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My name.
“River.”
That pulls me back, and I shake my head, trying to clear it. The little bubble of shock and numbness to the outside world is threatening to pop with each passing second, leaving a ringing in my ears and a searing pain in my heart.
“We have to go,” Ash is saying. “River, listen to me. Please. She’s gone. There’s nothing we can do. The cops are on the way, and we have to move.”
His words pop the bubble a little more, leaving me with more attention for what’s going on. The scream of the sirens is getting louder in the distance, and I can hear the squeal of tires as the other guests at this shit show of a wedding peal out of the church parking lot themselves.
I can still hear my own breathing, loud and labored, but everything else is in much clearer focus now. The gunshots have stopped, and the church itself seems almost eerily quiet after the chaos that erupted inside.
Julian is long gone by now, escaped with Cody to who the fuck knows where. Natalie probably got away with him. Some of the guests are dead or hurt, but probably a good number of them got away as well.
A deep voice rumbles through me, coming from the man with his arms around me, keeping me pinned in place. I recognize the voice and then the arms as Knox’s in quick succession.
“Yeah,” he says grimly. “We gotta fucking go. We killed a bunch of those cartel fuckers, and we don’t want the cops tracing any of this shit back to us.”
Even with everything going on and the turmoil in my head and my heart, I recognize the truth of his words. The four men surrounding me aren’t strangers or enemies, trying to tear me away from my sister to hurt me or punish me, and us being here is dangerous.
I stop struggling and drag in a deep, painful breath.
“Good girl,” I hear, and I can feel that Gage is close by too. Knox practically lifts me up off my feet and carries me to the car—the one we were going to use to get away from this when the plan was still a thing that mattered at all.
That feels like ages ago now.
Another fucking lifetime.
They put me in the middle of the back seat and climb in on either side of me. Once the car starts, we peel out, racing away from the church and the mess there.
“Well, that was a fucking shit show,” Ash grunts beside me, sighing and slumping down in his seat. He leans his head back against the headrest and makes a face as he pulls off his glasses and attempts to clean the smudged lens.
His tone is flippant, as usual, but I can hear the tension under it.
“Understatement,” Priest bites out. I can’t see him where he sits in the front passenger seat, but he has that same tension and anger in his voice as well. “I don’t think it could have gone worse.”
Gage glances over at him, and Priest nods at something unspoken that passes between them. At a different time, I might have tried to figure out what they were saying to each other with that look, but now I can’t even be bothered.
“Do you think we got them all?” Ash asks. “I took out a couple of those fuckers, but there were a lot of them.”
“There’s no way to know,” Gage replies, and I can tell he’s grinding his teeth in irritation while he drives. He glances in the rearview mirror, and his green eyes are bright with fury. His strong features look even harsher and more sharp than usual. “That was fucking chaos. There could be more of them that didn’t show up to the church or some that got away. We won’t know until…”
He trails off, and no one really needs him to finish that sentence.
Until they either try again, or they don’t.
“Let them fucking try,” Knox says, cracking his knuckles. “If they come after us a second time, they’ll wish they’d stayed in whatever hole they crawled out of.”
“We have to tighten things up,” Gage fires back. “We have no way of knowing what they’ll do, and we didn’t see their first attack coming. That was a mistake we can’t afford to repeat. We can’t let our goddamn guard down again.”
That raises the tension in the car even more, and Priest lets out a controlled breath that seems loud in the sudden quiet.
I can hear everything they’re saying, and I’m aware of the danger and the tension and how pissed they all are that this happened in the first fucking place. But I can’tfeelany of those emotions with them.
It’s like my whole body is numb, and the shit with the cartel might as well have happened to someone else for how distant it seems in this moment. I stare blankly ahead, watching the city of Detroit pass us by through the windshield, but I don’t really see much of it. The buildings and headlights and exit signs are all a blur, and I don’t know if it takes us fifteen minutes or fifteen days to get back to the guys’ house. Time slides by like molasses, and none of it makes a difference.
Someone touches my arm at some point, sliding a warm, sure hand down from my shoulder to my bicep, and I barely feel it until suddenly pain explodes through the haze I’m floating in. I wince, cursing under my breath.
Ash frowns and pulls my jacket back enough to expose my arm. Blood has soaked into the sleeve, and I didn’t even notice. It didn’t even hurt before Ash touched it, but now there’s a dull, throbbing ache, but even that isn’t as sharp as it should be.
