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I dared to reach for my gun, and maybe that was a miscalculation. In the small opening when one of my hands was out of commission, some prick hurtled into me from the side.
As I staggered backward, my fingers clenched around the pistol’s grip—and the next thing I knew, something was slamming against the back of my head with a blast of pain.
A board, I registered as I grappled for balance. A few more assholes had come up behind us too—one of them had hit me with a fucking slab ofwood.
More arms and feet lashed out at me. A bash to my forearm sent my pistol spinning away. I managed to grasp hold of two pricks’ heads of hair and slam their foreheads together with a satisfying thud, but with each body that wobbled away, three more seemed to rush in to take its place.
As I swung in one direction, someone in the other rammed a kick against my shins. Multiple pairs of hands yanked and shoved.
I sprawled on my ass, sputtering curses, still hurling punches as well as I could. Then some cabrón drove his heel down on my knee with the full weight of his body behind the blow.
Agony exploded through my leg, like a thousand shards of glass digging into the joint. A groan burst from my lips.
They’d broken my goddamn knee cap. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Anton loomed over me, clamping his hand around the short coils of my hair. He heaved my head into the pavement beneath me—once, twice, sending more white-hot pain fizzing behind my eyes. A throbbing sensation reverberated through my skull.
I blinked, but I couldn’t clear the thickening haze from my eyes. The click of a safety sliding off brought my gaze jerking upward. Salvador stood over me by my broken knee, pointing his pistol at me.
I tried to thrash at him, but other goons jammed my limbs against the concrete. Salvador gave me a vicious grin, his fingers tensing—
And a shot rang out, but from beside me rather than in front of me.
Salvador crumpled, blood spurting from a wound on his chest. A short but fearsome figure shoved into view.
“Get the fuck away from him, or you’re all dead!”
Lou fired another bullet into the thigh of one of the men pinning me down. He scrambled away with a string of expletives, clutching the gushing hole in his leg. She braced herself above me, the pistol she’d gotten from her mother clutched in one hand, the Glock I’d just bought for her in the other, murder in her eyes.
“If you don’t get the hell out of herenow, I’m just getting started,” she snarled. In that moment, there was no doubting whose daughter she was, even if she’d only brought out the Cordova in her under duress.
Anton held up his hands, but his mouth had twisted with revulsion. “Está bien. We’ve already delivered our message. Oh, but one last present.”
He stomped his foot down on my hand hard enough that a fresh explosion of pain radiated up my arm. I winced inwardly at the crack of bone.
I wasn’t going to be holding a gun—or much else—for a good long while.
“Enjoy your goodbye present,” Anton spat out, and waved to his men. Supporting the few we’d injured badly enough that they had trouble walking, the horde of them surged back into the side-street they’d emerged from.
Lou stayed poised over me, a tremor running through her body. Her arms quivered but held in place, keeping both guns aimed at the retreating men as they disappeared from view.
I groped at the gritty concrete beneath me with my uninjured hand, searching for leverage to heave myself upright. My head came up—and swam with a whirlpool of pain and dizziness.
Lou dropped down next to me, shoving one gun into her purse so she could wrap her arm around my shoulder. “Don’t try to get up. You could make it worse. Dios mío, Rafael, your leg—there’s blood all over the back of your head—”
I knew things were bad when she started slipping Spanish in there. The fact that when I opened my mouth, I nearly vomited was another major indication.
I swayed in her hold. My voice came out in a croak. “Sorry. I should have been… protecting you…”
“Fuck that,” Lou snapped. “They practically buried you.” She pawed through her purse and yanked out her phone. “I’m calling an ambulance.”
“Lou,” I protested raggedly. “No hospitals. No—”
“I don’t want to hear it.” The panicked note beneath her words startled me silent. “I don’t care what the doctors think about how you ended up like this. I’m not losing you, and no back-alley doctor is going to be able to fix all of this.”
I tried to find the wherewithal to keep arguing, but bright spots were forming in my vision, pulsing in time with the throbbing of my head.
“You saved my ass there,” I mumbled instead. “Not supposed to be like that.”
