“Antonio, breathe.” He wasn’t listening to me. “Antonio! Listen to me right now.”
Pulling off my seatbelt, I fell straight to the top of the car. Natasha lay there, knocked out, but still breathing. Crawling forward, I pulled my knife from my thigh, and reached up to cut his seat belt.
“Are you alive in there, sweetheart?” Someone called, and I froze. Antonio looked me in the eye before taking the knife from my hands.
“Mel bear? I’m going to be really disappointed if you’re dead.”
Aviela.
I fought back the memories; ones of me in her arms as she called me Mel bear. Grabbing a spear gun that had fallen, I tucked it into the back of my pants before I made a move to the window.
“Don’t go,” Fedel whispered. “Trap.”
“Help him when you’re stable, Antonio,” was all I could bring myself to say as I crawled on my stomach and hands, ignoring the shards of glass that cut into my skin.
I pulled myself out through the window, and onto the grass, only to find six guns pointed in my face, and my mother, white gloves and all, smiling down at me. She, unlike the rest of her men, looked as though she was going for lunch with the queen and not out for blood.
She looked so much like me. Her dark hair cropped at her shoulders with bright brown eyes staring back. Grabbing onto my arm, one of her men pulled me up, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Neal crawling out of his mangled car, but I couldn’t see Monte anywhere.
“Despite the blood and mud, I have to say, I made one attractive kid.” Aviela smirked.
I spat at her feet and was slapped by one of her men. I felt the blood pool at the side of my mouth.
“So rude. Is this what your father taught you?” she asked, walking toward me.
“He taught me a lot of things before you killed him.” With my only free hand, I was able to reach my gun and shoot the man who’d slapped me in his back.
He screamed and a bullet went through my shoulder, sending me onto my back.
“Rude and rash,” Aviela said, kneeling next to me as I gripped my shoulder and fought the urge to scream.
“You’d better kill me now, Aviela,” I hissed up at her. “Or I swear to God, I will not rest until I take your head from your shoulders.”
She pulled a gun and pressed it into my wound.
“You are a cub. I’m a lioness, sweetheart. Count your lucky stars you’re not on my list today.” With that, she shot me once more before rising.
The sun was in my eyes and all I could see was her shadow as she pulled off her white gloves.
“I’m your daughter…” I whispered as I started to fade.
“I never wanted you. I had orders. I followed them, and you were a side effect. No hard feelings.” Another gunshot went off, but I didn’t feel it. Everything went dark and all I could think of was…Liam.
LIAM
“Where is my wife?” I roared to the hospital nurse behind the desk.
“Liam, son, breathe.” Sedric pulled me back as I tried to keep calm. But that was hopeless at this point. I could barely see straight.
“I am breathing, where the fuck is my wife?” I screamed again, pulling the very first nurse who came out.
She stared at me, wide eyed, buckling under my grip.
“My wife,” I hissed into her face.
“I…I you’re hurting me.” She sobbed, trying to pull away.
“Liam, they just took her to room 228,” Declan called out and I ran. I ran like a man without his head.
I was going mad.
I knew it.
I could feel it.
One moment she was there, on the phone and the next, all I could hear were the windows shattering, the grating sounds of metal, and finally a chorus of screams.
Over and over again I called into the phone.
Over and over again I tried to get a message out to any of them, but nothing. For over two hours, we had nothing but radio silence. The GPS on all of our cars had been stripped. I demanded Jinx to take me to their last signal location, but she wasn’t there.
It wasn’t until my mother called, saying someone had leaked to the press about a car accident, that we were we able to find her. She was in some small rundown hospital on the edge of the city, and I didn’t even know if she was alive, or…I didn’t know anything. She wasn’t answering my calls. Neither was my brother. But I knew this wasn’t just a car accident. The bullet shells and Natasha’s skull had proven that.
They had killed her. Two shots to the back of the head. That was now Natasha Briar. Her body was found only two miles from the “accident” and the moment we found it, I feared what had happened to Mel… my Mel.
The moment I opened—more liked kicked down—the door, I came face to face with Neal, who sat at her side; busted eye, broken ribs and arm. He looked like hell.