Page 58 of Borden 3

His reaction didn’t surprise me. Over the years, the second he scented danger in the air, I was whisked away to a random safehouse I’d never seen. Relocating repeatedly with Lincoln in tow. We braved it. Lincoln was so little, he barely knew what was going on.

I still never got used to it.

My legs were jittery. I felt walking it off was the only way to get it to stop. Anxiety swirled inside of me. It didn’t take many steps to get from one side of the safehouse to the next.

We had never been here before, but the drive wasn’t far. I surmised it must have been one of Borden’s warehouses because he had so many of them around. They were heavily armed on the outside. There was a passcode to enter the room. I’d heard Borden punch it in as I held Lincoln to me.

I didn’t get any sleep.

When Borden returned in the dead of night, he was covered in blood and he looked thoroughly exhausted.

“Is it done?” I’d asked, standing at the threshold of Link’s little room.

“For now,” he’d said, but I didn’t believe him.

“Can we go back home?”

“House is fortified.”

What made it unfortified? All I knew was some alarms went off. Not even Hector would let me know. It seemed like Borden was back to keeping secrets. I didn’t like it. He noticed the look I gave him and just shook his head, saying simply, “Doll.”

That’s it.

Doll.

A warning. Or perhaps he was being kind. Maybe I didn’t want to know the details.

Still.

It was our home.

All was how we left it when we returned to the house, except there was more security, and quiet whispers. I heard something about the cameras going screwy and nothing else.

I had to work from home, and Link was directly in my care because Granny refused to be held up at the house.

“I want to be on my own, in my home,” she’d said, stubbornly on the phone to me. “None of that damned underground place, either.”

Borden fumed at that when I told him. “I don’t have all the men in the world to guard her, Doll. My hands are tied. Convince her to come.”

But Granny said no and that was the end of it.

For two weeks, I watched the pandemonium unfold. Fights broke out, people got shot. Luckily, Paolo pulled through, and none of Borden’s men got injured.

But there were bodies.

A lot of them.

Plumes of smoke kissing the sky seemed to be an everyday occurrence in New Raven. Borden fought back with fury, burying the Red Mambas. Whispers on the street would later say he’d rained their ashes down on the territory they used to occupy, a “kind reminder” that they would not prevail.

It was shocking. The city hadn’t seen this sort of grizzly war since Borden took over the streets all those years ago. During his soulless eradication of the brothers that murdered Kate and all who had so much as spent time with them. It was a shitshow then, and it was a shitshow now, the only difference was these were faceless men. Borden wasn’t after a particular leader. Nobody stepped forward to brag about what he’d done. It was straight up foot soldiers.

Unfortunately, whatever was left of the Red Mambas was absorbed by the Immortals, a group of tattooed ex-convicts who had raided gun nests from outside New Raven and knew how to use a gun.

When I saw Borden bury his head into his hands at the realisation that more of these attacks were coming, I felt like I was suffering with him. It didn’t feel like it was ever going to end.

The Immortals went underground, and for some time it was dead quiet.

But Borden wasn’t stupid.

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