Half a beat later, gunfire.
“Down!” I barked, dragging Lucy behind the table as Riot raised his sidearm and crouched at the door, Keno and Link on the other side of him.
Controlled shots shattered glass, sending sparks across the room. Smoke curled from the front lobby, acrid and choking.
“Ambush!” a voice shouted from the hallway.
“Back door!” Riot yelled.
We moved fast, boots pounding the floor. He fired twice, dropping a figure in the shadows.
A shout rose from below, muffled through the floorboards. Then the rattle of chains, a crash. My chest turned to ice.
“Basement,” I snarled, but another boom rocked the building, closer this time, drowning out everything else. Smoke poured in, forcing us back into the fray.
For one heartbeat, I saw it clear in my head, Gage slipping through the dark while every brother who swore his death was pulled into the fight. Then the bar erupted into chaos.
“Status,” I yelled.
“Got injuries! Boxer’s hit bad!”
Lucy clutched her gun, white-knuckled. I placed a hand on her shoulder.
“This is it,” I said.
“Let’s give them something to be afraid of.”
Riot slammed another mag home, eyes cutting to me for the call. I gave it, clear and sharp.
But my focus stayed split, half on the firefight, half on the girl crouched beside me with fire in her eyes.
She didn’t just believe me. Shebelieved in meand that was a hell of a lot more dangerous than the bullets flying outside.
Chapter 30
Lucy
The funeral wasn’t in a church. It was in the scrapyard behind the clubhouse. They said Boxer would’ve preferred it that way. The brothers, fire, and the sound of engines growling low like the breath of something wild and grieving.
They burned his kutte on the pyre first, standard tradition. Folded, laid over the coffin like a flag. Riot set it alight with a torch and didn’t speak a word.
No one did.
Not at first.
I didn’t ask where they’d gotten the coffin so quickly because I didn’t want to know.
I stood at the edge of the gathering, between Jay and Link, watching the flames climb higher, catching on the black-and-white Reaper’s patch like it was paper. The heat licked at my face, but it was the cold in my chest I noticed more.
Boxer was dead.
Shot twice in the chest and neck, when the Fangs shot through the front window. I’d seen his body, but I wished I hadn’t.
Because of me. Because I hadn’t kept the truth quiet.
They didn’t say it out loud. Not yet. But I felt it, every time I caught a brother’s eyes and saw nothing but calculation behind it. They lost one of their own, and the only thing heavier than grief was suspicion.
Someone lit a cigarette while another passed around a bottle. Quiet murmurs started to fill the space like smoke coiling between patches and glances.
