Despite the agony she was in, she started grinning ear to ear, her eyes wide and wild as tears streamed down her filthy cheeks and she figured out what I was saying.
“I appreciate the concern, but Rocky learned his fucking lesson about touching girls without consent before he could put that nasty cock inside me.” She laughed louder, her breathing harsh and fast. “Fuck, Widow, you should have seen him – I think all this was worth it for that look on his face and the sounds of his screaming.”
Her graphic detail of her heroism kept her going until we made it back upstairs, Delilah following us once she’d made sure the way out was clear of anyone but our guys. But the second we entered the main room, Henley’s hysterical laughter stopped, and she went entirely still.
The room was filled with bodies and blood. Beau, Aiden, Kellan and other Red Diamonds I barely knew were everywhere, killing or setting up the tiny controlled bombs Logan had been working on lately. Barely an ounce of floor space was free from corpses and splatters of red, and I ought to have known it would be a problem.
It looked just like Sapphire’s mansion had when we’d made it there.
Henley whimpered, and I twisted myself around, trying to shield her view as best as I could.
“Close your eyes, Barbie. You don’t need to see this shit.” I tried to get her to listen to me but that was not something sheever did, even as I carried her out of a fucking prison and far too long a torture.
“They’re dead, aren’t they? My parents… Georgia… Harley…” Henley’s rough voice broke further as she said her brother’s name. “They tried to keep me safe… and I heard… I heard the gunshots and saw the blood. I know they’re dead, Widow. I know they’re all dead and it’s my fault.”
My throat was dry. Hands shaking. I wanted to scream into the air, but I fucking couldn’t and it was killing me. It hurt even worse when I hadn’t even been able to bury them. I had to help Raya and her crew take my fucking family to a funeral home nearby to burn them all to ash and pretend that they had never existed at all because it was safer that way.
I hadn’t even been able to wait for Henley to come with me.
“Yeah. They’re dead.” I breathed, chest heaving with the fight against my tears. “I’m sorry. They were gone before I could get there – I was too late and only Harrison was left. We barely saved Darius. But regardless of what happened, it wasn’t and will never be your fault. You’re a fucking kid, Henley. You hold no responsibility – you did nothing wrong. If anything, you helped; Harrison is alive because of you. I saw the tapes of you trying to save him – I know you even helped Darius, too.”
I supposed it was a silver lining that even hardened mercenaries couldn’t bring themselves to kill a screaming toddler as he lay in a pool of his parent’s blood. But even if they had wanted to, they never made it. I had watched the CCTV footage as Henley had done her best to help – as she had distracted the gun man attacking Darius, and the other one about to grab her nephew.
“I tried to help Darius.” She sobbed harder and I couldn’t stop my tears anymore; they flowed down my cheeks as I finally stepped outside, into the bitter night air. “I saw him get shot, and I tried to help him and-”
“And you did good. You saved him.” I wiped the tears from her cheeks as I told her what Darius had said about her the second he’d woken up from surgery. “You were so fucking brave, and I know that means nothing now, but it will one day; I promise it will.”
I knew if the mercenaries hadn’t been distracted by taking her, they would have finished my friend off and as much as I hated she had been stolen away from us, knowing she had saved Darius made a tiny piece of my soul grateful. Without Henley’s distraction, Delilah wouldn’t have been able to get to him and hold enough pressure on his bullet wounds that he hadn’t died.
The two girls had saved a man I considered my brother, and that was a life debt I would never be able to repay.
“Where are the others?” Henley sniffled as I gently lay her on her feet outside Beau’s car so I could unlock the doors and check her over better, now that we were outside in the cool night. “How is everyone else that was there?”
“Not good.” I swallowed down the pain as I yanked open the door and found my hoody on the backseat, chucking it over her. It reached her knees and covered most of her marks, but there was no way I could forget they were there, even with the coverup. “Those women we saved… they were…”
“Dead?” She asked.
I nodded. “All of them. All of them are dead and I…” Running my hand through my hair, I cursed as Delilah let herself into the car, giving us a little privacy.
“What about Diamond and Yeva?” Henley asked, as she harshly wiped at her eyes.
“They’re fine enough – Yeva killed a lot of the men who attacked. She’s weirdly good with a gun. And she got Diamond into Tanner’s room and locked her inside. They were both shaken up and Yeva had a couple of nasty bruises, but that was about the gist of it.”
I had no idea how she had lasted so long on her own. All I knew was that as we pulled up onto Sapphire’s drive, Yeva had been there on top of a man, stabbing him more times than I could count with a sadistic fucking look in her eyes that had scared even me a little bit. There had been at least five bodies inside thanks to her too… all big men with big guns she had torn apart like she was more than just a girl with a blade and a gun.
It was insane and since that day I hadn’t been comfortable turning my back on her in case I accidentally pissed her off and wound up with a blade in my spine or something.
“What are we supposed to do now? What’s Sapphire saying?” Henley croaked as I handed her an unscrewed bottle of water from the trunk and helped her drink some.
“Nothing.” I replied. “We haven’t found her yet.”
“What?” She frowned, wincing when she tugged her wounds a little against my jumper. “What do you mean you haven’t found her?”
“She got taken the same time you did, and so did her guys. Beau managed to get there fast enough that he rescued Lincoln and that before they even made it a mile away. But they couldn’t find Sapphire and we haven’t been able to find her since.”
Henley’s eyes shut for a moment as she tried to pull in a breath. And when they opened, the bright blue shade that matched mine was gone.
There was nothing but darkness there. A sight I had never thought I would see on her, especially.
