I dropped my hands from my ears and listened. I listened painfully hard at every little thing. No longer uncertain, I was now… reassured by it.

“Just kill me!” he begged. “Just kill me.” And then he screamed long and hard as if something was being done to him. I heard the faint sounds of an object falling to the floor, and then the man was vomiting.

“Please… please just kill me.”

Jaxon

“Kill you?” Jaxon’s brows shot up as he stared at the mess of a man before him. He kneeled down until he was face to face with the piece of shit and said, “Why would I do you a favour and kill you so early in our game? I’m having so much fun. Aren’t you?”

The bloodied men, black and blue already from their playtime, watched Jaxon lean over and grab the switch blade off the floor. He casually wiped the bloody blade against his jeans as he waited for the man to respond.

“Not going to answer me?” Jaxon pierced him with a deadly look. “Should I pull out your fingernails on your other hand now? Was five not enough?”

The man trembled and wept. “I don’t know who sent us. I told you already. Please don’t…”

“Please what? Please don’t kill you?” Jaxon shot him a sweet smile. “You were going to kill my woman. No, wait, you were going to fucking rape her first and then kill her. In front of me, too. Right?”

The man shook his head vehemently. “No! No, that was him! Not me. I wouldn’t-wouldn’t have done-done anything, I fucking swear!”

Jaxon nodded. “Right. So you telling him that you wanted your go with my woman –”

“I didn’t mean it!”

“Right, right. Wow, how fucking stupid of me to think you meant it!” Jaxon shook his head with a look of false shock on his face. “So what would you have done then? You’d have…?”

“I would have-have stopped him!”

“Really?”

“Yes, I fucking swear! I’d never-never have touched her. Never!”

Jaxon nodded in mock understanding again. “Hmm. Yeah, and you pointing the gun at me–”

“I was going to drop it! I was never going to actually fucking use-use it, I swear, man! I swear!” Yeah, he swears – Jaxon got that already.

He continued to watch the man flounder in his bullshit. Really, the shit they fucking said when they were desperate! It was outrageous. They played the part of a victim to perfection.

“Enough of the fucking lying, man. Cut the bullshit. You’re a dead man regardless. So just tell me the fucking truth, alright? Die with some fucking dignity.” Jaxon ignored the hysteric panting that ensued from the fucker’s mouth. “You were hired to kill us. How did you find us?”

“He-he kn-knew where you were.”

“How?”

“I-I don’t know!”

“Don’t fucking lie to me.”

“I’m not, I’m not! I swear, I’m not!”

Fucking liar. He’d get that out of him eventually. “What gang are you from and where’s the marking?” Jaxon knew the fucking drill. Knew he was a hired killer, which meant his emblem was covered up, and he wanted to see it.

When the man didn’t answer, Jaxon pulled his hair roughly and inched closer to his face. “Listen to me, you piece of maggot shit, I’m going to ask you one more fucking time where your marking is, and if you don’t fucking answer, I’m going to make this experience as slow and painful as I can. And I’m a really imaginative fucker, so you wouldn’t like what I have planned. Where’s your fucking marking?”

The man still didn’t respond. Persistent bastard. It was actually admirable.

Jaxon sighed. He was so sick of getting his hands dirty, but what did it matter anyway? The cabin was a total write off now and the piece of shit deserved to die.

“Fine,” he said with a casual shrug. “You want to play it that way, dead man? We’ll play it that way nice and slow.”

And he did.

Twenty Four

Only I could fall asleep while someone was being tortured. It was just after many hours there’d been some silence, and my body had taken advantage of that silence and fallen into unconsciousness.

I inhaled sharply and awoke when a hand touched my cheek. I opened my eyes to Jaxon. He was knelt down beside the couch. His eyes were no longer distant or cold. They were soft and troubled, roaming me head to toe with concern.

“Hey,” I whispered.

“Hey.”

God, he looked tired. There were bags under his eyes and his face was paler. My stomach churned at the sight of splattered blood all over his shirt, arms and jeans. He reminded me of a gladiator that’d just walked out of the Colosseum. He was certainly big enough for one…

“Is he…?” my voice trailed off, but the question was thick in the air. I didn’t need to finish.

He gave me a stern nod. “Yeah.”

I nodded. “Are you okay?”

“Am I okay?” Bewildered, he sucked in a breath as his eyes watered. He leaned over and put his hand to my face. He was suddenly falling apart in front of me. “You… He took you… I watched him …” His breaths came out short and hard.

I rested my hand over his, massaging my thumb against his knuckles. “I needed him to.”

His bottom lip quivered as a single tear fell from his eye. “You killed one but I made the other one pay.” Then he hastily added, “It needed to be done. They would have killed you –”

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

I pulled him onto the couch and then I huddled against his bloody clothes. He wrapped his arms around me and held me for a long, long time. We didn’t talk.

I never felt so filthy in my life, on the inside and out. I would have gladly set fire to my body to rid the touch of that man. Yet Jaxon’s touch overpowered it, ridding away the sickness he left behind and replacing it with adulation. I knew I would forever be changed for what I’d done, but I didn’t fear the change; I embraced it. I wouldn’t succumb to fragility or self-pity. I’d already gone that route before. No, that was the caterpillar. The resolute, strong woman I aspired to be was the butterfly I knew was within me.

“What now?” My voice sounded dry and scratchy.

He was quiet for a heartbeat or two, and then he said, “Now we make the fucker that sent them pay.”

*****

Dawn broke just as we whipped into Gosnells.

We were risking it all coming back. What awaited us was the unknown. And while my world had changed in Maddington, Gosnells remained a portrait frozen in time. It was the place the Jackals would forever own; a place where my horrors were born, love was forged, and pain resided.

Just a few hours prior, Jaxon had taken me into the bathroom, determined to clean me up and adamant I keep my eyes closed on the way there. He didn’t want me to see what became of the tortured man, and I frankly was tired of harbouring sick images. In the bathroom, he cleaned me head to toe, even went so far as washing inside of me. It was hard for him to do it. Easy to kill a man but broken to help his woman, Jaxon had more layers than an onion – unconquerable, remember?

“I’m going to protect you forever,” he’d told me, lathering me in soap with determination. “No one will ever touch you again. Ever.” The veins in his neck protruded as he fought to keep his temper at bay.

“It’s okay,” I quietly told him, throwing my arms around his neck. “It wasn’t your fault. I can see it in your face that you think it was. It wasn’t. I’m not broken, Jaxon. I’ve never been more fixed in my life than standing here with you.”

I emerged out of my thoughts as Jaxon parked in front of the familiar red bricked bar. I felt nostalgic seeing the giant “King’s Temple” sign. The last time I was here held no fond memories I wanted to revisit. He jumped off the bike and turned to me just as I stepped down. He looked me up and down with that look of concern still carved in his features. I knew in a matter of moments that look would be shut away.

I had been shocked to find that although I’d dressed in clean clothes after I’d stepped out of the shower, Jaxon had put on the exact same ones. I thought, is he trying to parade his bloody clothes like a trophy? Only I saw his look of disdain as he threw them on, as if he too was sickened by it. Then I realized this was how he wanted to appear. He wanted to look raw after what we’d just come out of.

He retrieved the gun from the bike and placed it in his pants, not trying to conceal it. It bulged noticeably. He grabbed my hand and we walked to the entrance door. I had turned my mind off, allowing Jaxon complete control. Right before we entered the room of unpredictability, I turned my head up to the sky and watched the sun trickle in through the clouds thinking, if ever there’s an unchanging constant, it’s the sun.

The bar seemed foreign to me. There was so much… space. There weren’t hundreds of bodies crammed in here, or girls stripping on the counters, or men fawning over me… Instead, we were greeted with silence, and it felt strangely more cryptic than the noise.

There was some activity. Several men were drinking around a table, looking dishevelled as they played their card games. A mountain of cash was in the centre of the table, some of the bills crumpled up and set brusquely aside.

When they heard our footsteps, they all looked up. Shock and horror erupted from their faces when they ogled Jaxon’s state. Their game was long forgotten and they pushed up out of their seats, but Jaxon was already out of there, dragging me to the back of the bar where the office was. They hollered his name as we neared the door, but it opened before we got to it.

The doorway was completely filled with the muscled wall of a body that was Damien. My heart surged at the sight of him in one piece. I hadn’t seen him since the night of the crash. I don’t know why I ever thought he’d been hurt. The guy was just so big.

Jaxon let go of my hand and stormed in Damien’s direction. “What the fuck happened to that fucking coup?!”

Damien reached his arm out to stop Jaxon from coming any further. “We never got the chance! He went to make a call–”

“Yeah, a call to send fucking men after us!”

“And then he just disappeared. I don’t know how he found you.”

“After I tortured a man to get that answer, I found a fucking tracker on the bike.”

Damien exhaled in anger. “I fucking warned you about that, Jaxon!”

Jaxon didn’t reply. I watched carefully as the two men stared at each other. Yet again there was that communication carried out by simply exchanging looks. Whatever Jaxon saw in Damien, he didn’t like.

“What’s going on?” I whispered into his side.

“Finley’s a fucking dead man, that’s what’s wrong,” Jaxon gritted out.

He stormed into the office, his anger sharp in his features as he swiped everything off of Finley’s desk with one arm. Damien watched him, unperturbed by the anger display.

“Six years working for that fucker,” Jaxon vented, gripping the corners of the desk until his hands went white. “I depended on you guys for one fucking thing!”

“He didn’t know what we were going to do,” Damien replied calmly.

Jaxon scoffed. “Then why is he gone, Day?”

Damien shook his head. “I don’t know, bro. I don’t know.”

“That shit’s fucking unbelievable. After everything I put her and Fritz through, it was for nothing–”

“It’s not for nothing! He’s gone. Maybe he caught on somehow and took off.”

“The guy has connections, Damien! You know what kind of shit he could send after us now–”

Damien’s phone interrupted him, ringing an unusually springy tune that didn’t suit the large man. He pulled the phone out of his pocket. “Speak of the devil,” he muttered before tossing the phone to Jaxon.

Jaxon caught it and answered. “Yeah?” I watched him pace the room and the stress levels began to rise while he listened with his lips pursed and his brows fused together.

Something wasn’t right.

“Alright, Fritz. Thanks for the heads up.” Jaxon slammed the cell down and the desk vibrated beneath him.

“What did he want?” Damien asked, equally unsettled by Jaxon’s demeanour.

Jaxon sighed. “Jackals saw us riding in. They’re coming to pick me up.”

My heart lurched. “What? We have to get out of here–”

“No,” he interrupted with a shake of his head. “They’ll already be here. I gotta make this right.”

“No! Jaxon, they’ll hurt you. Remy… Remy will kill you. We have to go now.” I felt the hysteria explode out of me. This was bad! BAD!

He didn’t answer. He tapped his fingers against the desk, clouded in thought. I turned to Damien.

“Tell him,” I pressed him. “Tell him we need to run.”

“Nowhere left to run, Sara,” he softly replied. “He always planned for this to happen.”

What? No. No!

Jaxon rubbed his face again and then took me by the hand. He steered us out of the office and then out of the bar, walking hastily past the crowd of Scorpions that had been listening in on us. Damien followed closely behind until we were out of the bar and into the parking lot.

Looking at Damien, he said, “Take her someplace safe ‘til this gets sorted out.”