24
ROWAN
The first gunshot didn’t feel real.
It sounded too loud. Too sharp. Like something out of a movie instead of something that was happening right in front of me.
When the car had pulled up outside the bar and I’d been shot, it had sounded loud, but the black night had swallowed a lot of the sound. However, here, inside the clubhouse, the sound reverberated off the walls and ceiling, making it feel like my eardrums were going to bleed.
And then everything around me exploded.
Glass shattered and women screamed. Men shouted over each other—orders, curses, chaos colliding all at once in a barrage of noise and destruction. And the whole time the bullets kept coming, over and over and over.
I flinched hard as something smashed behind me, wood splintering and sending small fragments in all directions. Liquor bottles burst and rained glass across the floor. My ears rang, my heart slamming so violently in my chest I thought I might pass out right there.
“DOWN!” Tex’s voice was a roar in the storm and then his hands were on me, strong and unyielding, holding me steady. Keeping me together and stopping me from falling apart.
He grabbed me around the waist and dragged me with him just as another round of bullets tore through where I’d been standing only seconds before. I screamed, but I wasn’t even sure anyone could hear it over everything else that was happening.
The clubhouse—this place that had been loud and wild only moments ago—had turned into a war zone and bodies were dropping in every direction.
A man I didn’t know went down near the bar, clutching his stomach, blood spilling through his fingers as he hit the floor. Another man fell backwards and crashed into a table, flipping it as he fell and sending bottles and glasses in all directions. Someone else was firing blindly toward the door, shouting something I couldn’t make out. I could see his mouth moving, but no words reached my ears.
The air smelled like gunpowder, smoke, and blood. So. Much. Blood.
Tex shoved me behind an overturned table, his body covering mine as another spray of bullets ripped through the room and embedded themselves in people and furniture without remorse. I felt the force of it in the air, like the violence itself had a body and weight.
“Stay down,” Tex growled against the side of my face.
I nodded, or tried to. I couldn’t stop shaking. My hands were trembling so badly I pressed them into the sticky floor just to try to still them, but it didn’t help. Nothing helped. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. How was this happening to me, again?
A deafening volley of gunfire erupted from inside the clubhouse.
The Kings…they’d regrouped and were fighting back.
Where there had been chaos, there was now retaliation and control.
I risked lifting my head just enough to see. Tex’s brothers had taken positions behind walls, tables, and around the bar. Their movements were sharp, coordinated and deadly.
They fired back, and when they did, men fell.
This wasn’t a fight anymore, it was a massacre.
The cartel—I presumed it was the cartel—ducked for cover. There were at least ten of them, all bearing the same vicious expressions.
I clamped a hand over my mouth as another man dropped, his body hitting the ground with a sickening thud. Someone screamed—a high, broken sound that cut through everything—before it was abruptly silenced.
The gunfire slowed and then stopped, but the sudden quiet was worse than the gunfire. More terrifying somehow.
The sound system the Kings used had been hit, and only a quiet hissing could be heard from the speakers dotted around the room now.
My ears rang violently, the absence of noise almost disorienting after the chaos. Smoke hung thick in the air, curling through the broken remains of the room and making it hard to see where anyone was.
Groans and cries could be heard from several directions, but I couldn’t see where any of them were coming from.
I didn’t move.
I couldn’t.
