“Check out these tits, Axe,” Hamish said right before he left, grabbing a bikini-clad breast and giving it a squeeze. The girl let out a small sound of pleasure, but Axe saw the tension in her eyes, the way she held back. He knew if she had the chance, she’d strangle Hamish with her bare hands.
“Go ahead, touch them,” Hamish insisted to him. “It’s like you’re living in Disney World and refusing to ride a single feckin’ ride.”
Axe didn’t know how to respond, still doesn’t know how to tell Hamish that he will never touch any girl who has set foot in hisfather’s house. Da talks to others as if Hamish and Axe taking over the business is a foregone conclusion, that Axe will eventually outgrow his childish objections and start sampling the merchandise. That’s what Da calls the girls—merchandise.
The moment Axe steps out of his bedroom, panic slices through him. Something is terribly wrong. The morning’s usual eerie quiet has been replaced by shrieks and cries and stomping boots, all waning as they move through the hall. The tension hangs in the air like the faintest trace of smoke—acrid and sharp, it clings to everything, like a bitter, burnt scent that stings the back of his throat.
Today, there will be a massacre.
Mrs. Collins is no longer in the dining room, setting out the usual platters of black pudding—thick slices of blood sausage made from pork blood and oats, a staple of the breakfast table. The dining room is empty.
Where is Mrs. Collins? Where are the girls? The Whales? And Da’s security team, always roving with automatic weapons and sunglasses despite the endless gray skies—where have they gone?
“It’s Interpol,” Axe hears as he turns a corner and runs smack into Da. He looks different today. Unshaven, shirt untucked. Normally he’s doused in cologne. “My man in Manchester says we have one hour. One fucking goddamn hour. Let’s get this done.”
Da is shouting at Gallows, a man Axe has gone out of his way to avoid since he arrived on the island five years ago. Gallows is an imposing figure—shaved head and a Special Forces tattoo curling up his neck that readsNemo Me Impune Lacessit. Axe once looked it up:No one provokes me with impunity. As far as Axe can tell, Gallows is the only one on Da’s payroll who doesn’t touch the girls—even Mrs. Collins herself is known to indulge now and then. Gallows, though, watches them with cold, calculatingeyes, as if he’s tallying cattle. Sometimes, just for sport, he’ll kick them in the kidneys.
“Our twelve guests are already on the boat. They’ll be in Glasgow before lunchtime. There won’t be a trace they were ever here,” Gallows reports.
“Good.” Da doesn’t even flinch when Axe bumps into him. He’s too busy barking orders, too laser-focused to spare a glance at his own son. “Mrs. Collins activated protocol C. All files have been incinerated. Now we just need to deal with the merchandise.”
Merchandise.The word sends a chill through Axe, freezing him to his core. Nausea churns in his gut, and he knows the moment his father is out of earshot, he’ll lose whatever’s left in his stomach. It hits him harder than ever—he was born to the wrong family, the wrong father, maybe even the wrong continent. If it weren’t for the same bright blue eyes and sharp, unforgiving jawline, he could believe he’d been switched at birth. This is why he avoids mirrors.
He tells himself their souls are nothing alike.
“I don’t want a single hair left behind. Do you hear me? No fingerprints. No fingers, for that matter. No blood. Bodies dropped offshore, deep in the ocean. Fifteen minutes.”
“Sir, I’m not sure we can guarantee no blood. We’ve got twenty-two girls on the island and less than an hour. How do you expect me to—”
“Just get it done!” Da snaps. “When Interpol arrives, I want to be sitting in the den, drinking Black Label, smoking a cigar. I’m going to serve them tea, smile in their faces, and send them packing with nothing. My lawyer’s choppering in just to rattle them a bit. So they understand exactly who the fuck they’re dealing with.”
“Got it,” Gallows says, snapping a salute like Da’s some military god. Axe wants to run. He wants to scream at the girls to run, too—but what would be the point? He wouldn’t save them, just terrify them. There’s nowhere to go. No safe shore to swim to.
Da and his men have the guns, the power.
If this is really the end for the girls—on this cursed island, miles from anything that feels like home, their final breaths begging for their mammies—better it comes quick and without warning.
“Axe! Go help Gallows. We need you,” Da says as Axe tries to slip around the corner.
“No.” Axe’s voice trembles as bile rises up the back of his throat. He won’t do this. He won’t.
“Fine,” Da says, his voice snapping like a whip. “But when Interpol shows up, I’ll hand you over myself. Tell ’em you’ve been running the whole thing right under my nose. They’ll be thrilled to haul in a MacKenzie. You think they give a damn which one? A notch on their belt’s a notch either way.”
Terror claws at Axe’s throat like a beast. Gallows signals for him to follow, and he does, slipping away from Da’s watchful eye. But he knows what he’s going to do. He’ll leg it—he’ll be a bloody coward and run. When Interpol shows up by boat, he’ll jump aboard and beg for a lift anywhere that’s not Skara Brae. He’s clever enough, good with computers. Maybe they’ll even hire him.
As Axe is about to take off—he’s not even wearing proper shoes, but no matter—Gallows grabs him by the back of the neck and jabs a gun into his back.
“This way, lad.” Axe grits his teeth, but there’s no choice—he’s dragged straight toward Hell.
—
Once they’re outside, the trembling kicks in. Axe has already puked three times on the rocky shore; a grim trail of breadcrumbs for Interpol to follow, he tells himself with a bitter laugh, now on his handsand knees, hacking. Gallows has given up on him, eyes full of pure disgust. He’s got a job to do, and Axe can either muck in or piss off. He’s not their target, not yet. No sense in reminding them of his existence and ending up as another body tossed to the hungry sea.
The women are already lined up along the shoreline, shivering and scattered, in various states of undress—pulled from their beds, by the look of ’em. Barefoot, standing in two feet of freezing water, no more than ten feet from land, they clutch one another’s hands like lifelines. They’re crying, their voices a mess of languages Axe can’t place, though he doesn’t need to understand to know they’re begging for their lives.
He catches the whisper of “please, please, please” slipping from someone’s lips. What they’re begging for, he doesn’t know. Probably just for it all to end.
Axe has never felt more useless in his life, and his legs give out. Gallows and his men are armed to the teeth with AK-47s, while all he’s got is a spiral-bound notebook stuffed in his back pocket, filled with shite poetry. He’s reedy, skin and bones, hasn’t touched a weight in his life and wouldn’t know how to throw a proper punch if his life depended on it.
