roll, cunt, you get any closer and you’re fucking dead.”
The Bear slows down at Illi’s words and starts screaming at Atticus like he can stop the inevitable. “I paid you a diamond; if they kill me, you’re fucked, Crow! The Viper and the Ox will know, and you’ll have a fucking revolt on your hands.”
Pathetic.
The fog finally lifts, burning away with the rage pumping through my veins. I’m untouchable in this moment, if I had my gun there would already be a bullet in his fucking brain.
“The Crow doesn’t speak for the Wolf or her family. What you did tonight, the fight and threatening me? Well, you’re about to learn all about the real hierarchy in Mounts Bay.”
A nervous laughter bursts out of his chest as he looks around desperately, but none of the other members are laughing. No, they’re all a little smarter than this idiot and every last one of them has figured it out already.
The Jackal broke the sanctity of the Twelve. He cracked the foundations of the institution and now something else has taken hold in the Bay. A family of people loyal to each other and themselves, fiercely protective of our own agendas. If the Twelve is no longer useful to us then they’re out.
The Bear is out.
“You can’t do shit—“
I step forward until I’m in his face. “I could slit your fucking throat right here and now and no one would do a thing about it. You breathe at my discretion and if you value that oxygen, you’d run. You’d run so far away that the Devil himself couldn’t find you because you just made yourself problem number one in my books.”
His eyelids peel back until the whites of his eyes are showing but when he looks around, all he can see are the four men caging us both in, ready to pounce and bleed him out the second he attempts a goddamn thing.
“I paid a diamond.”
“Your favor to the Crow is nothing to me, and it means nothing to the Butcher. Stag, does it mean anything to you?”
Aodhan answers without hesitation. “Fucking nothing, Queenie.”
“There we go. You just keep picking the wrong fucking sides.”
I step away from him, mostly because I don’t actually have my gun on me and don’t have any other options to kill him with, and the moment I turn my back on him, he snarls.
I hear the single gunshot and then a body landing on the gravel.
I turn back to find Atticus staring down at the Bear’s corpse, the gun still in his hands.
“So the favors mean nothing now then? The Twelve means fucking nothing,” The Ox says, two of his men inching closer to us.
Atticus shakes his head and snaps, “No, it means that I’m not going to put up with a second Jackal. Stick to your own fucking business, stay out of each other’s shit, and we’ll be fine. Don’t mess with the fucking Family.”
“Of course you’d fucking say that! Looking after your own fucking people,” the Viper snarls and stalks off toward his car, his own men following quickly after him like they’re glad to be clear of this shitshow.
Atticus doesn’t glance our way at all, just stares down all of the other members until they walk away. “I’m not a member of the Family. I’m just smart enough to see the writing on the wall.”
Chapter Seventeen
Illi gets Aodhan so wasted he has to help me carry him back up to the loft.
When I tell him no one is supposed to know about it, Illi shrugs. “There should always be a fail-safe and now Jack’s gone, that’s me. I’m gonna—Queenie, Luca didn’t put him in the acid. I’m gonna go pick him up, and we can get him on ice until the O’Cronins decide what the fuck to do with him. I’m sorry, kid. We shoulda just killed the fucking Bear and dealt with the consequences.”
My eyes fill with tears again. “You heard Aodhan… he made his own choices.”
Illi huffs and pours Aodhan onto the mattress for me as I hit the light. He’s already snoring lightly, something he never does, so I start panicking about him choking on his fucking tongue.
“We both know his decision was a shit one. A really fucking shit one because now you’re crying and Aodhan’s gonna go fucking feral. You don’t lose people without losing your head.”
I nod, but we all made our choices tonight. The wrong ones. I should’ve just said something. I should’ve been the one to put