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Blood flecks my cheek, the splatter warm then cooling, and Roman falls to the fractured music of Willow’s screams.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Never Broken
Rafe
The boy I’ve grown to love drops out of my grasp, blood spraying from his shoulder. He cups the wound in slow motion, his mouth open in a silent groan I know is a remnant of the years he remained quiet in a screaming world.
Or perhaps he simply learned that in his silence, others talk and he learned to listen.
There is so much I don’t yet know about him. If my people don’t stop getting shot at I’ll never get a chance to fucking find out.
If.
My gun is back in my hands, the weight telling me I have two, maybe three bullets left, damning myself to hell and back for not reloading earlier.
“Put it away, Rafe,” a voice I don’t expect breaks through the warehouse.
Even Konnor has the grace to look surprised as the man who fired walks out from within his own ranks, taking nearly two-thirds of his entourage with him.
“Seamus,” Willow breathes somewhere behind me. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Seamus smiles, a dead, rotting thing, like a corpse that’s been left under a bridge too long and came floating to the surface, bloated and ghostly.
“Yes. Please do tell us.” Konnor rocks back on his heels, his hands sliding behind his back in a relaxed posture, but Seamus shakes his head.
“Oh, no, my friend. Or should I call you brother? Perhaps you’d trade me in for Mister Hernandez here.”
“Don,” I hiss through clenched teeth. “If you address the man you just shot correctly, you address him as your Don, Cunningham.” Not that Seamus pledged his allegiance to anyone, but I need to make a point.
Blessedly, Konnor says nothing, watching the man who lived in his house and ate at his table walk across the space like he was the only one in it, and not one of near twenty men and two women spread out in a large circle, with the five of us in the center.
Three women. I didn’t search for Sonja, and I didn’t need to. She was nowhere to be seen.
I’ll find out if you are loyal before I die.
“It’s not our day, Rafe,” Willow murmurs, her voice almost inaudible.
Her comment falls in one of those rare, still moments, and Seamus laughs.
“You don’t know how lucky you are that my bastard isn’t planted in her belly right now.” He shakes his head, his eyes glinting manically. “Or maybe it is, and you are as naive as ever.”
“Perhaps,” I murmur, not giving him an inch of my fury, widening myself in and shifting slightly to one side to shield Willow while her brother bleeds out in utter silence at my feet.
Guns point at us from every direction. Not just us, but Konnor too.
The Irishman rocks once more on his heels, his head canting slightly to one stride while he watches Seamus’s little coup play out while letting me know which entrance his reinforcements will come through.
Someone doesn’t trust you, little man.
Seamus gloats, while I pray he won’t take the second shot at Roman. I’m not sure anyone will survive the carnage if he does, including myself.
“Are you truly stupid enough to believe you can threaten my family?” I draw Seamus’s wandering attention as Konnor rocks back on his heels twice.
Two minutes.
It might as well be an eternity.
