Page 20 of Ruin

I went through my side of things as quickly as possible. The texts from Gemini and Saraya, the frantic drive back to town as I tried to get here before anything else went wrong. Saraya’s crash entry into the driveway and the car that followed her. The gunfire... and then the silence.

Yes, I skipped the part about Tinker. I didn’t want to tell Brock about that until I absolutely had to. Luckily, we had enough drama to distract him for a bit yet, and he was shaking his head by the time I finished, his eyes going to Saraya.

“You stabbed them?” he asked, aghast.

I grunted. Of course he’d gone right for the point I’d been refusing to address.

She lifted her chin and nodded, though. “Course I did. They were going to kill Gemini.”

Brock huffed with soft, affectionate laughter and pulled Saraya into a hug as well, the rumble in his chest getting bigger. “They should have known better than to go after you,” he murmured. “You’re a Banshee at heart.”

I heard the smile in her voice when she answered. “That’s the goal. And where were you?”

She really did jump right to the point. I sort of loved that about her.

He let go of her and turned to me with a scowl. “Cop picked me up this afternoon. Told me he was arresting me for a robbery, but then wouldn’t tell me what it was. Got me to the station and locked me up for the afternoon without telling me anything, but I knew for a fact that I hadn’t robbed anyone. Lately.”

I stifled a grin at that, because Brock had never robbed anyone. He was ridiculously honest and wouldn’t have allowed himself to do something like that. He knew, though, that robbery and murder were what people expected of men in an MC.

So he put on a very good show.

“They just let you out?” I asked, needing the end of the story.

“Had to call Abrams,” he said sharply, naming the lawyer we used. “He called and threatened them with some sort of something if they didn’t either give us details or let me go. Guess they didn’t have any details, because they came and unlocked my cell right away. Let me go without anything else. Doesn’t make any sense.”

Except that it made perfect sense to me. This was just further confirmation that Devil did indeed have the cops on his payroll. That meant big trouble for us, but I’d deal with that later.

Right now, I had to tell Brock what was going on.

“It makes more sense than you realize,” I said quietly. “Devil’s paid off the cops.”

Brock actually took a step backward, shocked. “What?” he gasped. “How do you know?”

I bit my lip, trying to figure out whether I was ready to do this, and then jumped in. I told him about the demand for Saraya and the plan to use Mandy instead. I laid out the first plan, with Mandy in charge of shooting Devil, and then told him that we’d changed it to keep Mandy safer. But, I said, it had all gone sideways.

“How?” he asked quietly as if he already knew that he wasn’t going to like this.

I paused a beat, but there was no getting around this. Besides, he had a right to know. “They had Tinker,” I told him, my voice clipped. “Devil thought he’d trade him for Saraya, but he must have seen that we were going to switch it up on him. He must have known we were laying a trap. Instead of coming out himself, he sent Tinker, with a rifle. And then the cops showed up.”

“Shit,” Brock breathed.

“Pretty much. There were at least ten cars full of them, and they were all armed. Tinker... He sacrificed himself to give me time to get away, Brock. He started shooting, and they... And they...” My voice broke at the memory of what I’d seen. Tinker telling me to run and then turning toward the cops. His body jerking as they shot him. His scream.

Mandy on the ground, her hands behind her back, while I ran for the bikes and the men I’d left there.

The sound of the sirens as the cops came after me.

Fuck, it had been a bad night.

The moment I stopped talking, Brock pulled me into another hug, his body shaking with sobs he wasn’t going to let out. “He always was playing the hero,” he muttered.

“He saved my life,” I whispered. “But I would have traded myself for him five thousand times over. And I don’t think I ever told him that.”

“He knew,” Brock whispered. “He knew.”

He let go of me and slipped away, heading for the house and a quiet place to go to pieces, and I watched him but didn’t follow. Instead, I reached for Saraya and brought her in, needing the warmth and softness of her, the feel of another human lending their warmth to my frozen heart. She wrapped her arms around me and buried her face in my shirt, her own back shaking with sobs.

Then she straightened and pulled away, as if she knew that we didn’t have time to stand around mourning the people we’d lost. Not if we wanted to save the ones who were still breathing.