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“Can you?” Kaige asked.
Gideon shrugged. “I mean, I can try, and maybe it’d be a good thing. Ezra needs to see first-hand how bad things are out here.”
Wylder snorted loudly. “He doesn’t care about that—or us, for that matter. He’ll lose a ton of money if the existing construction is demolished, and it’ll look bad to the investors. The only things Ezra Noble protects are his wealth and his reputation. He probably just wants to ensure that his development doesn’t come to any harm.”
“Yeah, no wonder he’s sending in the entire Noble troop,” I said, making a face. “He seemed awfully obliging all of a sudden.”
“Exactly.” Wylder’s grip on the steering wheel tightened. “Because God forbid anything happens to hisproperty.”
I stayed silent. Wylder was right. Ezra cared more about the condos he was building than his own son’s well-being.
“We need to turn this around,” Wylder added. “Maybe with a whole army of Nobles and the Claws, we can come down on the Storm so hard he’ll roll over. I want to see that Xavier psycho dead, whatever we do.”
I nodded, my body buzzing with anticipation. We had to strike some kind of fatal blow, and soon. We had less than two days left.
I spotted the looming tower of the half-constructed project and the metal bars of the crane poised next to it. The rising sun blazed through the steel girders. The waterfront project was easily the tallest building in all of the Bend, surrounded by tall construction walls that the Nobles had reinforced after the Storm’s people had broken in before to frame them for dealing Glory.
We weren’t alone. Up ahead, engines roared closer as the Noble forces Ezra had called on converged with us. The Claws men behind us honked their horns.
But as we came around the last corner, a swarm of other cars racing our way came into view down the road. “Fuck,” Wylder said, stomping on the gas. “They’re practically here already.”
He ripped across the asphalt and screeched to a halt outside the gates to the construction site. The other vehicles with us, Nobles and Claws alike, parked haphazardly around us. But our men had only just started pouring out of the vehicles, more still arriving, when the Storm force sped to meet us from the other direction.
A swarm of Storm men streamed out, already taking shots at us. We ducked behind the cars. I pulled my pistol from the back of my jeans and curled my fingers around the grip and the trigger.
Bullets were flying freely on both sides, making the air thunder and my eardrums ring. I eased up in time to fire at a few Storm men who’d made a run for the gate. They probably figured that once they’d gotten inside, they could pick us off from over the fence.
One of my shots caught a guy in the shoulder. Wylder took another down with a bullet in the side of his head. There was no time to think, only to react.
More men on the Storm side fell, but I saw a few of the Nobles and Claws men stagger and slump too. Anguish squeezed around my heart. We were fighting and some of us dying to protect the only home we’d ever had. What fucking right did the Storm have to come in and try to wrench it away from us? Wasn’t his empire big enough already?
“Head around the back,” Wylder shouted to a new contingent of Noble men who couldn’t reach us through the fray. “Make sure they don’t sneak around that way!”
A few cars tore off around the side of the development. Others parked with the men leaping out, guns already in their hands. They blasted away at the Storm forces.
The front line of the Storm’s men pulled back to a farther row of cars. We were starting to drive them off. Triumph surged up inside me.
They’d underestimated us yet again. We were so much stronger than that rich bastard in his mansion had ever imagined.
But the Storm’s people had other tricks up their sleeve. I spotted Xavier poised in the back of a pick-up truck, wavering and hollering at the men around him. I couldn’t make out what he was saying amid the rattle of gunfire, but his intention became clear soon enough.
“They’ve got fucking TNT,” Kaige bellowed, his lips pulling back in a snarl. “They’re going to try to blast right through the wall—or us—like they were going to at the store yesterday.”
“Don’t let them get close to the wall!” I cried out, hoping that enough of our people would hear me. I shot at the men carrying the explosives, catching one in the chest. He collapsed. Another dashed in to pick up his cargo, but a renewed hail of bullets from our side caught him too.
“That’s right!” Wylder shouted. “Push them back! Push them right out of our county.”
Just as hope started to unfurl in my chest, at least a dozen more cars roared into view to join the Storm’s forces. I swore under my breath and reloaded my gun. “We’ve got even more to deal with.”
Wylder’s face hardened, but he kept his jaw firm. “We’ve still got enough manpower to hold them off. We’re taking down more of them than they are of us.”
That wasn’t necessarily going to be true for long. With the new men joining the Storm’s crowd, a different sort of gunfire reverberated in the street. A few of them held machine guns. They pelted our front lines, and several more figures on our side crumpled with blood spurting from their wounds.
“Take cover but keep shooting as much as you can,” Wylder ordered, pitching his voice to carry through the chaos. “Keep protecting the wall!”
The air had gotten thick with the stink of hot metal and spilled blood. My gut churned. My ears must have been numbing with the constant barrage of noise, because it didn’t sound so loud anymore. I shifted my weight to get a better angle to aim from and hissed as pain lanced through my wounded thigh.
These fuckers were responsible for that too. We’d come here to win, and that was what we’d do.
