Ivar's Heathen Bride

Manic cackling echoed around the warehouse followed by a scream, a gunshot and silence. 

The rain pounded against the carpark outside and thunder rumbled overhead and a blonde woman burst from the warehouse doors, followed armed with only a pistol and a deathly wide smile. She slipped slightly as she got to her motorbike, she climbed on and tried to turn it on but something was wrong. It wasn’t moving, she looked from the bike and then ahead of her at the man who was closer now than before but seemed to be walking slower, almost taunting her.

He stopped in front of her and held a gun to her head.

“Why are you doing this now?” She looked into his blue eyes that seemed to sparkle in glee. He was covered in blood from her fallen friends. “We we’re close to a peace deal!” She screamed at him, venom in her voice as she stared him down and waited for an answer.

He didn’t answer. He just smiled again and pulled the trigger.

She fell limp from the bike as the wild card laughed and laughed. When he calmed himself a little, he pulled out a lighter and lit the fuel that he had leaked around the bike before taking a small jump back, hissing as pain tore through his legs. He moved about too much tonight, he needed to rest.

So he walked back to the car, his driver waiting to take him back to the hideout with a smile and blood on his face. Just when he sat himself in the car, there was an explosion from the direction he just came from.

He pulled out a small book from his leather jacket pocket, opened it to a bookmarked page and crossed off a name.

Lagertha.

“You gotta be the bigger person.” Brennan sighed as he held back a furiously kicking woman with red hair. 

“No! I’m 5’3 and furious! You be the bigger person!” Rhiannon tried once again to squirm from his grasp but seeing as her feet weren’t even touching the ground it made quite the view, especially seeing as he was 6’5 and muscular. 

Arlyn was giggling to herself from the other side of the table. Niko was teasingly waving what was left of Rhiannon’s sandwich in front of her face and she kept trying to kick the smirk off his face. Brennan sighed and took a few steps back which only made the red head escape even more heated.

“Y’ snooze, y’ loose.” Niko laughed and took a bite of the sandwich. “Holy shit, I can see why you’re angry now. This is delicious.” 

A loud, frustrated screech drowned out the rest of the noise in the penthouse.

“What the hell is going on out here?” Tristan grumbled as he stumbled out of his room with an empty mug of coffee in one hand and trying to fix his tie with the other. Tristan was the leader of the Celtic Warrior Club, a man in his early 40’s who was starting to grey a little and always wore suits. Nobody knows why but even when they first started out he wore a tailored suit, his first purchase with his heist money and he wore them ever since.

He sat down next to Arlyn and gestured to the scene in front of him, which had calmed down a little bit, she shrugged and took another sip from her coffee. Brennan had finally put down Rhiannon who was glaring at Niko from across the table, muttering under her breath that she ‘is totally going to leave him behind in the next mission’ and that ‘he can drive himself home’.

“I didn’t know flirting could be so violent.” He whispered to Arlyn and she laughed.

Brennan sighed and sat next to his sister. They were twins and looked remarkably similar, apart from the fact he towered over her, and most people come to think of it. He was the enforcer of the group, the muscle. Arlyn and Brennan both had brown hair, green eyes and skin. He crossed his arms on the table and rested his head on top of them.

“It’s too early for this…” he mumbled.

Arlyn patted his back and moved to the chair by the window to watch the view. The sky was painted with pinks and blues as the sun rose, lights from buildings were starting to twinkle on like stars as the city groggily woke up. ‘Kattegat is beautiful this time of day’ Arlyn thought to herself as he looked out of the window, her phone lying forgotten on the table for a moment as she watched the sun rise.

Then her phone rang.

The screen said “Jace”, one of her informants.

“Hey Jace. What’s up?” she asked, concern slipped into her voice. Jace never called unless it was urgent.

“Arlyn, there’s a problem.” He sounded almost out of breath. “I went to the Shieldmaidens like you asked and it’s a total bloodbath in there.”

“What?” she almost dropped her phone. “That’s impossible! Is anyone alive?”

This caught the attention of the others, even Niko and Rhiannon stopped bickering. Tristan got up from his chair and moved slowly to sit opposite Arlyn.

“Not that I can see, an underling or two may have got out but the rest are dead.”

“Even Lagertha?”

“Yeah… found her burnt up, not sure if she was dead before or not. Want me to get Finn and see if we can find out anything else about the bodies?” He tried to hide a gagging sound as a door screamed open. “Oh god, it’s even worse in here.”

“I’ll contact Finn, you get out of there and lay low for a while. I’ll call you if anything else comes up.”

“Okay. If I hear anything else I’ll let you know. Bye Arlyn.” The phone went silent as Arlyn still held it to her ear.

She didn’t even say goodbye, she was too shocked.

“What happened?” Tristan asked, he leaned forward slightly as his brown eyes focused on hers.

“The Shieldmaidens were wiped out last night.” She managed to get out. “All of them are dead, even Lagertha and her Elite Maidens. Finn found all of them in the warehouse. Lagertha was found dead and burned.”

“Shit.” Niko muttered. “I didn’t like them but… shit. They deserved better than that at least.”

The ‘Shieldmaidens were one of the toughest gangs in Kattegat. It was a splinter of the Ragnarsson gang that split apart when their leader, Ragnar, was killed by another gang. The rest of them formed a group called the ‘Ironsides’ which was led by Ragnar’s oldest son called Bjorn. He had other sons but nobody knows what happened to them, probably living under the radar somewhere. Arlyn called Finn, a contact of hers in the Kattegat Police Department and told him about the news. He dispatched his team straight away and said he would call back when the morgue reports came in. 

Tristan called the gang to get ready and to head to the warehouse themselves once Finn’s team had recovered the bodies. Rhiannon, as the gang’s driver, got them there in almost record time as Finn couldn’t hold the detectives back for long, so if they wanted clues, they would have to get them now. Tristan wanted to know who did this and how, they had to step up their defences now such a threat was on the streets and practically on their doorstep.

The warehouse was a mess.

Blood was everywhere and the chalk outlines from Finn’s team seemed to never stop. They looked around for anything that seemed suspicious. Nothing was taken, there was money left on the desk in Lagertha’s room that she must have been in the middle of counting when all of this broke out. 

“Guys.” Niko piped up. His blonde curly hair caught the sun that was starting to beam through the windows. “Have you noticed how there is only one type of bullet case? And there doesn’t seem to be many, the person who did this was efficient.” He bent down and picked one up.

“Person? What makes you think there was only one?” Brennan asked as he came back through a side door.

“Well Finn said there we’re only Shieldmaidens, right? No other bodies. They wouldn’t have let a group kill them without dishing out some casualties.” He paused for a second. “That and the fact there is only one type of bullet used. A rare one at that. This was made for a custom gun.”

Niko was the gang’s weapons and explosives expert. If it makes a boom and causes destruction, he knows about it, knows how to disarm it and how to make it. Tristan was always yelling at him for making explosives inside the penthouse that could trigger at any minute.

Police sirens started in the distance as Arlyn’s phone buzzed.

‘Finn: Sorry, I couldn’t hold them back anymore without it getting too suspicious.’

“We’ve got to go.” Arlyn started moving towards the car. “Cops are heading this way.” 

They all moved back into the car with a silence as Rhiannon peeled away from the warehouse, they passed the burned spot as they left.

Arlyn winced.

@lisinfleur

Manic cackling echoed around the warehouse followed by a scream, a gunshot and silence.

The rain pounded against the carpark outside and thunder rumbled overhead and a blonde woman burst from the warehouse doors, followed by a man armed with only a pistol and a deathly wide smile. She slipped slightly as she got to her motorbike, she scrambled on and tried to get it going but something was wrong. It wasn’t moving, she looked from the bike and then ahead of her at the man who was closer now than before but seemed to be walking slower, almost taunting her.

He stopped in front of her and held a gun to her head.

“Why are you doing this now?” She looked into his blue eyes that seemed to sparkle in glee. He was covered in blood from her fallen friends. “We we’re close to a peace deal!” She screamed at him, venom in her voice as she stared him down and waited for an answer.

He didn’t answer. He just smiled again and pulled the trigger.

She fell limp from the bike as the wild card laughed and laughed. When he calmed himself a little, he pulled out a lighter and lit the fuel that he had leaked around the bike before taking a small jump back, hissing as pain tore through his legs. He moved about too much tonight, he needed to rest.

So he walked back to the car, his driver waiting to take him back to the hideout with a smile and blood on his face. Just when he sat himself in the car, there was an explosion from the direction he just came from.

He pulled out a small book from his leather jacket pocket, opened it to a bookmarked page and crossed off a name.