“Two down,” I say, squeezing the trigger of my Barrett MK22, picking off men one by one. “Three.”
“Four,” Carson says, hardly breathing hard after pulling a man’s throat apart with his bare hands.
Scary motherfucker.
“Five,” Mateo says.
“Six and seven,” Luke announces.
One by one, we count them off. None of our men are hit.
“Twenty-two,” Julian says. “That was the last one.”
But I see more movement.
“No, there’s two more,” I say, taking aim. “Back of the building, hiding behind crates. I can’t get a shot.”
“On it,” Mateo says. “Only cowards fucking hide.”
He hits one, and the other runs right into my crosshairs, and I take the shot.
“Twenty-four,” I say calmly. “I’m coming down.”
By the time I walk into the warehouse, our foot soldiers are working on removing the heads from the bodies, so I stay out of the way of the blood.
It’s not that I’m afraid to get messy, as I’ve been covered in my fair share of blood. But tonight, there’s no need.
Spider swears as he slices his knife through a man’s throat.
Decapitating grown men is hard work.
“Why didn’t you just send their tongues?” Luke asks Julian with a grunt.
“Because receiving a crate full of twenty-four headssends a message,” Julian replies smoothly as he takes photos.
“You’re not wrong,” Carson says as we walk back toward the cars. Julian’s men will stay behind and finish up here, but it already took far longer than I expected it to. It’s past six in the morning when we reach the plane.
I pull out my phone and see the texts from Bruno.
B: She got back to the motel fine. I’ll stay here until I have more instructions.
Without replying, I slip the phone back into my pocket and prepare to sleep on the flight back to Vegas.
Twelve
LULU
What a night. It was exhausting, exhilarating, and another steep learning curve. My mixology classes had given me excellent knowledge, but working somewhere like Rapture, where most people ordered classier drinks than white wine, beer, or a cosmo, I was being stretched every shift. I love it. The walk back? Not so much.
I still had that niggling feeling of being followed, so I took a roundabout route back this morning, hoping that on the off chance my father’s people had thought to look for me in Vegas, that I was outsmarting them.
Could they have found me this quickly?
That thought kept going around and around in my mind, and I had to believe no, they couldn’t.
So my plan is to sleep the whole day away; I can just feel it. I’m not stupid enough to completely let my guard down, but I feel it’s okay to rest, take a breath, and thenfind a better hotel closer to the club. I made almost agrandin tips tonight.
I smile to myself and wiggle my butt, trying to get comfortable in this crappy bed.
