knew she was with me.
Vera and Ronnie must have thought the same thing because the looks on their faces were thunderous. They liked Cheska. Fuck, they loved her, and not just because she was mine.
They wouldn’t get her. I fucking vowed to myself that they would never get her.
Cheska stayed glued to my side as we pulled up at the church. I held her fucking close as we went inside and sat down in the living room. One by one my family returned home, bringing their bags with them. We were all staying under this fucking roof until the cunts messing with us were caught.
No one spoke as we all sat around the room. Cheska sat on my lap. But it was the hairpin blades in her hands I watched, as she studied the gift Ronnie had given her. Her fingers danced over the steel and over the intricate filigree handle.
“I have braces for you too,” Vera said, nodding to the blades in Cheska’s hold.
“Braces?” Cheska asked.
“To conceal them.” Vera gestured to her sleeves and the bottom of her trousers. “They lie flat so no one will know you have them on you. Giving you time to plan your escape.”
Cheska nodded, but her eyes widened. Then I saw something flit across her face. Something I’d never seen on her before—a shadow of fucking black, a spiral of darkness.
Darkness that matched my own.
My phone sounded in my pocket. I pulled it out, expecting to see a message from Mikey telling me the police were bought off and the yard was cleared. Instead, it was a message sent by an encrypted number.
I opened it up as Eric and Charlie talked of what Mikey had found so far and the others listened. Cheska was busy turning her blades over and over in her hands, and I focused on the video that had been sent.
The video was silent and the quality was grainy. It took me a while to realise what I was looking at. But when the camera panned out and I saw a familiar thatched roof and manicured garden with a wooden fence, I knew.
I tensed, every fibre in my body braced to fucking snap. Cheska whipped her head to me, obviously feeling something in me change. My breathing came fast and hard as I watched some fucker in all black walk to the house that held every good childhood memory I ever had. And I watched as the cunt circled the cottage and poured petrol over the walls and the sides.
And I fucking watched as my mum walked out, checking a noise or something that she must have heard. I didn’t move a fucking muscle as I watched the cunt charge at her from his cover of darkness and slam her back into the house, locking her inside, barricading the door with a metal bar. My mum hammered on the glass in the door as they backed away. Then she ran to the living room window just as the flames ignited, trapping her inside.
“Babe?” Cheska’s soft voice said, but all I had was white noise in my head as the video showed the cottage starting to burn. Showed my mum running from the window when the heat became too much. Showed me her fucking terrified face as she backed away, the flames swallowing the house like it was being devoured by the jaws of hell itself.
The camera shut off and the room was plunged into silence. But my mum’s and Pearl’s voices were screaming in my head. Screaming for help, for the fucking help that never came as the house was torched, as my little sister, who was no doubt in bed, found my fucking mum in the thick black smoke of the cottage and held her tightly as the place burned and fell around them. As it fucking ripped the life from their lungs.
It wasn’t an accident.
Arson.
It was fucking arson.
They were murdered. Mum … Pearl … they were fucking murdered. I didn’t even feel myself pushing Cheska off my lap. I didn’t think anything as I gave myself over to fury and started ripping the room apart, bottles from the bar smashing as I wrenched them down, overturning tables and chairs and slicing them open with my knife.
They’d been murdered. My mum … my sister … Some fucker had—
I searched for my phone, finding it on the floor. I replayed the video, and …
There.
I dropped the fucking phone when I saw it. When the cunt holding the camera went to