“Be smart.” I growled, circling so I could see the gunfight turned fistfight behind me. Someone was going to get killed. I had to stop this.
I met Jacob’s eyes and shook my head in disgust.
“Enough!” My shout was short and sharp and somehow managed to break through the mess going on around me. Most of the men Travis had brought with him were down and far more bloodied than The Hounds, but that didn’t mean we weren’t sporting our own injuries. “I’ll shoot him.”
Drew’s cry of my name was filled with anxiety as he turned on the ground and shot his hand in the air. “Ayda,no!”
He was too late. Travis hadn’t stopped moving in the confusion created by my threat. He had his eyes on me as he marched forward with a wild, manic glint in his eye. My hand trembled only when he was within my reach, and no matter how much I wanted to turn the gun on him in self-defense, I couldn’t seem to move. Jacob’s derisive laugh cut through meas Travis reached for my gun and slipped it from my grip.
I didn’t know exactly what I expected to happen at that moment, but his movement was so quick, I seemed to have a hard time tracking him. Before I could cry out in surprise, Travis aimed my gun at Jacob’s face and pulled the trigger… not so much as wincing as we were both coated in the backlash of blood spatter of the shot. The breath sawing in and out of me stopped all at once as I stared at the satisfied smirk on Travis’ face as he slipped the gun right back into my hand.
“You just did me a favor, sweetheart.”
Jacob’s body seemed to take forever to fall, the dull thud coming as Travis headed back to the center of the fray, while I stood breathless and unmoving.
What the fuck had just happened?
Chapter Thirty-Nine
DREW
I’d lost sight of Trigger. My eyes were fixed firmly on the dead Jacob Hove lying at Ayda’s feet. His ghostly stare was aimed right at me, all the light removed from his features. His mouth hung open, the tongue that had thrown so many insults our way now hanging free like he was a stray shot dog in the middle of the street no one gave a fuck about.
Of all the moves I’d expected from Trigger, that had been the last.
He’d just killed his brother.
Blood brother.
Fuckingblood.
My chest was rising and falling hard as I tried to remember how to move. I was on my back on the ground, my arm still in the air with my head and hand raised. Frozen.
“If you’re going to shoot someone, you can’t waste time, Ayda,” Trigger said without any grief in his voice whatsoever. “The moment that finger hits the trigger, you pull. You pause, you die. Your team loses. The victory of war starts to slip from your fingers. Do you honestly think Jacob would have thought twice about shooting you in the head if the gun had been in the other hand?” He spun on the heels of his feet just as I lookedback to find him. “And you’re just too pretty to die.”
The bastard looked happy.
Ayda stared at Trigger in abject horror, her mouth opening and closing as she fought to remember the order of muscular movement that would help her breathe. “He was your brother, Travis.”
Trigger spun to face her, his eyes wild with that sick sort of glee you see in mental patients. His response came in a shout that pushed his veins out in his neck and temple and cause saliva to gather at the sides of his mouth. “He was a liability to my club. A common rapist who had no problem dumping that shit onmy club’sdoorstep. This wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t have been the last.”
“He was yourbrother,” she said again, confusion making her eyes glassy.
Trigger sneered at her, his disgust for her emotional response clear. “He was stealing the meth as quickly as we were cooking it. He was a fucking tweaker. The stupid fuck was selling the shit to his students, and it was only a matter of time until that led right back to the Navs. Fuck, I’ve covered for the little bastard most of his fucking life. He was a liability—a liability that was about to bring heat down on my club. Not on my watch.”
He spat on the floor and rubbed his hands over his shorn hair.
“Thank you for your help with that.”
“You bastard.”
He was so focused on Ayda, I managed to tuck my legs under my ass and push up on all fours, keeping my eyes trained on him while the rest of my men held the other Navs down. With one push, I was up, standing as carefully andsilently as I could until I was only a few paces behind him.
“Jacob deserved to die months ago. Don’t act like you didn’t want rid of him, too. You just gave us the opportunity to pin his death on someone else,” he shouted. “Seems like The Hounds aren’t as fucking useless as everyone in the MC world thinks after all.”
I saw Slater move on my left, and Jedd move on my right. I held my hands up to both of them, glancing each way and silently ordering them to stand down.
If anyone was going to take this asshole out, it was me.
