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“Yeah, like fuck I’m locking myself safely away and calling more cops in here,” I scoffed. “This is my family. I’m not hiding, and I’m not sitting down while someone else, someone who hates them, is going in there”—I jerked my head toward the building—“firstly to see if there’s something you can to do finally bust them, and only secondly see if you can save whoever else is hurt.”
He glared at me, the look somehow mingling with a tenderness that I couldn’t understand. “Rosie, I don’t hate them. Not now. Not with… everything. But I’m going to protect you, and I’m not letting—”
He was cut off by a sound I was all too familiar with.
A gunshot.
I didn’t hesitate. I went running into the building where the shot came from.
The thump of police-issue boots and the cursing behind me told me that Luke followed.
Chapter Ten
I went in prepared for the worst, my blood both ice and fire. Ready to face both grief and revenge. Because someone committed the ultimate crime of spilling the blood of our family and doing it inside our gates.
We may have gone legit, but that didn’t mean that action didn’t have one consequence.
Death.
We’d had blood spilled in our family ever since we lost Laurie. And I’d had poison in my veins from that. From losing one of my best friends. And having to face it consistently throughout the past five years. I was used to fighting, to death. But I promised myself that I wouldn’t let it be any more of my family.
I let out a breath when I burst in to see both Lucky and Bex intact. My eyes went to the bullet wound at Lucky’s shoulder. Well, mostly intact. Just a flesh wound. He’d live.
He was circling a man who was bleeding from between his legs. A small grin tickled the corner of my lips, betting that the man had Bex to thank for that. She was bleeding from her head, focused on both Lucky and the man crumpled on the ground. He was familiar.
“You’re going to die. But not yet. Not even in the near future,” Lucky said.
Luke arrived behind me, breathing evenly. He didn’t declare his presence, obviously scanning for threats and seeing none, then pausing to collect evidence.
“But it’ll happen. I’ve got a brother who’s so very anxious to meet you,” Lucky continued.
And that was it, the moment I recognized the man. Devon. The son of the man who’d kidnapped Amy years before. Who had almost killed both Bex and me with a car bomb.
As those thoughts filtered through my mind while witnessing a man I considered a brother holding a gun to someone bleeding out from a dick wound, I thought about how fucking dramatic our life was.
And it could only go up from there. Or down, depending on your perspective.
“Step away from him and put down the gun, Lucky,” Luke said, his voice even and hard.
So he’d decided to make his move.
Lucky’s response to Luke’s command was to swing the gun from the prone man to the doorway where we stood. It stayed raised as his eyes went to Luke, though he immediately lowered it when he realized he was pointing it at me too.
I met Bex’s eyes, giving her a wonky sort of smile as if to say, ‘just another Tuesday in paradise.’
Lucky wasn’t perturbed at Luke’s presence. “Can’t do that, Luke,” he said, voice casual. “This swine”—he delivered a swift kick to Devon’s midsection, resulting in little more than a pained moan—“is the reason Skid is dead. The reason Becky almost fuckin’ died.”
I was putting all the pieces together. He was the reason Becky got kidnapped, why I walked in on her hacking at her hair in front of the mirror because she couldn’t even stand her reflection after she was raped. The reason why, for months, she was little more than a haunted shell of a person, forced to live inside the house of horrors that was her head.
I knew what I needed to do, the only thing that could be done with Luke there that would both save my family and deliver the revenge that needed to be dealt. I reached into my purse, looking for the gun that was always there, along with my favorite lipstick—Mac, Ruby Woo, if you were wondering.
Lucky focused on me, still addressing Luke, whose gun was still raised. “Why Rosie was almost blown into a thousand pieces.” The way he said it, giving Luke a pointed reminder of how close this man came to killing me, told me Lucky saw a lot more than he let on. “So I suggest you leave, pretend you didn’t see a thing,” he instructed Luke.
Though I knew the situation was serious, I wanted to choke out a laugh. Asking Luke to forsake his badge and his morals by helping the club he despised to commit murder was like expecting Cade to cooperate with a police investigation.
