That meant I saw him from the corner of my eye before he approached.
Everything about him screamed trouble.
When he slid his arms around my waist from behind, I stiffened. “Back off.”
“Don’t be like that, baby.” The stranger revealed an accent that belonged south of the Mason-Dixon line. “You know you want to dance?—”
“Get away from her,” Neev snapped.
But he didn’t listen.
His hands tightened, slipping lower, shifting around my hips. I stayed still. My heart didn’t, though. My pulse spiked as the scent of cheap cologne, shitty watermelon vape juice, and sweat combined, sucking up the oxygen around me.
I wasn’t scared, but I needed him to relax around me. To think Iwas.
Then I’d fucking brain him.
“Nah, I think she likes me.”
“She has better taste than that,” Neev growled. “You have to trawl the clubs for girls that are under the influence because only beer goggles would make up for a face that not even your mom’d love.”
I had to laugh. “Neev!”
“What? It’s true. He looks like the fuzzy coin you find underneath a sofa cushion.”
The guy stiffened. “Bitch!”
“Leave us alone,” Raisin snarled, shoving his shoulder.
“I don’t see her struggling,” the American asswipe reasoned, arms tightening as his nose settled in my throat.
I stared at my sisters, shooting them a warning look that they begrudgingly obeyed. Still swaying to the music, letting him think I was into this when I wanted to gouge out his eyes, I waited until I heard him chuckle before I slowly bowed my head.
Smoothing my fingers over his hands, letting them tangle with his sweaty ones, I withheld a gag, barely, before I pitched my head back so fast that he wasn’t the only one seeing stars when my skull collided with his forehead.
As he howled, “CUNT,” I lifted my leg and slammed my foot into his instep. Then, spinning around in a pirouette that’d have impressed my fourth-grade ballet teacher who’d expelled me from class for rowdiness, I raised my knee and let it collide with the familyrocks.
When his howl morphed into a shriek, I expected him to tumble onto the packed dance floor where nobody had bothered to help us.
Only, the dumbass didn’t.
He rushed at me like he was a stampeding bull.
At least, he tried.
The bullet got to him before I could.
Jumping back, Raisin screeched, “What the fuck?!”
The sound of a gun being fired had the music roaring to a halt. His cry of agony contributed to the other screams as people yeeted themselves from the nightclub like rats fleeing a sinking ship.
Accustomed to more rowdiness than this on any given night in the ER, and probably drunker than I cared to admit, I turned to the guy with the goddamn gun.
At the back of my mind, I accepted that my brothers would likely kill me if they ever heard I faced an active shooter. But see above:drunker than I cared admit.
I found the guy who wasn’t even hiding—he ambled toward me like this was an everyday occurrence.
His slick suit told me that maybe it was, but that didn’t stop me from stacking my hands on my hips and challenging: “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
