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Octavio looked at me. “We hit them all at once?” Like he was giving me the chance to reconsider.
I stared right back at him. “The plan hasn’t changed. Let’s do this.”
The driver pressed on the gas, and the SUV hurtled forward. The engines of the other vehicles roared behind us. Octavio pulled out his gun and rested it on his thigh before pressing the button to roll down the window.
The next several seconds passed in a frenetic blur. The driver whipped the SUV up onto the sidewalk and parked it with a jerk. Octavio was already firing through the window, other shots blaring as the rest of our army targeted the outside guards.
Through the open window, I watched two men near the brick building’s front door jerk and crumple, bloody splotches dappling their shirts. The Deadly Rose force was already pouring out of the vehicles and charging toward the building.
Octavio heaved open the door, and all I could do was follow him. I wouldn’t earn the respect Mom wanted by huddling in the backseat like a coward.
I was sending these men into the fight to their possible deaths. I’d damn well better have the guts to stand with them.
As I dashed across the sidewalk, a man ahead of me rammed his shoulder into the door. It burst open, and he headed inside, more shots ringing out. I lifted my pistol instinctively, grimacing at how familiar the gesture felt, how easy it was to fall in line with my mother’s expectations. With the past I’d wanted so badly to shed.
I sprang through the doorway after the handful of men who’d taken that entrance. Shouts and footsteps were thundering from all around as the rest carried out my strategy to surround and overwhelm the building’s inhabitants.
A man in a sweat-stained tee lunged out of a doorway with a knife. My hand jerked around; I blew a hole in his forehead before he could stab the blade at my chest.
As he toppled over, a shudder ran through me. I blanked my mind against the revulsion and pushed myself onward.
My ears rang with the booming of the gunshots. I moved from room to room, checking that any Anacondas in the place had been taken down.
Several other bodies lay sprawled across the floor. I didn’t recognize any of them, and they were dressed shabbier than Mom would have tolerated. It looked like my army had cleared at least the first floor of opposition without any of our own falling.
I was just coming up on a kitchen at the back of the building when a skinny woman sprang at me, her fingers clawing at my face. My finger squeezed the trigger before I’d even processed that she wasn’t holding a weapon.
Her head snapped backward with the close-range shot. Blood splattered the walls—and my face and shirt.
“Fuck.Fuck.” Bile rose up my throat, and I just barely swallowed it down.
Her body slumped lifeless on the floor. Had she been part of the gang or just a sort of groupie? Or even a customer partaking of whatever goods they sold?
Too late for that to matter now.
But Dios mío, this was not where I wanted to be. NotwhoI wanted to be. Who the fuck was I to decide who lived or died—to blast their lives away over petty squabbles?
I was supposed to be on the ice, conveying beauty and emotion for an audience, making them dream of things they hadn’t imagined possible. Instead I’d been dragged into hell.
And now I was an instrument of that hell, this sick system that revolved around the most violent competition, all over again.
The kitchen beyond my latest attacker was empty. Nothing after it but the back door the Deadly Rose men had bashed down.
“First floor’s clear!” I hollered out, my voice sounding distant to my ears.
A waft of cool night air washed over me from the open doorway. The shots were already slowing above me. They didn’t need my leadership to finish this massacre, did they?
I drifted outside, taking a few steps into the shadows of the parking lot there. My head spun. I gulped a deep breath of the fresh air, wincing at the sticky patches of blood cooling on my skin—and two figures solidified on either side of me.
“What do we have here?” a hostile voice snarled.
They must have been Anaconda members who’d just arrived from someplace else. I whipped around, yanking my hand up, but I couldn’t shoot both of them when they were in opposite directions.
I moved too slow in my uncertainty. One of my attackers hurled a fist at me. I dodged, but his knuckles caught my wrist, making me lose my grip on the gun.
I ducked and snatched after it—and a sudden thump sounded just a few feet away. Massive arms whipped forward to snatch one guy’s head and shatter his spine with a wrench of his neck.
My fingers caught on the pistol. I jerked it up in time to put a bullet in the second guy’s chest, just as the new arrival jabbed a knife into his throat.
