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Linc’s knees buckled as bile rose, making him gag. His wife. His beautiful wife. What had these monsters done to her? “Jesus! What the fu—? Callie!” Linc cried as he tried to run to her.
It was a wasted effort. Whoever held him had an iron grip and strength Linc would never possess.
“What did you do to her? Oh, my god, Callie!” He struggled like a madman, screaming and sobbing, but nothing broke his captor’s hold.
She hadn’t reacted to his presence.
She hadn’t even blinked.
There was no rise and fall to her chest.
She was dead.
“Nooo!” He screamed as his knees buckled, causing the arm across his chest to slip up into his windpipe.
“Get the fuck up, dipshit. I ain’t carrying your weight,” the man behind him growled in his ear.
They could let him fall. They could choke him out. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore. His beautiful, sweet wife was dead. But what about…
His knees slammed straight. What about Mary? Part of him wanted to scream out. To ask about his daughter, but what if that only alerted these thugs to her presence in the house?
“So, Mr. Cannon, we have a little problem here.”
What? Cannon? “I’m not—”
“Shut the fuck up!” the bearded man yelled. “Your job is to say yes or no when I ask you a question, got that Cannon?”
“But—”
The man holding him dug the point of the knife into his cheek so hard it broke the skin. Warmth trickled down his face, and Linc gasped in pain and shock.
“You stole from the big man, Cannon. That was your first mistake. Your second mistake was trying to blame it on someone else. How you managed to skim one hundred thousand dollars, I’ll never know, but I ain’t paid to know shit like that. I’m paid to teach lessons.”
One hundred thousand? They thought he stole one hundred thousand dollars from someone. What the hell was going on? He’d never taken anything from anyone in his entire life. It was so surreal his head spun, and the bearded man’s words ran together. All he could think about was that his beloved wife was gone.
Forever.
A flood of tears coursed down his cheeks, mixing with the blood and soaking into the collar of his shirt. Despite the unfathomable pain of seeing Callie’s lifeless body, he couldn’t tear his gaze away.
“You listening to me, Cannon?” the bearded man asked. When Linc didn’t respond, the bearded man rushed forward and landed another blow, this time to Linc’s face.
Then another to his gut.
And one under the chin.
Thoughts of his daughter once again broke through his fog of shock and grief, fueling into a rage he’d never have thought himself capable.
He kicked and fought and struggled against the two men with every ounce of energy and strength he possessed. But there were two of them, and they subdued him with ease. Sweeping Linc under his legs, the bearded man took him to the floor then held him immobile.
His buddy again pressed the knife to Linc’s cheek. “Just in case you didn’t quite understand the message,” he whispered before holding Linc’s face against the floor and digging the knife deeper.
As one man punched him repeatedly, the other carved some sort of pattern into his face. His mind fully fractured, separating from his physical form until the pain didn’t even register. Throughout the ordeal, he stared into his wife’s unseeing eyes. He stretched an arm out as far as he possibly could, needing to feel her soft skin under his hand, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t quite reach her.
All that beauty wiped off the face of the earth because of mistaken identity.
Sirens wailed in the distance and the two men working him over froze.
“We gotta split,” the knife-wielding asshole said.
“Yeah, let’s move.” The bearded man gave Linc one last kick to the ribs before bending down and whispering. “Don’t worry about your daughter. She didn’t hear any of this.”
Mary.
They’d killed her, too. An animalistic sound of pain rose up in the kitchen. Linc barely realized he was the source of the agonized wail.
As the madman stood, maniacal laughter filled the kitchen, and the last of Linc’s soul crumbled to dust.
They’d pay. Somehow, some way, he’d find these men and their boss and make them pay in the worst way possible.
Just as Callie died on that hard kitchen floor, so did Lincoln. The man who left the hospital three days later had bandages on his face, ice in his veins, and a heart as hard and black as a lump of coal.
CHAPTER ONE
A FULL FIVE minutes early for his appointment, Jigsaw shouldered through the door into Inked, the one and only tattoo shop in Townsend, Tennessee. But even if it wasn’t the lone ink provider, even if there was a tattoo shop on every corner, it’d be the only one to receive his business. Inked was the best, by far. Rip was a master with a tattoo machine and could bring anyone’s vision to life.
