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I coil my muscles under me and shove off hard, rolling toward my brother.
McKenna drops my maimed hand and drives a vicious punch into my ribs as I knock him in Dante’s direction, but as if we’d fucking choreographed it, Dante surges up the moment I start the roll and knocks McKenna off me with a brutal jab to his throat.
I bounce to my feet, and before McKenna can recover, Dante snatches up the trench knife and follows his attack up by driving it into McKenna’s side.
McKenna jerks back, hissing with pain but so amped up on adrenaline and rage that he doesn’t let it slow him down. Instead, he grabs the chair Dante was tied to and swings it around, slamming it down onto the gory red lines he carved into Dante’s shoulders.
Dante lets out a choked shout of pain, the blow taking him to his knees, and I see fucking red, ripping the chair out of McKenna’s hands and giving him a roundhouse to the jaw that has blood spraying out of his mouth and his body spinning back in Dante’s direction.
Dante lost the knife when he got knocked down, but he’s already back on his feet, pale as fuck under all the blood and bruising, but all-in the way he always fucking is, beating McKenna back with a rapid-fire series of strikes that has McKenna retreating toward me and finally going down.
I drive my knee up into his face as he falls, knocking him backward, onto his ass, but when I surge forward to stomp his chest and put him down for good, the fucker scrambles backward, managing to gain his feet before we can get to him and then rush back at me with a primal yell.
He grabs my head, ignoring the blows I drive into his stomach, and digs his thumbs into my eyes, doing his fucking damnedest to twist my head all the way off.
I tighten my traps and squeeze my eyes closed as pain shoots to the center of my skull. I don’t give a shit. I refuse to let him have the satisfaction of either snapping my fucking neck or blinding me, and I drive my fist up, clipping McKenna’s chin.
He retaliates by twisting my head around hard enough that I have to spin to avoid breakage, and McKenna cackles like the sadistic bastard he is.
“That’s right, I’ll take you apart one fucking body part at a time, you worthless piece of—”
His threat ends in a pained grunt when Dante pulls the motherfucker off me with a hoarse shout, throwing himself into the fray again despite his injuries.
“Oh, fuck no,” I grit out when McKenna digs his fingers right into my brother’s flesh, trying to pull it apart where he already sliced into it.
I slam into him, knocking him away, and it turns into an all-out brawl between the three of us. With Dante already fucked up from the beating he took and McKenna just as ferocious when cornered as he is power hungry, it gets far fucking uglier than it should for two-on-one.
“Fucking end him,” I grunt, when I finally get McKenna into a headlock. “Get that fucking knife, Dante. Find a goddamn weapon!”
The weapon I brought is on the other side of the room, too fucking far away, but I catch sight of McKenna’s, the butt of the gun half buried under the remains of the broken chair.
“There.” I jerk my chin toward it, and Dante lunges for it.
McKenna turns into a live wire, thrashing hard in my hold and managing to hook his foot behind my knee. It throws me off balance, and when he follows it up with a brutal jab to my ribs, it’s enough for him to rip out of my hold and scramble toward the gun.
He shoves Dante out of the way a split second before Dante can snatchit up, and Dante goes down hard, a tide of red soaking the side of his shirt as if some of those pieces of flesh McKenna carved out of him have decided to offer up even more of his life’s blood on the altar of McKenna’s manic quest for power.
“Fuck,” Dante grits out, trying to lever himself back up but collapsing with a pained grunt.
McKenna dives right over him and gets the gun, raising it in a smooth, practiced move as he rolls and comes up on his back with a crazed grin on his face and the promise of death in his eyes.
Too fucking bad for him, their scuffle bought me some time, and I used it to get to my weapon first.
“You’re both dead,” McKenna spits out as he rises to his feet, swinging the barrel between Dante and me. “You’re both fucking de—”
I lift my weapon and shoot.
McKenna’s body drops, a bullet between his eyes.
The sharp retort of the gunshot echoes off the concrete walls, leaving Dante and I in a ringing silence broken only by the ragged sound of our breathing. It’s over.
Austin McKenna is dead.
38
RILEY
“This is bullshit,”I pant as the fight escalates around us, the Reapers who’ve showed up storming McKenna’s house with a brutal ruthlessness that has the West Point gang members fighting back in a panic. “What’s taking him so long?”
