Third a Kiss (Goddess Isles #3) - Pepper Winters Page 0,89

fierce to those who couldn’t speak. To the vulnerable creatures with four legs, wings, and tails.

He would fight for them.

He would extract vengeance for them.

As he should.

But…where would I be?

Would he let me fight beside him?

Or would he push me away?

I didn’t have an answer and as the sun rose higher in the sky and Jealousy kept me company while we watched more smoke billow and stronger scents of charred earth and flesh trailed over the sea…I did my best not to be worried.

But I was worried.

So, so worried.

Because we might be over…before we’ve even begun.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

WEARING WHITE TO TOTAL carnage was a gruesome wardrobe choice.

Blood painted my t-shirt and slacks. Bone fragments and brain pieces, charred fur and dismembered animal parts. I wore it all as I dug through the smoking wreckage.

Thanks to my team of gardeners on Lebah—and their tanker of freshwater to grow my crops—we’d put out the fire caused by Drake’s bomb. We’d salvaged part of the veterinary practice, saved a few holding pens, ceased fire from chewing its way through the dog enclosure and pieced together parts of the rabbit warren.

But that was it.

Everything else: the barns piled high with feed and medicine. The high-tech surgery for large and small beasts. The hours upon hours of excavating, building, planting, creating had all been destroyed.

Along with so many, many fucking lives.

Four hours ago, I’d been ready to jump aboard the helicopter and fly after Drake. To make his body blow apart like Cuthbert the pig and the adorable otters who’d been so close to releasing back into the wild. I wanted to see his brains splattered in the soil. I wanted his blood coagulating beneath the hot sun. I wanted the stench of his decaying body ripe in the air.

I wanted him in motherfucking bits.

But vengeance would have to come after I’d offered triage to those left behind. The singed monkeys and charred beagles and every other critter that’d already survived so much.

Cal and I worked side by side with locals and staff.

The Indonesian people operated under the law of karma and they arrived in droves, pulling ashore in their fishing trawlers or hitching a ride on a sea vessel, coming to our aid thanks to the plume of smoke announcing war.

Their good deed today would help a good deed for them tomorrow.

None of us spoke, too disgusted and deadened by what we shovelled from the layers of toxic ash, recognising severed tails, paws, and fire-ravaged carcasses.

I’d thrown up when I’d come across a cow that’d only arrived two days ago. A roof beam had snapped, thanks to the bomb’s power, hurtling down to harpoon into the side of the animal. It’d been trapped against the wall as fire chewed its way up its legs and along its flanks.

Dead while standing, its eyes were still open, a snapshot of blistering agony as it’d burned alive.

I’d stumbled to the corner and expelled the dinner I’d shared with Eleanor. It’d splashed on my boots, coating me in yet more filth, blending with guts and viscera.

I hadn’t eaten meat in fuck knew how long, and the stench of animal flesh made me violently nauseous. My mind and heart shut down, unable to associate the butchered remains with the creatures I’d tried to give a better life.

It was my past all over again.

The lab experiments. The domestic violence. The brother who tormented his own sibling.

Fuck, the guilt.

It nibbled its way through my chest until it took a knife and fork to my heart and ate it piece by piece. I bled guilt. I sweated guilt. My head pounded with culpability and utmost shame.

I couldn’t look anyone in the eye, even as Cal patted me on the back and hissed in my ear that this wasn’t my fault. That I couldn’t have predicted that my brother would bypass my scouts on the sea and instead of coming after me go after the most vulnerable.

But I should have known.

It was fucking obvious.

It was his M.O.

I’d been such a stupid bastard not to see this coming. And I blamed myself, not just for this carnage, but for being too goddamn busy falling in love with Jinx to put parameters in place to prevent such a thing.

I’d been selfish.

I deserved this pain, but the rest of these poor victims did not. Their broken bodies and obliterated hearts were on my hands, no one else’s.

In this instance, Drake had been smarter than me. He’d never entered my waters. Instead, he’d flown over them in a