Page 18 of Unleash Hades (Ungoverned Spaces #5)

Hugo

Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean

T he cut on my brow had reopened as my face began to swell to the injuries incurred from the She-Bear. I felt the warm trickle of thick, copper-scented blood as it traveled to the inside of my eye, down the side of my nose and to my lips.

I admired the damage with a sadistic fascination.

The damage she could do with her bare fists rivaled what I could do with brass knuckles. It was admirable work.

“Really, Hugo?” Alastair said as I fell into the large leather seat of the Caledonia Security Jet. “You’re getting blood all over everything.”

I sat in the leather seat, not caring that I was putting red human fluids on everything.

He was just mad at me because he could not be mad at his wife.

“Could you at least wipe the blood off your face?” Alastair complained.

“There.” I stared right at Alastair as I took my palm and swiped it across my cheek, smearing it over my skin.

“You’re insufferable.” He rolled his eyes and disappeared into the cockpit.

My friend was a love-blind fool who couldn’t see what was happening to him and his family. Poor man. Things would get worse before they got better. Hopefully, they’ll finally talk before their children are old enough to realize their parents are fighting.

This flight would be insufferable, and their nasty brood would be with me the entire flight. If screaming babies are a pain on a commercial flight, on a private jet, they’re even worse.

“Is Rafe in place to watch Calissandra?” I called after Alastair through the open cockpit door.

“Yes! He always is!” he called back, irritation lacing his tone. “God you’re annoying.”

“What the fuck did I do?”

The Anglos of Caledonia Security, my colleagues, were always blaming me for shit.

Some of it was my fault, but most of it was not.

But I was growing tired of Alastair’s ribbing - he hated his father-in-law as much as he loved his wife and children.

And she was simmering like a pot about to boil over.

I wish they’d just get the explosion over with so we could move on.

“You’re bleeding in front of my children!” He complained.

“They’re newborns. Practically slugs. They don’t know the difference,” I yelled at the back of his head as the engine revved. “Considering the bloodbath that involved their birth…”

“Shut up!” Alastair called.

A high-pitched wail came from one of the two plane cribs. And then the other echoed the sentiment, the sound of it squeezing my brain like a vice. I pressed a finger against my temples to stave off the looming headache.

“They may not know the difference, but they can hear you,” Rose, reprimanded, as she shushed the babies in their plane-safe seats. The children quieted down, lulling back to sleep, which seemed to be their main occupation.

That, and shitting themselves and suckling on tits.

The latter wasn’t a bad way to spend a day, but I wasn’t particularly interested in Rose’s over-ripe jugs.

“I want Rafe following Calissandra at a distance,” I said, tapping a finger against my thigh, and feeling the tension in my gut. “I should be staying in New York.”

I was agitated. I had just seen her. She was so close. I should stay close by.

There were only a few weeks left in her incarceration with Richard.

I clenched and unclenched my fists, remembering the feel of her against me. It had been better than I had remembered. It was better than anything I had ever had.

We took off, and I was left to the reverie of my sweet summer goddess. My springtime. My flower. The light in the darkness I lived in.

“We need to talk to the Sideshow freaks about the She-Bear,” Alastair said after we stabilized in the air, “You gave her the tracker, yes? Did you explain how to use it?”

“I gave it to her but couldn’t explain. There wasn’t time.” I looked at Rose, and the devotion in her eyes as she looked at her children.

I knew Cali didn’t have her sons as newborns. She had them when they were toddlers. Adoption. But did she look at her own twins like that?

If so, would she ever be mine, as much as she was their mother?

A possessive, unreasonable, jealous feeling swept over me, as I thought about her, and how finite her time was.

All human time was finite, but we had waited for ten years.

Would I get anything from her in what little we’d have left after Richard was dragged to Hell where he belonged?

Would she ever be mine?

Don’t be ridiculous. You don’t even have her in the first place.

I dismissed that intrusive thought. She was mine. I knew it. She knew it. She said it in every broadcast in small, unnoticeable ways. The number of ways she cried out my old callsign - Hades.

I smiled, realizing that when the camera captured a moment of surprise, she did not cry “Oh my God!”... no, she cried “Holy Hades.”

A warm feeling flickered in my chest, along with the tension in my shoulders that wanted me to spring to action and run to her side. To be the dark God that she called for…

Did that make her my Persephone? Cursed to be divided between me and the world in the light?

I pulled out my phone, hooking onto the plane’s wifi. I didn’t subscribe to television. That shit would rot your brain.

I did, however, subscribe to the Laurent Channel, which had subsidiaries across multiple platforms - news, gossip, documentaries, and talk shows. I watched for her.

I scrolled through what was broadcast, scanning for her name to see if she was going to appear in any of them.

“Hugo,” Rose’s voice cut into my bitter judgments, and I watched as her hazel eyes examined me with an annoying look of concern and sympathy. “I know that you care about her, but…”

She tried to smile, and I rolled my eyes.

“Get to the point!” I raised my voice and regretted it right away when a baby’s scream cut through the cabin, as one of the little spawns woke up.

Rose placed her hand in the crib, and started stroking the little devil’s belly until it was soothed back to sleep.

“I’m saying that maybe you deserve better than a married woman who has only spoken to you once or twice in ten years!

” she said in a harsh whisper. “Do you think she’s treating you fairly?

You spend every dime you have on her security, and the only thing she gives you is one conversation? Don’t you think that’s insane?”

She was saying what every other man in Caledonia Security thought, but never had the balls to say out loud to me. I could appreciate that about Rose.

But she was wrong.

There is nothing fair about life. There is nothing fair about love, either.

“You haven’t been with a woman since her for ten years,” Rose said, shaking her head. “And she’s married ! Do you think she’s kept her legs shut to her husband?”

“You will not talk about her like that,” I said, bringing up a reprimanding finger in warning. “You don’t know what he’s like.”

I did. I did know that she went to bed alone, in her own company. At night, she was as solitary as I was. But they didn't know the depth of my devotion. They didn’t know how eagerly I watched. They didn’t know what lengths I would go to see her.

They’d never approve of the cameras in her room, in her house, in her office.

We had a tenuous relationship with respecting privacy, but they weren’t that loose.

They also didn’t know what horrors I had watched.

The horrors perpetrated by Dick Davenport, the… husband. He did not deserve the privilege of such a title.

They didn’t know everything. They never would. They didn’t know the manipulations, the schemes, the way he held their children over her head. The way he…

“Is the celibacy worth it?” Rose said, her lips pursing.

She and Alastair fucked like rabbits. No wonder they had twins so early.

I shuddered, thinking of the shit-machines that had taken over their lives.

“If it spares me one of those disgusting little parasites,” I nodded to her children, “Then yes.”

Caledonia Security was getting its fair share of babies. Besides two sets of twins, Chloe and her husband Leo had adopted Asa. The almost-seven-year-old was tolerable.

At least he was house trained.

Our office was starting to look like a daycare during the cold season, when the snot-nosed kids couldn’t be dropped off at daycare. Everyone would stop and coo, and the day would be thoroughly interrupted!

“Did you just call my children parasites?” Alastair came to his wife, planting a kiss on her forehead, before running a gentle hand over her hair. She smiled, weakly. A polite smile. My friend had no idea how much trouble he was in.

Then he leaned down to each snot-nosed baby and kissed their little flat noses. I truly did not see the appeal. They didn’t even look human. They resembled… frogs, with their funny little bent knees, and snuggled arms.

Who would ever want such a wrinkled alien?

“Isn’t that what they are?” I said, frowning.

“The man has the tact of a rabid hyena,” Alastair said, placing a hand on his wife’s shoulder.

I knew Rose wasn’t offended in the least. We had struck up a small alliance since I let her take me at gunpoint to rescue Alastair during the great Irish/Bratva war that installed her father as Pakhan.

“He’s not wrong,” Rose said, with a shrug.

Alastair placed his hands over his heart, as if he had been stabbed there, and dramatically cried, “How dare you say that about our babies?”

He wasn’t offended either. I wondered what social customs made such strange displays of sarcasm an effective mode of communication. It just seemed rife with possible misunderstandings and was a complete waste of energy.

“I’m the one waking up every two hours to feed them,” Rose said with a roll of her eyes. “You’re not their foodbank.”

“I cannot believe what I’m hearing!” Alastair couldn’t keep the glint and small smile from his lips as he stared at his wife, and their children. Even on his worst day, he was still a happy man. I envied that about him.

I wondered if that was because his wife and children made him happy, or if he had simply gotten stupider since falling in love. Or maybe it was both?

My thought was immediately tampered, when I looked at Rose, whose tired eyes looked at her children with a sadness that looked… dangerous.

Like she was on the brink of tears.