Savage Heart (Wreck & Ruin 2)

Two years before

My finger slices across the edge of the knife, skin splitting and blood running. I glance up to Valentine, the absolute fuckwit I’d been assigned to help. He was no smarter than a damn goldfish and far too power hungry for his own good. I could understand why the Syndicate had chosen him as their little runaround, too stupid to question it and too violent to wonder why it was him over literally anyone else. He truly believed he was better and stronger than them all.

News flash, he wasn’t. He didn’t have the manpower, and definitely lacked the brains.

He was the perfect candidate for their manipulation and even more perfect for mine.

“You ever wonder if you could do it on your own?” I ask innocently, sucking the blood off my finger.

“What?” Valentine snapped, looking over the details he’d been given about the Silver’s, the rival family he was warring with. The very ones the Syndicate wanted to eradicate.

“You know, take out the Silver’s and rule the city without the help of the Syndicate?”

Valentine pauses, looking up to me, the papers discarded, and laptop left open, “Don’t you work for them?”

I grin, “On loan. I’m not loyal.”

He looks back to his information. Marcus Valentine was an aging man and one with several health defects that would put him into an early grave. The alcoholism and drug use weren’t helping his case. He obsessed over his one and only daughter, Wren, but not in the fatherly way most would be used to. No, he worked out exactly how she could be of use to him, how he could marry her off or sell her, wondering if such a thing could put him in the lead. The odd thing was, he had her placed in a different family to be raised, one that only treaded the line of good and evil so she could be raised semi-normally.

That wasn’t going to happen though. I already knew that. After what went down last week and how Valentine targeted a Silver family event, resulting in the death of Alexander Silver’s mother, I knew Wren wouldn’t remain safe.

The hit was an organized attack, instructed by the Syndicate in the hopes of taking out some of the big players, namely Alexander’s father, the current ruler of Brookeshill. Of course, it didn’t work out that way and only killed the mother.

I’d studied the Silver’s, they were brutal in the way they ruled, merciless, but not cruel. They passed judgement fairly and kept everyone in line, it was why they had managed to successfully hold the city for as long as they had. But if there was anything that drove that family to insanity, it was harm coming to their family and Valentine had just killed the matriarch. There would be brutal payback, but it wouldn’t be direct, no, it would be in a way Valentine would never expect, and did I happen to drop some information right into the Silver’s tech team? Maybe. Would they have found Wren without me, that was likely, I was just helping them along and speeding up the process.

I’d doubt they’d even realize the information I gave them was planted.

Did I feel bad that an innocent girl could be murdered for this, perhaps a little, but only because Isobel wouldn’t like it. But everything could work out or it could blow up, I guess I just had to wait and see.

“Admitting you’re not loyal isn’t a flex,” Valentine sneers.

I laugh and lean back in my chair, using the same knife I’d sliced my finger with to cut into an apple, “I’m freelance, Marcus, I hold no loyalties other than what can line my pocket.”

He narrows his eyes.

“Have you,” I press, “Thought about what it could be like to rule this city without the Syndicate? You know it won’t be yours with them involved.”

He sneers, “I have no choice.”

“There’s always a choice.”

“Not here, I don’t have enough power and they can give me what I need.”

“In return for the city and you merely acting as a sit in. How’s that different from where you are now?”

He pauses.

“I have an idea.”

“And what does it get you?” Valentine counters.

“I don’t care about any of this, Marcus, not this city, not these people, I am simply bored and well, this might just bring a little excitement to my life.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“There’s a family in Europe, they’ve ruled the underworld for years and never been challenged. Their resources expand even the Syndicates in some cases. Why not trade with them. Their help in return for something else.”

“What could they want?”

I smile, standing to exit, “Use your imagination, Marcus, what does any man want?”

I was playing with fire and guessing, but if I was right, Marcus would bid his only daughter and mention the Syndicate in the trade. I had to hope that was his route, if not, I’d have to go to plan B and that mess wouldn’t be easy to deal with.

If he was as predictable as I had guessed he was, then it would work out as planned.

Leaving him where he wallows, I head out, travelling across the city to the hotel where I’m staying. It’s been too long since I’ve seen Isobel, too long since I’ve smelled her skin and tasted her, felt her beneath me and on me. The tracker I’d implanted in her before I gave her back to her brother beeps on the laptop I have open on the desk, a little blue dot showing her in the center of London. I’d figured out that was the apartment she was currently residing in, separate to her brother. My eyes on her told me she was doing okay but every report indicated a deadness about her. Like she was living but wasn’t alive.

I needed to get back to her, but I had to do this first. I had to do this for her.

She still hated me, and I couldn’t have it that way.

I didn’t care who I had to hurt, to kill, I would do it for her.

I settle on the bed, my sketchpad in hand and I draw. I draw what I’ve always drawn when I’ve missed her this bad. That image of her the night she found out the truth, where she appeared so broken, I wasn’t sure anything could fix her. I drew the tears on her cheeks and the rigidness to her muscles, of how she held her knees to her chest, containing all that she was inside.

She’d kept all of it in the years before me, managed to maintain a light not many people would be able to keep in her circumstances, and then I came along and for a time, that light brightened, it was florescent and beautiful until my lies snuffed it out. Now it was nothing more than an ember.

But it was an ember and embers, like all things flammable, can be ignited once more. I would set fire to her, let her flame burn.

It felt devastating that I had been the one to finally extinguish her hope, that it had been my lies to defeat her when that was never my ambition. But it happened that way and good or not, I would be hers. Whether she wanted me or not.

And so, I draw, I draw to combat my basic desire to be near her, I draw to keep that side of myself restrained. Everyday was a challenge, it was a curse, but I took each step knowing it would lead me back to her.