As each step was taken forward, the sounds around him grew in strength. Raucous, harsh, vehement. Male voices that yelled and bickered. They were a mass of aggressive calls for more, for less, to move, to stop. It had been a long time since Nick had suffered through such overwhelming stimuli. Nirvana had been the last guidepost for the miscreants of humanity to congregate. Then, he had been at Euan’s side. His insides a whirl of torment after what he had suffered. This time, he was surrounded by another level of anarchy. His body vibrated with memories, but also in the fire was the knowledge that he had survived what had been done to him, grown stronger, and would save the woman he loved from the same fate.
Nirvana had been lawless, the men tough and threatening. But this was violence personified. In Nirvana, Mickey-O’s hold might have been waning, but he still gripped the reins of control over his domain. Where Nirvana had been brutal chaos, this place was vicious and cruel.
Men fought in the open. Blood and fists flew while skinny bodies with glassy eyes watched on. They spat, they pissed, they bled. They gathered in small groups, pounced on victims like rabid dogs eager for the meat. In every dirty hand that was not wrapped around a throat, a grimy jar filled with cloudy liquid was held. Nick didn’t need his engineering degree to inform him that what they drank to destroy themselves was local moonshine that would send them blind.
The blood was wet on the pavement. It mixed with the mud from the recent rain. Lost teeth crunched under his boots alongside the stones. Mangy dogs barked, rowdy male laughter echoed. Chaos, hopelessness, desolation. Nick nearly lost his footing when a man fell to his knees at his feet.
‘I’ll suck your dick for a jar o’ Tack.’
Nick pulled the hood further down to cover his face as he grimaced and shook his head.
She had been here. She had seen this. She had been surrounded by this horror, this show of repugnance. His hands at his sides vibrated with the adrenaline, the shock, the mocking sensations that told him that she had been touched by it, maybe even been consumed by it.
He turned from the worst of it and walked with haste towards the main compound. In the mud, he finally saw tyre tracks that looked fresh enough to be the ones that had carried her here.
He swallowed the saliva that pooled in his mouth and followed the markings in the sludge. He passed terrors he could not voice. Revulsion and disgust formed a solid ball of abhorrence in his gut. His throat was clogged with the brutality of it all. Of the waste. Mickey-O had wanted to save these men, he’d built Nirvana so it could be done. If there truly was a God, in that moment, Nick understood why he had cursed them with the plague.
The closer he moved towards the entrance of the great warehouse, the more conspicuous he became. There seemed to be an invisible cloud of separation that surrounded the main building. The air was different here, less stifling, more sinister. The men that wandered its perimeter were harder, meaner, eager and engaged. Nick crouched to fiddle with the lacings on his boot and surveyed the landscape for options.
His only weapon was the knife, it remained a cold presence on his hip. Darkness could provide cover, but that would take time. Time Kira didn’t have. He couldn’t think of what they could be doing to her. He couldn’t think of her current circumstances at all. He had to work out a plan to find her, get her free and then the both of them to escape.
Options swamped his mind. His body for hers, his blemished soul for her precious one. But he couldn’t risk it. Parker had no honour, and Euan would stop at nothing to see them both free. It would destroy the big man to know that Kira had been here, tainted by this. He’d never forgive himself, the road he had travelled was too hard to allow a bump like this be too hard for him to overcome.
As he crouched, a man wandered past. He walked tall, erect, but nothing else registered. In his hand, a gold watched dangled.
It had been months since he’d seen it. The last time he had, it had been strapped to Euan’s wrist. A token of luck as they fought for their lives. It had been lost in a dirt pit full of blood and lost teeth.
The gold gleamed, the glass face was clean. The leather strap worn yet well preserved for its age.
He remembered his father strapping it to his wrist every morning. He also remembered the man giving it to him as he took his last breaths.
Nick didn’t think, he simply reached out and snatched it from the hand that held it.
It rested in his palm, warm and cool, just like he remembered. The roman numerals, the black hands, the chip in the glass just above the three …
It was a sense of dread that slowly pervaded his senses that made him look up. An internal warning that somehow filtered through the elation of finding what had once been lost.
His eyes lifted from the watch to the man that had held it.
Blond hair, brown eyes, high cheekbones. A mouth that curved in triumph.
Parker West stood before him.
‘Hello, Nicky. I’m so glad you decided to welcome me on your knees.’
Chapter 21
Euan
When he had called for volunteers. All those who could stand, did.
Dishevelled, burned, scarred, they obeyed his orders. He did not know the outcome, only that they went in search of those that needed rescue. He gave his directives, assigned roles, planned an attack on a compound
