“Separate them!” I snapped at the nearest trust fund asshole. He stared at me as if I’d asked him to reach into a running engine with bare hands—as if doing anything useful might cost him a few fingers. “Fuck it!”
I grabbed the collar of the man holding the woman down and yanked him back. “Twenty extra if you don’t let go now!” I shouted right in his ear.
“Fucking whore bit my fucking cock!” the man yelled.
The woman sobbed.
I could see cuts on her back and on her bare ass, blood. I yanked him again.
“You wanna make it fifty?” I snarled.
He finally loosened his grip enough so I could reach between them and tear him off her. I clocked two other women in short dresses, heels—clearly brought in as party favors and currently crying in the corner. I made the connection fast and gestured for one to come over. She hesitated, then lifted her chin as if she was trying to look braver than she felt and edged toward me.I saw the fear in her eyes. Small. Brunette. Dark-eyed. Blood on her cheek, haunted eyes filled with regret. Too close to what my sister had looked like when we’d run. It hit harder than it should’ve.
“You,” I said. “Take her, your friend, and whoever else needs to get out of here, and go to my SUV outside. It’s the only one out there. Wait there. Do not fucking move. Got it?”
“She’s hurt,” the friend said. “We don’t have any money but?—”
“I’ll deal with that later,” I snapped, and the women scattered. No one stopped them. No one even flinched. The party guests watched, and a couple of them laughed. One raised his glass in a lazy salute, as if the whole thing was entertainment. Not a single one of them lifted a hand to help the girls or their friend.
Men surrounding something on the ground, laughing, boots kicking up dust, the kind of noise that fills your ears until you can’t hear yourself think. My momma is on the ground, broken in the middle of it all. Dead. Eyes open. Blood everywhere. Their shadows falling over her as if she weren’t even human.
Raven on Lucia. Using her—the way men like him always used anything they thought they owned. His hand fisted in her hair, her face turned away, blood streaking her thigh. She was barely conscious, limp under him.
Men shouting, “My turn next!” Drunken voices overlapping, fighting to be first.
Raven snarling over his shoulder, “Fuck off—she’s mine!” while she cried soundlessly.
Me, fourteen, stepping in front of them with nothing but rage and a shaking knife.
Raven finishing, and throwing Lucia to the dirt like trash, her body hitting the ground so hard I felt it in my teeth.
Me hauling her up anyway, although I was sure we’d both die for it.
They laughed; they told me to fix her. That she was no good if she was bleeding all over them. My sister’s dark hair was matted with blood, her face cut, but she wasn’t crying.
My vision thinned at the edges—as if the room I was in now was collapsing into a single point I couldn’t quite focus on. The noise from the bar warped, distant, and my hands moved, but they felt a step behind my thoughts, detached, automatic. The smell of blood, and abruptly it wasn’t the private event suite anymore—it was dust, heat, screams.
For a few seconds, I wasn’t a grown man. I was a teenager, barefoot, shaking, covered in my sister’s blood, staring down at my momma’s lifeless body, and the world around me split down the center, present bleeding into past until I had to blink hard to remember where I was. My heart hammered against my ribs in a stuttering pattern, too slow, too fast, then nothing at all.
I forced myself to breathe. One breath. Then another. Pulled myself back into the now by sheer will, by the weight of the job, by knowing the women outside needed me sharp. Not drifting. Not drowning.
The dissociation snapped like a rubber band, leaving pain behind it, a headache blooming hard at the base of my skull. I wiped a hand over my face and focused on the man in front of me, on the blood, him screaming and cursing, the mess I could control—not the one I couldn’t change.
“Don’t let that bitch fucking leave,” he shouted, and then he twisted toward me, wild-eyed, grabbing his crotch with one hand, nearly tripping on pants around his knees. “Fucking paid the whore and she tore my cock!” he snarled, doubling over as if it was somehow her fault he’d been using her as a useful hole and a punching bag. Blood smeared his knuckles, and he kept cursing, spit flying, trying to lunge past me to get to her again.
I stepped into his space. “Back off,” I told him.
He was crazed, though, and swung at me. I shoved him into a table. He lunged again, but this time I caught the whole ugly picture—blood soaking the front of his powder blue pants, torn skin, the unmistakable shape of a human bite. The woman had sunk her teeth into him hard enough to leave a full imprint, and he was too drunk and furious to register anything except pain and humiliation.
“She fucking tore me up!” he bellowed, trying to shove his bloody crotch in my face. I didn’t need a closer look. I’d treated enough bite wounds to know she’d gone for the best target she had.
Good for her.
“Keep coming at me,” I warned, “and I’ll finish what she started.”
“Calm the fuck down, Briggs!” someone else shouted, a man, a big presence coming from a door to the left of the private event suite. The crowd parted for him without a sound, every guest finding the floor really interesting.
“Jeremy Winter,” the new arrival said. “This is my event. I trust you got your money, doctor.”
