“Pragmatic. Makes sense.”
“Plus, she can be such a pain in the ass when she’s miserable.” He flashes a quick grin, raising his glass. “You’ll see. Has she given you the look yet?”
I smile despite myself. I know exactly what he means. It’s the pinched glare she gets when she’s livid. She had it the whole time we were at the store last night.
I’m about to tell him I’m familiar when there’s a commotion in the back of the room. Shouting, angry, scared, along with a familiar ping of anxiety running through the people nearby. Everybody’s craning to see what’s going on which means more bodies start cramming the tight space. I push my drink aside and stand, reaching for my weapon.
There are guards outside. A dozen of them, watching front and back. But even with the muscle, we’re still vulnerable. Finn said they only decided to do this because it was a way to start the war planning under the guise of a celebration. He figured it’d be about as safe as it ever could be.
Not even the Baranovs would stoop so low, he insisted. Even they had enough honor to respect a happy occasion.
Now I’m thinking he was wrong.
“Stay here,” I tell Luke. “Something’s happening.”
I stride through the crowd, pushing people aside as they filter toward the front exit. Luke stays by my side, which pisses me off. He should be leaving too, but I don’t have time to fight him back.
The shooting starts.
Instantly the press of bodies heaves away as everyone scrambles for cover. It’s pure fucking chaos. I can’t tell where the fighting’s coming from, who’s shooting where, what’s going on. More than a few men around me are down on their stomachs, guns waving wildly around, and I curse when I realize I’m more likely to get killed by friendly fire right now.
I shove Luke hard, ramming him with my shoulder. He sprawls with a yelp, hits a table, and rolls over, landing sloppily in a booth. I have half a second to leap after him when two men stride into the room, both strapped with submachine guns.
The carnage is awful. Bullets fly and bodies are torn to pieces. I come up shooting and manage to catch one man in the side, surprising him. He spins away, gun firing up into the ceiling, spraying bullets into plaster and wood. Chips and dust rain down as he collapses. I flip the table with a curse seconds before the remaining shooter turns on us and opens fire.
I slam my foot into Luke’s guts to keep him down. I want to return fire, but I’m busy keeping Regan's damn brother alive. It’s not an ideal situation. I should be free to fight, but instead I keep thinking about how much it’ll break her god damn heart if she lost this suicidal moron.
There’s more shouting, more gunfire, until a familiar voice rings through the nightmarish din. “He’s down. Hold your fucking fire.”
I peer over the flipped table to find Cormac Whelan looming over the dead. He’s gore-splattered, bloodied, like a demon from a horror film. A smoking gun hangs limply from one hand as he crouches down and rips the mask off one of the corpses.
I don’t recognize the face.
“What… the fuck…” Luke scrambles to his feet. His face is pale with horror. “Oh my god.”
The room’s a slaughterhouse. Anyone who didn’t make it out in the initial rush is splattered with blood. More than a few corpses are slumped sideways, the floor and ceiling slick with dripping, sticky blood, the room reeking with death. Cormac’s busilycutting at the face of one of the shooters, probably questioning him while he’s still alive.
I start surveying the damage. I can’t let myself panic. Not right now. There are wounded to deal with, and the extent of this attack won’t be obvious until we know who was killed. If anyone in the main Whelan family is down—if Finn got hit during the shooting?—
I don’t let my mind go there.
Instead, I hurry over to a lieutenant I barely know, a young man with a baby face. Fucker can barely even grow a beard, but his guts are hanging out. He’s weakly trying to keep them in. “Liam… is it bad?” His eyes lock on mine, face sweaty. “Is it really bad?”
“You’re alright.” I try to remember his name until it comes to me. “You’ll be okay, Eamon, I promise.”
He mutters something, but it’s too quiet to hear over the groans of the dead and the dying.
I patch him up the best I can, but he’s too far gone. I move on to the next body, a man with a shard of wood on his thigh. He’ll be okay. On and on, more gunshot wounds, more shrapnel-filled flesh, until Luke grabs me by the shoulder.
“Regan,” he says, clearly on the edge of collapse and panic. “Where’s Regan?”
“She’s back home. She’s?—“
I’m about to saysafebut how the fuck do I know?
They targeted this meeting.
Which means they might target her too…
