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That would mean Caroline would go.
He could live under all sorts of hopes and fairytales that it would work if she stayed, but it fucking wouldn’t. He knew it wouldn’t because asking her to stay would be asking her to give up her family. The family she’d risked death for climbing out a window. The family she’d cut herself to the bone for—almost fucking literally—without thinking. She’d have to leave them behind, or at the very least lie to them every day.
He was willing to ask her to do a lot, because he was no longer an honorable man. He would demand she never set foot in a fucking war zone again. He would ask her to live a life of violence, deaths, and being dragged into interrogation rooms by cops trying to bring them down.
He wasn’t so noble to give her up if it was just that.
But it wasn’t.
He’d never go back to Castle Springs. And she had a whole family there.
So yeah, that pissed him off.
Another ugly truth that was unavoidable.
The truth was a bully. Gregory David Roberts was right about that.
It terrified him. The thought of having to let her go, now he’d had her again. Now he’d had her for the first time—had those parts of her that hadn’t existed before. He’d fucking fallen in love with her all over again.
And he would love her till the day he died.
And that would be a long and miserable stretch of time without her.
He arrived back at the club craving her touch, her heat, her fucking smell so he could bury himself in her, away from those truths.
But she wasn’t there.
She was at a fucking karaoke club.
After midnight. Drunk, by the looks of her text.
While they were in the middle of a war with a man that made it clear he had no problem killing women.
He tasted acid.
And rode hard to the bar.
He arrived just in time to kill one of the men who Claw and Swiss had missed. One of the men that had opened fire on his woman.
Caroline
“Oh my god,” Emily chanted, looking down at the blood gushing from her shoulder.
I put my hand on the wound calmly.
“You’re going to be okay,” I told her.
“I know I’m going to be fine,” she snapped. “It’s just a flesh wound. “That’s not what I was talking about. This is totally gonna get a movie deal. If it bleeds, it leads, baby.”
I stared at her under the harsh fluorescent stage lights. “You’re fucking insane, you know that, right?”
She nodded. “Multiple therapists have told me, not in so many words.”
“Just so you’re aware.”
I kept my voice even, calm. It was my battlefield voice.
Inside, I was scared to death.
Not just because we’d just been shot at while singing “C’est La Vie” by B*Witched—I’d been shot at before, but not as…personally as this. It was the fact my best friend was bleeding in front of me and I was staunching the flow. Yes, it was just a flesh wound. But it was a wound. On my friend. Because of the club.
And then I was even more terrified because I thought about the entire club being shot up. Everyone. Who else did they get?
Swiss and Claw had gone into full, psychopath badass mode. They’d killed two men seconds after they started shooting. The third ran out.
Swiss had gone to cover me and Emily.
Until she shooed him away. “Go, chase the bad guy, I’m fucking fine.”
He gaped at her. Checked me over. “Seriously, fucking in love,” he muttered, jogging back to the bar, gun in one hand, cellphone in another.
I prayed whoever he was calling picked up.
My eyes locked with green ones.
Green, furious and terrified irises.
He ran over.
Pocketed his gun.
Looked down at Emily, then at me.
“Are you hit, Caroline?” he asked, voice cold, robotic.
I guessed I was covered in blood so it was hard to tell. “No,” I whispered. “No,” I said stronger the second time.
Emily looked between us, must’ve clocked the way Liam’s shoulder’s sagged at my words. I wasn’t expecting it, therefore she was able to push my hand off her bullet wound, stand up and punch Liam in the face.
He definitely wasn’t expecting it either, since he stumbled back and almost fell off the stage.
“Emily,” I shouted, standing and bracing her as she stayed standing on wobbly legs. “You can’t just punch Liam after you’ve been shot! What if you hurt yourself?”
I wasn’t too worried about Liam, he’d surely been punched before, and he did kind of deserve it.
She shrugged and winced with the movement. “I told you I was gonna do it. I’m a woman of my word.”
Liam wiped the blood from his mouth. He was still taut, tense, with that cold fear I had been feeling gripping him. “I like her,” he said finally.
We couldn’t take Emily to a hospital, for obvious reasons. I argued this fact, but Emily was the one who fought me on that.
