Chapter 24 Rowan
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.
Tex’s arm was still around me, one hand gripping the back of my neck, holding me close, like if he let go, I might disappear.
“Don’t move,” he muttered against my hair, pressing a kiss against my head. “Just don’t move. I’ve got you, sweetheart.”
Then there was the sound of car doors slamming outside and my stomach dropped as heavy footsteps followed.
Boots crunching on gravel, coming closer…coming inside.
A voice cut through the silence, cold and controlled. “It doesn’t have to be like this. We don’t want the club,” the man called out, almost bored. “We just want the girl. Send her out to us and this all ends tonight. Or don’t and you all die.”
My blood turned to ice and my body started shaking even harder.
Tex’s grip tightened, pulling me back against his chest. “Easy,” he whispered, so quietly I wasn’t entirely sure I heard it. “I’ve got you,” he continued, his voice different now. Lower and deadlier.
I pressed into him without thinking, my fingers clutching at his shirt, anchoring myself to the only solid thing in a world that had just shattered.
“I’m not letting them take you,” he murmured, and I could feel the tension in him. The readiness to kill or be killed. To defend my life with his own.
From the corner of my eye, I saw movement. It was Swampy—or at least I thought that was what I’d heard Tex call him. He was crouched a few feet away, his back against the wall, jaw tight as he reloaded his gun with steady hands.
There was blood soaking through his shoulder, dark and spreading fast down his arm.
But he didn’t even seem to notice. Didn’t flinch or hesitate in his movements, as if he wasn’t shot at all.
He just clicked another magazine into place and rolled his neck like this was nothing more than another day.
My stomach twisted.
How could he be so calm? How could any of them be so calm?
My gaze shifted from him, and that’s when I saw her—the girl that had come out of the room Tex had been in.
She was lying on the ground near the hallway. Her blonde hair fanned out across the floor, her body twisted at an unnatural angle. Her once pretty eyes were open wide, staring at nothing. A thin line of blood trailed from the corner of her mouth, dark against her pale skin.
For a second, my brain refused to process it.
Then it hit me that she wasn’t moving and she wasn’t breathing because she was dead.
A broken sound escaped me before I could stop it.
Tex’s hand came up, gripping my jaw gently but firmly, turning my face away from the other woman. “Don’t look at her, look at me,” he said, his voice rough.
I tore my gaze from her and stared up at Tex, silent tears trailing down my cheeks.
I noted the soft flecks of gold within his eyes and I stared at his mouth and the way the corners of it were pulled down into a hard scowl.
I noted the hard line of his jaw and the way it twitched as he clamped his teeth together.
I noted all of these things, because if I died, then something deep inside me wanted his face to be the last thing I saw. I wanted to know every inch of this man, to bring me comfort in my last moments.
“Last chance!” the voice outside called, closer now.
“Fuck off!” a voice from our side of the room called back.
Boots echoed against the floor. “Send her out and we let the rest of you live. Maybe. That is if you don’t keep us waiting too long.”
I heard laughter coming from somewhere.
My heart pounded so hard it hurt.
This was because of me.
All of it.
The blood, the bodies, that young woman. All this death and destruction was because of me. I squeezed my eyes shut, tears spilling over despite my effort to hold them back.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered, the words breaking apart on my lips. “I’m so sorry.”
Tex’s arm tightened around me instantly, every muscle in his body taut with tension. “Don’t,” he growled, low and fierce. “You don’t get to take that on.”
But I did. I felt it. The crushing, suffocating weight of knowing they were here because of me. The guilt that men and women were dying because of me.
And as I sat there trembling in his arms, surrounded by death and smoke and men preparing to kill again, I realized something else.
This wasn’t going to stop. Not until one side was gone, or I was dead. It was only a matter of time.
I could feel the weight of every scream, every gunshot, every life hanging in the balance because of me.
It pressed against my ribs until I could barely breathe.
Before Tex even realized what I was doing, I slipped out of his arms and stepped out from behind the broken concrete barrier and raised my hand in the air.
The other arm was strapped against my chest still.
“Rowan!” His voice cracked like a whip behind me.
I didn’t turn. I couldn’t. If I looked at him, I’d lose my nerve.
“I’m right here!” I shouted toward the line of men at the entrance to the club. “I’m the one you want. Just stop—stop hurting these people. Please. Just let them go.”
I caught a brief glimpse of the men at the front of the club, smiles on their faces, guns aimed in my direction, before boots pounded behind me. Tex’s arm wrapped around my waist and yanked me back so hard my feet left the ground. I twisted, pushing at his chest, but he held on like steel.
“Let me go,” I begged, breathless. “Tex, let me go. People are dying because of me.”
“No.” His voice was low and rough. It was final.
I shoved harder, tears blurring everything. “You don’t understand—I can’t watch this happen. I can’t be the reason—”
He grabbed my face in both hands, forcing my gaze to his. His eyes were wild, terrified, furious—all of it aimed at me.
“I’m not letting you walk out there,” he said.
“You don’t get to decide that,” I whispered, shaking. “I can’t let all these people die because of me.”
His forehead pressed to mine, his breath unsteady. “My life wouldn’t be worth living if it wasn’t for you.”
I froze. “Why?”
I had to know. If I was going to die today—I deserved to know.
He had said we had no future, yet now he said his life wouldn’t be worth living without me.
It made no sense.
He made no sense.
“Brave little mouse, isn’t she?” the man called with a mocking tone. “Far braver than you, it would seem. More sensible too.”
“You ain’t leavin’ here alive,” someone called from our end of the room. “Time is ticking. Tick, tick, tick…”
Shouts echoed all around me, but all I could hear was him—Tex.
He swallowed hard, his eyes searching mine. He looked away from me, practically wincing as he did, like it was physically painful for him to tear his eyes from mine. “You don’t understand,” he replied gruffly.
“So help me to.”