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Such a waste.
CHAPTER13
Amelia
I was searchingfor Aiden and Dylan when someone abruptly grabbed my ankle. A new level of panic spiked through my chest.
I looked down as the smoke cleared enough to find Cliff sprawled across the road. He didn't wear that same gleeful look of power now, when his face was pale and contorted in pain. His clothes were soaked with blood, and his hands were pressed over a deep stab wound in his stomach which was pumping blood profusely.
“Help me." His voice was barely a rasp.
The bloodied knife lay nearby, the handle blood-slicked. I looked around, but Cliff seemed as if he had been disarmed in the attack; there was no firearm lying within his reach.
There was so much blood. It leaked through his fingers and pooled across the pavement. There seemed to be almost no chance he would survive.
“Cliff, you’re going to die,” I said softly. “Is there any message you want me to give your parents? Anything I can do to help you?”
I glanced around through the fog. Everything seemed muffled, even the cries of men and the harsh bark of gunfire, as if the smoke absorbed the sound and made it into nothing. The fog separated us from everyone else, as if the world beyond was just a nightmare.
Cliff and I were alone again.
“No, I’m going to be okay,” he said weakly. “I’m going to get better. I’m going to get married. Rose and I—”
The handle of the knife was so slick with blood that it was hard to get a good grip. His gaze was focused on me, on trying to scramble up, as he begged me to help him.
I dared one last look around, then drove the knife into his gut.
“Rose and you arenot,”I muttered as he stared at me in shock, his eyes wide. I dropped the knife and touched him like I was trying to comfort him. Except, I was only trying to cover my tracks.
Rose and I didn’t always get along, but I’d always do whatever it took to protect her.
His eyes were still wide and he was trying to speak when, suddenly, he slumped back against the pavement.
CHAPTER14
Shaw
I knewI’d found the woman of my dreams when I watched her stab a man.
One minute, I’d been moving through the shadows and smoke. The next, I saw her kneeling next to a bleeding man like Florence fucking Nightingale with a halo of reddish-auburn waves. They were both obviously Longroad pack. Her face might have been pretty except for the dark, mottled bruises that ran across the side of her face and surrounded swollen eyes.
She clasped the man’s hand, her red lips moving as she spoke a few words. A prayer for the dying?
But, all the while, she was reaching for the abandoned knife by his side.
She looked up, and I melted into the shadows. When I stepped back, she was plunging the knife into his gut.
Holy shit. A surprised laugh came to my lips.
She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, even covered in blood and bruises.
Something deep and new opened inside me in that moment—a bond between us, a desire for her, that I couldn’t even make sense of. I wanted to run my fingers through those auburn curls and tenderly kiss the bruises.
And then I wanted to find the man who had left those bruises and beat him to death.
I started toward her, as if being pulled by an invisible string. But as I strode toward her, another man materialized out of the shadows. He ran toward me, casting a wild-eyed gaze at the girl, who was already disappearing into the smoke.
He knocked into me. At the last moment, I sidestepped just enough to take his leg out from underneath him. He smashed into the ground, immediately rolled, trying to get to his feet, and I kicked him in the face.
