Chapter 1 #2
Her shoulders came down, and she closed her eyes for one heartbeat, letting the resignation flow through her.
She’d known this was coming. She’d known since the sink in the bathroom four states back. She’d just wanted a little more road first.
“Rainey, sweetheart.” Rux was grinning. She didn’t have to open her eyes to know it; she heard it in his voice. “We’ve been looking for you.”
The room had gone silent, everyone holding their breath without knowing why.
She forced herself to open her eyes because closing them wouldn’t stop any of it, and she’d promised herself she was done cowering.
He took two steps toward the stage.
The guitar strap bit into her shoulder. She could throw it. Swing it. Maybe buy herself three seconds.
She caught movement at the edge of her line of sight—something dark and low to the floor—but she didn’t dare take her eyes off Rux to see what it was.
Rux came up onto the stage. He was big, close up.
Big enough that he’d never once had to wonder whether he’d win in a fight.
He closed a hand around her upper arm, and she flinched.
The guitar slid off her knee and hit the floor with a hollow thud and a thrum of strings that sounded, absurdly, like the saddest thing she’d ever played.
“Did you really think you could hide from us?” He hauled her up off the stool by the arm.
No. She wouldn’t make this easy.
She swung with her free hand and got the heel of her palm up under his chin. His head snapped back, and the grip loosened, and for one wild second, she thought she’d done it—thought she’d bought herself a window.
Then his fist came from nowhere.
It caught her across the cheekbone, and the world went white, then red, then tilted hard. Her shoulder hit the stage floor, and the impact jarred through her teeth. She tasted copper. The room spun, a smear of neon and faces and the low, rising growl of a dog.
Rux was on her before she could draw breath. His hand fisted in her shirt, hauled her up like she weighed nothing. He yanked her head back, and a knife flashed steel in the purple light as he pressed it against her throat.
She couldn’t speak.
Couldn’t breathe.
Her pulse hammered against the blade, and every beat felt like it tore open the wound he’d started. Blood trickled down her throat.
“I should cut out your tongue right here,” he said, low, his breath hot in her face, his hand fisted in her hair. “See how pretty you sing then.”
She should’ve figured it would end somewhere like this. A bar off a highway. Nobody who knew her name.
She closed her eyes again and drew a breath and held it as she waited for the pain.
It never came.
One second the blade was there; the next, another body muscled in between her and Rux.
A wet crack of bone.
Rux howled, and the knife dropped from his hand, clattering to the stage floor. His grip on her hair let go. She staggered back into the amp.
It was the man from the end of the bar. He had Rux’s arm bent up behind him at an angle arms didn’t go, and then he drove him down face-first into the stage.
She scrambled back from them and pressed herself flat to the wall.
Rux got a knee under himself and shoved hard, and they went sideways into the mic stand, which fell with a shriek of feedback she felt in her teeth. The two of them hit the floor and rolled. When they came apart, the stranger was on his feet with the knife in his hand.
She had time to think, run.
Rux came at him, and the stranger took a blow to the ribs that folded him. Rux swung again, and the stranger stepped into it instead of away, ducked his head so the fist only grazed him, and drove the knife up and under in one motion.
Rux made a sound like a balloon deflating. A long wet exhale. He stood there with both hands pressed to his middle, looking down at himself, and then up at the stranger with an expression of almost childish surprise, followed by fear.
Then he went sideways. He hit the stage floor and didn’t move again.
The room stopped. All of it. The whole world.
She stood against the wall with both hands flat over the drumming under her sternum, and she couldn’t get a full breath, and she couldn’t stop looking at the man on the floor.
A man was dead.
A man had been alive and grinning and holding a knife to her throat, and now he was dead on the boards of a roadhouse stage, and it had happened in the time it took to drop a guitar.
The dog stood at the edge of the stage, that growl still rumbling, its dark eyes moving between the man by the pool table and Hobbs at the door. Holding them. That the beautiful good dog was the only reason they hadn’t already made a move.
The stranger turned to her. His chest heaved. There was blood on him and a mark rising on his cheekbone. His eyes were flat and steady and should have frightened her more than they did.
He extended a hand. “I can protect you.”