Page 49 of Entangled
“For fuck sakes, Kade! She’s dead!” Finn’s voice said through the fog. I blinked, and the light had faded from Lilah’s eyes, just as it had my father’s. I couldn’t help but feel a sick satisfactionout of it. But then I felt a pang of regret, like I should have made her suffering last longer. I shouldn’t have ended her life as quickly as she ended my father’s. She didn’t deserve that mercy. For everything she’d done to Soren and my family, her suffering should have been prolonged. But watching my father be murdered had caused my usual patience to snap, and it was only going to get worse.
“Kade, it’s Soren,” Finn said with a deadly calm. One I knew meant that something wasn’t right, and I’d been too distracted to notice.
My eyes snapped up and tried to take in my surroundings.
Dead bodies littered the floor, the floor painted in crimson. But my eyes landed on one in particular, held in the arms of Sawyer, skin pale, and body limp. Even her blonde hair looked like it had lost its color.
“Soren!” I roared, scooping her in my arms and running through the door, and away from whatever remaining gunfire there was. From what I could tell of the noise, there wasn’t much, seeing as most people were dead. I didn’t even know if it was our side or theirs, but I just had a feeling that regardless, the death toll was high.
“Soren baby, open your eyes,” I pleaded, gently smacking her cheek in order to wake her up. Her skin was cool beneath my palm, and nausea coiled through my gut at the prospect that I may be too late.
She groaned, and I felt like my soul was one with my body again, and like my heart hadn’t just been almost crushed into smithereens.
I moved my hands along her body, and my hand came away with dark red blood where a bullet had entered her side. She was losing blood quickly, and I felt so fucking helpless. I was a gangster, not a doctor, and not for the first time in my life I regretted my life path, but even more so now.
“It’s okay baby, we are going to get you taken care of,” I assured her, rushing to Finn’s SUV, opening the door, and placing her in the backseat, doing my best to not let my nerves get the best of me. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, whether to apply pressure to her wound or hold her face.
I have to get the fuck out of this life.
“Kade,” Finn said, grabbing my arm, stilling my frantic movements. “I’ve got her. Get in the passenger seat. Mav can drive.”
“Over my dead body,” I growled. I didn’t trust my younger brother behind the wheel of a car. He tended to have an impulsive energy about him. But when Maverick came around the corner, the look in his eyes was enough for me to trust him. At least this once.
‘I’d never let anything bad happen to her, Kade,” Maverick assured me, and I’d be a liar if I said I’d seen my brother so vulnerable before. I’d never seen him take such responsibility in something before or cared so much.
“I guess a crisis really does bring a family together,” I mumbled, finally letting go of Soren and hopping in the passenger seat.
“Wait,” I said, before Maverick turned the key. “If he’s alive, Jude is mine.”
Maverick peered in the rearview mirror at Finn, nodding before turning the key. I knew at that moment a text had been fired off to one of Finn’s men to take Jude to a secure location until I was ready.
I would snuff the light out of anyone who had ever caused harm to Soren.
One down, one to go.
The only thingI could hear was the beeping of the monitor, and the only thing I could see was Soren’s pale face laying on the pillow of the hospital bed.
I’d seen a lot of things over the years, but this image of her would haunt me for the rest of my life. Not to mention the guilt that I should have been paying attention to her. I should have stayed by her side instead of letting my murderous tendencies take over. I could have protected her instead of ending a life.
I would never be able to apologize enough or make it up to her. I’d forever blame myself for the pain she was in and the coma she had succumbed to. A coma that she’d already been in for several days. The doctor kept saying she’d wake up any time now, but as the days grew longer and longer, I felt my hope whittling further and further.
I’d barely had time to cherish her and experience life with her yet. We’d been cooped up in the house, waiting for the dust to settle in our situation. There was so much left to do with her. Our time hadn’t begun yet. It couldn’t be over.
I didn’t want to die and realize too late everything good I had with Soren. I didn’t want to be someone who realized too late how amazing of a woman was right there, who wanted me just as badly as I wanted her.
I hadn’t even gotten the chance to admit how I felt about her. Sure, I’d told her she was mine, but I wanted to confess my love to her. I wanted to scream it from the rooftops. But it meant nothing if she couldn’t hear me.
A bullet had grazed my arm when I was carrying Soren’s limp body through the door of the warehouse, but I had barely felt it at the time, only noticing it when a nurse at the hospital pointed it out. It was the equivalent of a bee sting to me. The pain in my heart at the state of the woman in front of me hurt more than a bullet.
As the number of days grew without seeing the light in her eyes and her smile, the more my vengeance grew.
I was staying at the hospital day and night waiting for any sign of Soren waking up, and in that time, in the quiet, I plotted my revenge. Jude Peirano may think that he got away with hurting Soren and pulling one over on the Luchetti family, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
His day was coming. As soon as Soren was awake, and her condition was no longer in limbo, it would be time for him to pay his dues.
My father didn’t deserve to die in vain either, and although Lilah had met her end, it wasn’t enough.
I had an unsatisfiedhungerto inflict as much hurt as I’d been given.
