“She’s a class act,” Blackjack said quietly from his corner, his head tipped back against the wall. “And she’s a real beaut under all that blood, trust me. Stops a man in his tracks, she does.”
“Huh,” Ace said, bringing up the gun he kept in his hand to scratch at his stubble with it. “Should I fuck ’er, you think, before he gets here?”
Blackjack straightened from the wall. “Fuck off, Dad. He’ll be here soon and we can get this shit rollin’. We’re after Zeus, not his fuckin’ woman.”
Ace turned his head to stare at him as he sucked his teeth. “You like ’er, that it?”
“Fuck off.”
“That’s why you don’t want to kill ’er—you like the slut! What, did she give you a piece of her sweet cherry pie?”
Blackjack was off the wall and in front of his father in a second. “I said, fuck off, old man. I’m in this for Garro just like you are. He fucked with the club, he killed your fuckin’ best friend and he’s taken all the fuckin’ glory from me. Won’t promote me to fuckin’ shit in the club, won’t tell me nothin’ of his plans. He gets the kids, he gets the shit hot wife and he deserves fuckin’ none of it.”
I watched detached as Blackjack flipped out, spittle flying as he yelled into the face of his father and I thought, okay, he’s whacked too.
The next minute, there was the all-too-familiar sound of gunshots.
Pop.
I wondered if I’d ever get used to the sound or stop thinking that it sounded so innocuously like a giant chewing bubblegum.
Pop. Pop.
Ace and Blackjack immediately went into action.
I watched from my strange third person perspective as Ace knelt behind the open door with a gun and knife in his hand and as Blackjack crouched in the corner with a bigger gun trained on the door. Three more bikers settled in, guns trained on the door.
We all watched the stairs.
The gunshots outside moved closer then echoed throughout the main level. There were shouts and thuds as violence swept through the house.
Then it was quiet.
The men in the room looked at each other but Blackjack held up a hand for stillness and we waited.
Then there was a roar at the base of the stairs and thunder as men ran up them. A crash sounded from a window on the landing and someone landed with a knife in his teeth amid the Nightstalkers set up outside the door.
Bat.
The three men turned to him but the ex-military man was already moving, dropping down to a lunge then coming up with his knife, slicing clean through the belly of one of the men.
His guts spilled out and he followed them with a thud to the floor.
A shot went off as they tried to get Bat in their sights, but he shifted at the last second like a dancer and the shot hit the Nightstalker behind him.
Another down.
The commotion on the stairs grew even louder but everyone in the room with me was focused on Bat as the remaining man leveled his gun at his face and fired.
A bullet grazed the outside edge of his arm but Bat was undeterred as he slammed the gun out of the man’s hands then slipped his big knife effortlessly between his ribs and up into his heart.
Third man down.
One of the men in the room with me hesitantly moved forward to engage him.
Before he could get the chance, a body flew through the air from the stairs and crashed into the wall with a horrific crunch.
Seconds later, Zeus appeared in the doorway.
From deep within my cocoon of shock, my heart began to thaw and my mind began to whir.
Zeus was there.
I tried to scream because there were about four guns trained on him the second he stalked through the door with Bat at his back.
Zeus didn’t care.
He plucked a dead body from the ground and used it as a shield as he walked into the room then roared like some great angry beast as he threw it into two of the Nightstalkers kneeling closest to him.
They fell back and before they could get up, Bat and Axe-Man, who had appeared out of thin air, were on them with knifes sinking through their butter-soft flesh.
Zeus took a step toward Blackjack, utter rage in every line of his enormous frame but before he could get there, Ace emerged from behind the door and jumped on his back, sinking the edge of his blade into Zeus’s trapezius.
Zeus bellowed so loudly, the room shook with it. I watched without breathing as he reached back with one of those mighty man-killing-hands I loved so much, grabbed the smaller man and flipped him over his shoulder. Then before he could land, Z picked him up by the throat and flung him against the wall.
There was a sickening snap as Ace’s spine broke on impact.
Vaguely, I noted that Nova had his knife at Blackjack’s throat and that Axe-Man was beside me, gently cutting through the tape at my ankles and wrists.
“Don’t have to watch this,” he mumbled.
I watched on as Zeus stalked over to the crumpled man, pinned him against the wall with a knee to the gut and cupped his face. Then with a quick, almost casual flick of his wrists, he broke Ace’s neck.
The man dropped to the ground like a broken toy, but Zeus wasn’t done. He proweled over to where Nova held Blackjack and smashed his head into the wall behind him.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Zeus shouted. “You betray your brothers like this?”
“You aren’t my brother,” Blackjack spat. “You never gave a shit about me or my problems. You fuckin’ promoted that Irish fuck Priest over me. There’s no fuckin’ brotherhood under a Prez who’d kill his own brothers.”
Zeus’s laugh was hard. “That what your dad told you, that I killed Crux for kicks? He was fuckin’ killin’ brothers, you motherfuckin’ idiot. He was killin’ brothers just like you killed Mute, for no goddamn reason other than that you’re fuckin’ sick.”
My system rebooted like it’d been jumpstarted and suddenly I was on my feet, so powered by rage my body vibrated with it as I moved toward the group huddled in the corner. I didn’t notice the blood drying my clothes to my skin or the fact that my dad’s body dropped to floor when I got up.
All I noticed was Blackjack and the words Zeus had just uttered.
The words I’d been thinking already.
Blackjack killed Mute.
Before Zeus or Nova or Axe-Man or even I understood what was happening, I was grabbing Zeus’s gun from the back of his waistband, lifting it with a steady hand and popping off a shot into Blackjack’s throat.
He watched me in shocked horror as the shot slammed him back into the wall and blood spurted like a geyser from the wound.
I watched him without remorse as he fell to the ground and slumped over, bleeding out like a stuck pig.
The Fallen men looked at me and they did it carefully.
“Lou, give me the gun,” Zeus grumbled.
I didn’t.
Instead, I flipped the safety, threw it to the ground and wrapped my arms around Zeus’s blood-drenched back.
A second later, I burst into tears.
My guardian monster’s arms came around me, his lips pressed to the clean side of my hair. “I got you, little girl,” he said in a voice as rough and deep as any monsters, while he held me like a guardian angel. “I got you.”
I was graduating. Somehow, the year was finally ending and I was graduating. I still had my hair, something I never would have thought at the beginning of the year but then again, I never could have predicted where these months had taken me. My dad was dead, entombed in the Lafayette Mausoleum at First Light Church that no one ever visited. Warren was dead too, found floating in Entrance Bay just weeks after he’d been involved in a bar fight that left him with an ugly, broken face. Only Javier remained standing, an impenetrable pillar of Entrance society, stepping into the vast vacuum left by the Lafayette’s abdication from the societal throne. There was nothing to pin on him, no evidence stating he’d funded the Nightstalkers, no witness to his cold-blooded murder of my father but for me. He lived free and well but with an itch at the back of his neck that told him The Fallen would never forget.