“I was careful!”
“Half an inch lower and the round would have been in your brain!”
“Got it.” I exhaled once through my teeth and rose up again to shoot the next one through the eye.
Another burst of bullets came in.
“Cover me.” Hiro vaulted over the bed, flying in the air and slicing necks, one by fucking one. So fast that I feared I might shoot him as I got the others.
What the fuck?! And you told me to be careful?
Blood sprayed as men fell from his blade or my bullets.
Then, one of their rounds caught Hiro mid-vault.
No!
I saw it the way one saw lightning—after the fact, in a flash, before the thunder. A spray of red snapped across my brother’sleft shoulder as he twisted between two men and stabbed one in the heart.
The fabric of Hiro’s shirt opened in a long shallow seam.
He landed on the other side of the newly dead men and kept moving as if the bullet had not happened, but I saw the wet shine of him and the torn cloth, and my chest seized for the half-second it took me to confirm that he was still on his feet.
I reached Hiro as he wiped the blade on the shirt of a man he had killed.
His chest was rising and falling fast. His hair was wet with someone else's blood. There was a smear of red along the side of his jaw that was not his and a long stripe of plaster dust across the shoulder of his shirt from a bullet that had missed him by less than the width of a hand.
He met my eyes.
I met his.
For one breath, neither of us spoke.
We’re good.
Dead bodies were spread out on the floor around us.
Hiro spat on the floor. “I counted twelve.”
“The other four must have run off.”
Sound erupted behind us.
We turned that way.
Reo and my men raced to us, and my Roar didn’t look happy at all. “Why didn’t you wait for us?”
I gestured to where he’d come from. “What was down there?”
“Just fire and people burning to death.” Reo cocked his gun. “Apparently, the action is here.”
“It is.” Hiro winked. “Glad you could keep up.”
Reo sneered at him and scowled at me. “The both of you get behind me.”
I blinked, but did as I was told.
Hiro snickered. “We were just trying to get a warm-up before the battle tomorrow.”
