Treasure [h.s]

| 37 - Branding |

The first time I drifted off to sleep last night was by the angelic hands of my wife, who spent her time taking care of me until I was finally drugged up enough to suppress the nausea and fall into a peaceful state of unconscious bliss.

It was perfect, really. Her delicate touches lulled me to sleep by playing with my hair, feeding me, and kissing every inch of skin she deemed too warm to be normal.

However, said wife seems to think that I won't rise from the dead to track her down. Like a spidey sense, I quite literally shot out of bed for seemingly no reason. Until the realization hit that she wasn't in bed with me, and her shoes were gone by the door, along with her keys and knife.

And then all hell broke loose. I called every single man I possibly could to tear apart every inch of this city. I sent an army out looking for her. I prepared to rage war on anyone stupid enough to touch her.

My thumb was on the call button, ready to demand Niall and Louis send their men, too. Until I got a call from Zayn who reviewed club footage. Less than five minutes after I fell asleep, my dark-haired siren was wandering into her club and straight to the door of the basement. Exactly where she isn't supposed to be.

So you would imagine my surprise that only twenty minutes after I fell asleep, I was barreling downstairs and to the basement, only to find that the shithead guarding the door let the most important Treasure slip through his fat fingers.

He was dead by minute twenty-two.

The second time I drifted off to sleep was after an hour of consoling a frantic siren, except I don't think her pleading to spare the already dead man was anything close to trickery. It was genuine. Her concern for a man who let her go into a basement, one that's currently housing a traitorous rat in the torture chamber, is greater than her concern for her own well-being.

The man agreed to let her in the same proximity as someone who wouldn't think twice about snapping her neck, because of the promise of a check. A check that Brinna has no authority to write and he has no authority to cash.

I have one rule: protect the girl at all costs. A very simple fucking rule. It holds the most weight of anything I've ever said in my lifetime. It's the utmost important rule. It's the rule to die by.

Every single person here has explicitly agreed to do no less than die for her if need be. He practically fed her to the wolves.

Over money.

Something that I quite literally print and pay him plenty of, to protect said girl.

He broke the most important rule. There are no second chances when it comes to protecting my Treasure. He became the threat, therefore he had to be eliminated.

That is precisely why Brinna had a breakdown and despite my effort to console her over a dead nobody who tried to get her killed, she ended up falling asleep sniffling and shaking and insisting that she had killed a man, which is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard come out of her mouth.