Page 7 of Ruin

Gemini, who was already hurt, would never be able to get up from such a move.

While this guy had Gem held up, one of the other men reached into his waistband and grabbed the gun he’d had stashed there, and Gem, too weak to do anything about either of these men, roared in absolute fury.

But I could see that his struggles were losing power, and a red stain was spreading over his white T-shirt from the wound in his shoulder. We’d stitched it tightly but had never expected him to take part in this sort of thing, and those stitches were never meant to hold up during an all-out bar fight.

He was going to get weaker the longer he bled. And that man now had Gemini’s gun, as well as any other weapons he’d brought with him.

Right.

I glanced around, trying to figure out whether there were any weapons nearby, and saw the knife I’d been using to chop veggies. Right there on the counter, within easy reach. Almost like it was calling my name and holding itself up, screaming that it was there for my use.

I grabbed it on instinct and charged forward, the knife held overhand the way Dutch had taught me in another lifetime.

The guy with the gun was holding it up toward Gemini, his finger on the trigger, but he was farther away from me than the guy actually holding Gemini. I might not be able to get to the guy with the gun, but I could take away his target, and I could do it relatively quickly.

I slammed the knife down in the intruder’s shoulder, then jerked it out, switched my grip so the knife was pointing upward, and slid it up and into his body, right underneath his rib cage. It wasn’t exactly what I was aiming for—if I’d managed to get it between the ribs, I would have hit vital organs—but it did the trick. The guy screamed, dropped Gem, and fell to the ground himself, jerking and screeching like a stuck pig.

Literally.

I kicked him right in the balls for good measure, then jumped over him and drove the knife into the belly of the man with the gun, twisting it as far as I could while it was in there. This guy acted much the same, going to the floor in a gush of blood and screaming like I’d just murdered him.

Hell, if I had, I wasn’t sorry. They’d come running in here to attack a wounded man and a woman. Now that I could see their faces, I also knew that they’d definitely been in on the gangs that had regularly attacked me, and they’d been even nastier than most.

As far as I was concerned, they deserved whatever they got, and if that was death on the floor of our clubhouse, then so be it. I wasn’t going to give one single fuck for having sent them straight to hell.

Gemini, who I’d lost track of during my attack, slid over and grabbed the gun the man had dropped. He came to his feet in one smooth move, held the gun up, and put two bullets right into the guy’s head. A quick turn, two more bullets, and the other man was dead, too. One more turn, and the third guy—who’d been knocked out for most of the fight—was done for.

Jack, Harry, and Amos, I thought to myself. Those were their names.

Or rather they had been before Gemini and I had killed them.

Everything went nearly silent around us, the fight suddenly over, the intruders dead. The only sound now was that stupid cooking show, with the host telling the viewers that they needed to pound the chicken to make it tender before dipping it in the bread crumbs if they wanted the best possible outcome.

I looked at Gem, tender chicken the last thing on my mind, and found him looking at me, his eyes dark with worry and something even darker than that.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” he muttered. “If they sent one crew, they’ll send another, and if they had a lookout in the garage who didn’t come in, he’ll be on his way back to tell them that we’re in here by ourselves.”

I just nodded, long past trying to argue with anyone when it came to our safety. He was right: Devil’s men were coming after us, and any lookout would almost inevitably have told the rest of their crew that we were here without any backup. It was only a matter of time before more attackers showed up.

We’d beaten these guys because they hadn’t thought I was capable of holding a weapon. I didn’t know if we’d get as lucky the next time. The next guys might be a whole lot faster and smarter, and Gemini was already tired from the first fight.

He nodded back, his eyes on mine like he could hear everything I was thinking, and started toward the door, pausing only long enough to grab my hand and drag me after him toward whatever plan he’d come up with.

CHAPTER 6

KNIGHT

I WATCHED MANDY CAREFULLY and then turned my eyes to the land around her. Shit, I wished there was someplace for her to take cover out there. Someplace for her to hide if everything went sideways and they started shooting. Instead, though, it was just wide-open space. The driveway and then the parking lot, with no place for her to take shelter.

Nothing to block any bullets that might go flying her way.

I gulped and pushed the thought away, knowing that I couldn’t stand to think about losing another member of my crew. Instead, I focused on the things that were in the parking lot. Pieces of bikes and shell casings, as well as a broken gun. I didn’t know where that last one had come from—or why Devil had left it there when surely they could have used it—but it didn’t matter.

What mattered was the bitter taste in my mouth at the realization that she was walking across the spot where Gemini had been shot, her own life now in danger, and the same eyes on her from the buildings at the end of the parking lot. This was where it had all started. Here, where we’d come to tell Devil and his men that we had Saraya and that we weren’t giving her back.

Now we were here to prove that Devil’s demand for her return would go unheeded.

The irony was as sharp as a knife, as distasteful as blood in my mouth. I hated being here again. I hated that I was sending another of my friends in there to take care of a problem that wouldn’t have existed if Devil wasn’t the worst sort of human.