Chapter 39: Chapter 39

NOTE|

OKAY maybe I am evil for enjoying the pain that comes with killing off characters and surprising my readers with plot twists out of nowhere.

When I came up with the book title, in my head I knew it was always going to be about Jr and Connor and I didn’t want to show that just yet. I wanted all of you to love Callan and Nicole and understand the pain the boys carry, to feel the loss just like they did, just like I did.

And Callan’s death was always going to play a pivotal role in the Alpha Bodyguard series I’m still writing about Flames, Blaze, Holy, Snakes, Jason and Pindrop.

So, am I evil for not giving a warning about Callan and Nicole’s deaths? I am. Yes I am but please DO NOT leave any hate comments on the book, there are tons of books on the app and I can’t hold it against you if you want to leave this one.

I love all of you, I read each one of your comments and sit down the whole day thinking of how I’ll make each one of your happy. And speaking of, shout out to the comments from these people: @sophia martin, Vicky, Monique, Jasmine Robinson, Irene, AMY lol—sweet Amy—and any other person I failed to read a comment from.

With Jr and Connor, I can promise none of them are dying but at the same time I can’t promise their love stories will be all rainbows and cupcakes, I shed tears writing some of the plot holes and thus I’ll have to make you shed tears too.

That’s all for now, be nice.

CONNOR/ KADE HAWKINS

THE GINGER WITH THE ‘fuck me’ leopard print heels hadn’t stopped whatever it was she was doing.

And by whatever it was, I meant peering at me like I was a demon who had escaped hell and tried to drag her along to my own hell.

And damn it, this was hell.

The crazy elevator lady had followed me to the parking lot way before I could clean the mess that was a Zeta untrained cunt who’d tried to slit my throat with a flimsy knife. As if shit hadn’t turned sour, their getaway driver another untrained shooter shot at us and managed to get away.

And as if my day wasn’t fucking bad enough there was—

“Drop me off here”

Her.

I ignored her, re-dialing Ice’s number for the fourth time.

He was busy, probably cleaning the mess I had left in the basement but shit, if he didn’t answer I was going to lose my fucking mind.

Loose ends. I hated loose ends and when those loose ends were associated with gangs like the Zetas, then everything was beyond fucked up.

I raided the little shits months ago. Just one of those gangs that embezzled money meant for food aid for countries in Africa and some in middle Asia. I wasn’t that fucking inhumane not to give them a warning but their boss had refused to negotiate and I had been left with one choice.

Kill them all.

Exterminate.

Ice handled keeping shit quiet. Eliminating the Zetas without any other gang associated with them knowing who had pulled the trigger but now—

Some lived and they knew me and they knew I had pulled the trigger.

The only way to end all of this was via blood bath and not just anyone’s blood but mine and Ice’s. if they hadn’t already.

Fucking reeling, my pulse in my ears I could hear it, I dialed Ice’s number again, he picked up a few seconds later.

“Five calls? Situation?”

“Zeta. Loose ends. A fucking witness”, I bit out evading the red’s gaze.

“A witness you didn’t get rid of? Who’s she?”

“No one. Wrong time, wrong place”

“Is she pretty? Let me guess, has nice tits, a good ass and the cherry on top, blonde hair”

She wasn’t blonde. I couldn’t give a fuck about her tits or ass especially most especially when she had the signature ginger hair on her head and eye brows. I never trusted red heads, not since…

“Ginger”, I gritted loudly, Ice coughed on the other end of the line.

“Wow, I would never have seen the day Kade Hawkins brought a ginger to the house. You are bringing her here, right?”

“The situation calls for it. They might have seen her; she might be in danger”

“Or she’s too hot to let go, that it?”

“I’m better than that”

Wouldn’t sink too low for a woman who thought that standing two feet near her meant I wanted to fuck her in an elevator.

Of course, I had fucked in the most precarious of all places. Infront of witnesses nonetheless but that didn’t mean I would bend her over and take her bareback in a fucking Amato building or anywhere else.

Jesus fucking Christ why was I even thinking about sinking into her?

I had bigger fish to fry. Bigger fish to eliminate.

“I’ll get everything ready. Possibly find the shits we didn’t exterminate”

“Good and hey, glad they didn’t get to you”

“If that’s your way of telling me you love me then it’s a pretty shitty way, Kade. Don’t kill her with your sweetness buddy”

“I can’t make any promises”, I retorted cutting the call, placing the phone on the center console before I peered into the front view mirror thankful as fuck that the blue SUV wasn’t the same car behind us when I left Amato.

Last thing I needed was to be followed carrying a woman who for a ginger had some sort of skittishness with blood, dead bodies and possible knives stabbed in something.

“Do you kill people and kidnap the witnesses to save your sorry ass from landing in prison?”

Sarcastic and scared, a deadly combo for a woman.

“No”

I didn’t have any reason to answer her. Frankly speaking I should have ignored her, drove her all the way to my house left her, found a nice chick to fuck at Deluxe before we raided the remaining Zetas and called it a day.

“No on the killing or no on the kidnapping part because you literally have me tied to your car. These handcuffs…this is considered abuse, this is illegal, stabbing people in a parking lot is psychotic. Listen mister, if you drop me here, I swear—”

“Kade”, I corrected.

If she was trying to assert her dominance in my car best believe she would call me right. No mister, not that type of shit women like her spewed in the name of pretending they were innocent little lambs.

“Kade, I don’t know you. I have no right to run to the cops and tell them what I saw today. They also shot at me, you saved me…I promise if you let me go, this…all this, it will be like it never happened. I never saw you, you never saw me”

“Friends, how many do you have? Better question is how brave is the little boyfriend you got back at your apartment? Has he ever held a gun before? Your family? Are you sure they’d be able to protect you from a few sociopaths that butcher people for fun? If they can then be my guest, leave if you must”

I stopped the car ever so slightly at a shadier alley.

I wasn’t a good guy, hadn’t been since I crossed my family over. A good guy would have handled this with the usual charm and panache.

Calm her down with some shit of where we are going, you’ll be okay. I’ll protect you and keep your family safe you just have to trust me.

Instead, an impish scowl forming on my face, I reached out to the dashboard found the keys to her cuffs and leaned closer to her seat ignoring her eyes and focusing on the damn things binding her wrists to the seatbelt.

Her unsteady breath hit my ear, her boobs struggled underneath that polka dotted mess she called a blouse and I had I been in my usual calm self my dick would be throbbing at the scene.

Still her scent did the job, her raggedness, her uneasiness and the subtle hint of her being scared and turned on made my dick twitch.

Roses. She smelled like damn roses and something else. Some intoxicating shit that overwhelmed my focus on the keyhole in the cuffs.

The skirt she had on resembled the five-inch heels on her feet. Fucking temptation.

Bad, Kade.

Bad.

Red. Ginger. Tina Hanks.

And whatever caveman-y thoughts of opening her legs and looking at her bare cunt fizzled out the way flames did under the mercy of cold as fuck water.

I reclined to my seat, not a word, calm and fucking composed.

This was it. She didn’t need to buy my bullshit. She saw a murderer in me and the right thing to do was to run away from murderers.

She just had to open that door.

Run from me and back to her little life. Well, and if she managed to live for twenty-four hours, good for her.

And if she didn’t, her death wouldn’t be on me. I didn’t tell her to follow me, I never for a fucking fact brought the Zetas on her little strawberry colored porch.

Could I live with that though? Another death weighing me down, ripping me apart day by day with haunting nightmares, ghosts of the past?

I got my answer the very minute she opened her side of the door, slammed it and scrammed away like a deer down the tarmacked sidelines.

“Good riddance”, I bellowed.

She was running…fast for a woman her size and that brought an amused smile to my face.

“Be a good girl and run away from me. Run Red. Run like your life depends on it”, I said watching her through my window as her polka-dots drifted with distance.

Her five-inch heels came to a still next to some park bench of the sort. Her ass stared at me from the mirror and I stared back shamelessly.

“Run”, I barked like she could see me.

I barked getting fucking turned on at her there by the road, thinking, assessing, probably wondering how insane she was at a level between one to ten because the moment those fucking heels stopped, I knew what was running through her mind.

She turned around and she was running now…back to my car.

Back to the monster.

CASSANDRA BATES

CRAZINESS came in all sorts of ways.

I knew I was among the crazier lot God had built with leftovers when after my heartbreak with Jr, I sought answers from the church. And two seconds in that church and all I had been thinking about was the preaching thirty something year old hot as fuck priest bending me over the altar and fucking me till Jr was out of my system.

Of course, that never happened. Even though I wished it had happened with absolutely no regrets.

This wasn’t crazy. This wasn’t mental but it was far from the norm.

Kade Hawkins gave me a leeway. A chance to go back to my life, work to the bone from Mondays to Fridays as usual and eat ramen noodles on the weekends watching melodramatic shit that had my heart constricting with jealousy and guilt for not thriving in the love and sex department.

In my own fucked up way I had left that behind by running back to his car, by seating a few inches from the crude man who might have been taking me to my grave.

And why?

I thought of my dad. He had retired from all of this. Years of killing, playing bodyguard, Jr’s father’s death, they had all scarred him and I didn’t want my mess the one that involved psychotic people who shot other people in a parking lot getting to him.

I also thought of Jr. I hated him and maybe I still loved him as a man, as my adopted brother and as a friend. He was in New York on some dangerous assignment and he didn’t need me adding any more to that.

Which left the question of was I really dumb to trust the man with the scary looking scar in protecting me?

God knew I needed protection but I would have rather got protection from the thirty-year-old priest I had wanted to fuck when I was nineteen rather than Kade Hawkins.

“I love my dad. I wouldn’t want to see him—”

Dead. That would gut me for life.

“People die and that’s not something new”, Came his brutal reply.

Scowl permanent on that drool worthy face, hair still on his head and that mysterious aura of mischief, sin, death, everything gruesome you would ever imagine engulfed him.

The crazy part being I wanted a touch of that. Something sinister, I hated blood, couldn’t stand the sight of it but I wanted touch of his blood-colored life and maybe that was the part of me that was trying to make everything normal and not insane that was talking.

“They die, I agree but at their own time when God has made sure they’ve completed their purpose”

“Purpose? God?” he asked in a mock.

“You don’t believe in God, I gather. Or purpose?”

“The real world doesn’t work the way it does because some invisible man in the skies wants it to”, was his gruff reply.

I wasn’t religious. Not the sort that carried rosaries and prayed at night for penance of sins. But I liked to believe everything that happened wasn’t just coincidence. Like running into Kade.

“Is that why you kill? Because you don’t believe in God or sin?”

“In my world, sin is what drives me. I kill because I have to, and if I don’t, my purpose as you put it, is done. I’ll be done”

His car glided down easily up a pebbled drive way and from a distance, I could see the extensive green canopy blend well with a modern house with crystal clear slider doors and windows.

The car came to a halt, Kade turned to me, eyes unwavering, glued in on me, tracing every inch of my skin the way Jack Sparrow did with treasure, his dark brown eyes bounced down my nose, skimmed my lips, licked down my throat and whatever retort jamming my throat refused to make its way out of my mouth.

I stared back like a pup trying to prove it was strong and fierce in front of its master. Kade stared harder, fiercer, angrier, my nerves flayed raw, flames licked my heart and a strange whorl of fear as well as streaks of arousal dotted every inch of my skin.

“This is not some bullshit witness protection program. I’m keeping you here because you are stuck with me and I, you. We get in there, you race to your little room, you stay quiet and more importantly no damned conversations about God to anyone”

Cornered, shut up for good and humiliated at that, I followed like a pup. I got lost behind his towering height, tried to keep up with his long strides, tried to breathe behind all those of waves of masculine energy he exuded.

Minutes later, past a posh foyer the kind you saw in mansions that held charities with one of them ten thousand dollar a plate fundraiser, past a grand stairwell that had a chandelier leaking between it, to the living room where another bunch of gruffy men stood with Kevlar vests and a whole lot of ammo that might have deemed them terrorists.

“Ginger?” one of the men, the one with the ash blonde white hair and equally as bulky as the son of a gun next to me greeted.

I swallowed hard, Kade’s commands looming in my brain and at the same time the stinging anger to correct him surging through me.

“Cassie”, I enunciated. Kade’s scowl might have grown. Ash blonde smiled, giving his gun to the man behind him before he took steps towards me.

“Ice but you can call me whatever you want sunshine”, he took my hand ever so softly kissing the back of it and I didn’t know just what to say.

You guys were killers. You guys were mercenaries and I—somehow had ended up being part of—

Kade snatched my hand from Ice’s lips not letting go even when Ice took a step back with a laid-back playful grin on his face.

My eyes lingered on his touch. The redness inflicted by those damn cuffs still graced my wrists, stung even but Kade’s hand was there. Skin to skin, his pulse on my wrist, his anger groping my wrist painfully and I should have spoken out, told him he was hurting me but that’s the thing with this damn man, I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t think when I was around him.

He was scary and intimidating and breathtaking and ass. The kind of man your mother warned you to stay away from because she too wanted to fuck him.

Did I want to fuck him? Was that what this was about? The insanity of it all?

He turned to me, those eyes ever blazing.

“Upstairs, on your right, first door”, he commanded.

You race to your little room, you stay quiet.

No, this wasn’t me. I didn’t stay quiet when an egotistical man challenged me. The Cassie I knew stood up for herself, had never been one to obey commands and was never ever ever the damsel in distress.

“You brought me here. You said you kill people because you have to and if I’m going to be an accomplice to mass murder, I demand to know just what the hell is going on”

“Red”, Kade whispered his voice falling to an octave, his grip tighter.

“I like her”, Ice said behind Kade and a surge of pride and victory coursed through me.

“Upstairs. Now”

“No! I want the truth. I want the bloody truth. What are you? Spies? Secret service? FBI? And the people who are after you and me now apparently, what are they?”

Kade scrubbed his jaw with his right hand, the one that wasn’t touching me, the one that was free.

“The truth? It’s been a shitty day, my patience’s running thin and if I didn’t have to tail some piece of shits across town, I would be kind enough to show you just how we treat guests around here”

“Kade”, Ice interrupted Kade as if the shit he would say next would make me pee my pants or in this case-- skirt.

“No, the missus wants to know the bloody truth, why don’t we give her that—”

“That’s enough, K-“

“You have no fucking right to demand for anything. This shit, everything happening right fucking now is your fault. I’m no spy, I don’t work with the FBI and I’m not like the boyfriend back in your colored apartment who’ll promise you everything will be okay when shit isn’t okay in the first place. I’m the guy however who’ll bend you over my knee slap your naked ass till you understand how everything works around here. I call the shots, you obey. Go to your room, RED”

Quaking bravado keeping me from the verge of shedding tears, I snatched my hand away from him, leveling him with false pretense that I wasn’t alarmed at his words,

“MAKE ME”

xXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXx

See you tomorrow