37. Riley
As Maddoc’svoice cuts through the air, I don’t think.
I just move.
My body lurches into motion, sprinting across the dusty concrete toward my sister as pandemonium fills the dark warehouse. Men are shouting and cursing, and gunshots ring out like fireworks.
I can’t breathe, or maybe I’m breathing too fast. It doesn’t matter. Unlike the Reapers, the other gangs clearly don’t have their weapons silenced, because I’m almost deafened by the sharp crack of gunfire and all but blinded by the flashes of light every time someone shoots.
But none of it matters, because Chloe is right fucking there.
She’s frozen in place and terrified, sobbing as black rivulets of mascara run down her cheeks, and time seems to slow down as I sprint toward her.
If any of those fuckers hurt her, if she starts to bleed, if this goes wrong and a bullet goes astray…
“Chloe!”
I call her name a second before I barrel into her, taking us both down to the floor and out of the line of fire.
“R-Riley?” she stutters, her eyes so wide that the light brown of her irises are completely ringed in white. She clutches me, panting for breath and fingers digging into my arms hard enough to bruise. “What are you—? What… I don’t—”
“Later,” I gasp, my knee stinging where it scraped across the cement floor when I tackled her. “Come on.”
I drag her up and put my body between her and the last standing Capside guy, a skinny man with his teeth barred and his bald head splattered with someone else’s blood. He’s busy shooting like a maniac up toward the rafters where Dante and Logan are positioned, but he could shift his focus to us at any moment.
Shit. I need to get Chloe under some kind of cover.
“Go,” I hiss, staying low as I push her toward a looming stack of pallets off to one side.
I hear Maddoc shout something, and there’s way too much fucking gunfire for the plan to have worked the way Logan wanted it to. If it had, the Capside and West Point men would all have been dead already.
I don’t know what went wrong, and I can’t stop to care, but when someone shouts—a male voice full of pain—it suddenly hits me that one of them could die. One of the Reapers could die.
Something sharp and painful squeezes my chest, making it hard to breathe. But then a line of bullets smacks into the concrete in front of Chloe, sending chips of concrete spraying toward us. She screams, shying away from it, and I scramble up next to her and grab her arm.
“It’s fine, come on, keep going. Move, Chloe.”
I barely even register the words that are coming out of my mouth. I just know we can’t stop until we get somewhere safer. These damn pallets aren’t enough to stop bullets.
“Go, go, go,” I chant, forcing myself not to think about whether all three of the men who came here with me will walk away from this.
There’s a thick pillar off to our left, and I point to it. “There! Go!”
Chloe clings to me as we sprint for it, crouching low. The second we’re behind the thick concrete, I shove her down to the floor and throw myself on top of her, trying to make our bodies as small as possible.
“Fuck, oh my god, oh fuck,” I gasp, doing my best to shield Chloe from all this fucking chaos as she sobs and clutches me.
I’ve got her pressed as tightly as I can between me and the cold column of concrete, but I still want to puke from fear and adrenaline.
“How did you—? Riley! I can’t—I didn’t…” Chloe is sobbing, her words coming out in wet, broken gasps that make me want to kill Austin McKenna myself. But she’s here. She’s alive. That’s all that matters.
As long as we make it out.
“Shh,” I whisper, tasting salt as I bury my face in her hair and wait for it to end.
One of the Reapers will call the all-clear soon. They have to.
Worry surges inside me, and I try to tell myself that the icy shards of fear in my stomach are just for me and Chloe, and not because of what might be happening to the three gang members I’ve been living with.
They’re just a means to an end, and once we get out of here, it will end. They’ll go on with their war, and Chloe and I will pick up the pieces of our lives.
“Fuck!”
I flinch. That was definitely Dante’s voice, and my stomach cramps so hard that I’m almost sick. I don’t want to care if he lives or dies, or fool myself that some random connection I feel is actually real… but I still don’t want him to die.
I don’t want any of them to die.
Then, so suddenly that it leaves my ears ringing, everything goes silent.
“Is it… is it over?” Chloe whispers, her whole body shaking against mine.
“I don’t know,” I murmur, my arms locked tight around her.
I can’t hear anything moving, not anything at all. Which is good, except… all that shooting definitely means Logan’s plan didn’t go the way he wanted it to. Did everyone die?
The silence goes on and on, and I have to know.
“Come on,” I whisper to Chloe, still holding her tight as I slowly push us up to standing.
“Princess?”
Everything inside me relaxes when Dante calls out. I loosen my arms, sliding a hand down Chloe’s arm to lace my fingers through hers, then tug her behind me as I step out from behind the pillar.
My legs wobble a little, and I lean against the pillar, letting it take some of my weight so that I won’t collapse to the floor.
“Riley!” Chloe hisses. “Oh my god, you got shot!”
What?
I look down, realizing that one side of my shirt is wet, stained with blood at the waist. Shit. When did that happen?
I can’t remember when a bullet might’ve hit me in the thick of everything, and I can’t even feel the pain of it now, my body too wired and high on adrenaline to register the wound.
Maddoc strides toward me, shoving his gun into the waistband of his pants as he grabs the hem of my shirt and yanks it upward. His jaw is tight, his lips pressed together, but when he gets a look at the bullet wound, relief passes over his features.
“It was just a graze,” he tells me. “Missed your vest, but missed everything else important too. You’ll be all right. Let’s get the fuck out of here. We’ll stitch you up back at the house.”
He turns away without another word, calling out to Logan and Dante, and I blink as I stare at the back of his head, trying to process the expression of raw fear I saw on his face before he realized I was all right.
Was he really that worried about me?
“What’s going on, Riley?” Chloe asks in a low voice, clutching my arm. “Who is that?”
“He’s, um, helping us,” I say, keeping my answer vague because she’s already freaked out, and telling her that the men who saved her are Reapers isn’t going to help with that one bit. “I’ll explain after we’re safe.”
“We’re not safe yet?” she whispers, shrinking in on herself.
Shit.
“No, we are,” I reassure her. “I mean, I think we are.”
Maddoc, Dante, and Logan are systematically checking out every inch of the warehouse. Logan’s doing something to one of the dead bodies that I’m guessing will play into his plan and Dante is gathering things—drugs or money, maybe—from another one.
There’s more to this plan, though, and I’ve still got a role to play.
“Come on,” I tell Chloe, not willing to be separated from her at all. “I need to help too.”
“Help do what?” she asks, stumbling after me and all but cutting off the circulation to my fingers with her tight grip on my hand.
“We’re going to keep Austin and his crew from coming after you again,” I tell her as we approach Logan.
“Riley.” His cool blue gaze finds me immediately, and he tilts his head toward the large duffel bag he brought with him.
I nod, hustling over to it with Chloe in tow. “Help me spread this,” I tell her, handing her one of the heavy red containers.
Her nose crinkles. “Gas?”
I shrug. It’s some kind of accelerant, and I didn’t ask for more details than that. Logan says it will get the job done, and that’s all that matters.
“Where?” Chloe asks as I lift up the other one.
“Everywhere.”
We’re going to burn the place down.
Chloe looks over at one of the dead bodies on the floor—a West Point guy, I think—and her eyes harden. “Okay.”
She heads away from him, spreading the harsh smelling liquid as she goes, and I move toward the big doors she came in through.
Headlights spear through the open loading dock, and I freeze, but then realize it’s probably Maddoc and Dante pulling the vehicle around so they can unload it. I don’t see either of them in the warehouse anymore, and the fact that Logan doesn’t flinch at the flash of light reassures me that it must be them.
I keep pouring out the accelerant, and a moment later, Maddoc and Dante enter through the open bay, carrying another body between them.
I look away, my stomach turning a little.
This is the one part of the plan I was never too sure about, but Logan promised me it’s important. And if it helps cover our tracks and keeps Chloe safe long-term, then it will be worth it.
The corpse that Maddoc and Dante brought in will match Chloe’s description closely enough that if Austin digs into what went wrong with the drop, he’ll assume she died here too.
I didn’t ask how they got the body for this mission. I didn’t want to know.
All I did was insist that they wouldn’t kill someone to get it, and Dante assured me that they wouldn’t.
Apparently, he’s got some kind of hookup at a morgue or a mortuary or something, and that was good enough for me.
“Got it covered?” Dante asks, sauntering over to me once they’ve set things up. I nod, and he takes the almost empty canister from me. “Take your sister out to the Yukon,” he says firmly, resting a hand low on my back and giving me a little push.
I nod again, feeling almost numb in the wake of all the fear and adrenaline that poured through me earlier. But it’s not over yet. It won’t be until we’re safely out of here.
I grab Chloe, shielding her a little from the sight of Dante emptying the last of the accelerant over the bodies, and hustle her out to the vehicle.
Logan follows us, and all three of us climb into the back of the car. I take the middle seat, with Logan on my right and Chloe on my left. Logan ignores us both, pulling out a laptop from beneath the seat.
Dante slips into the front passenger seat a minute later, and Logan’s head pops up.
“Lit?” he asks.
“Maddoc’s got it,” Dante answers. A loud thwump sounds from the building, making me flinch, and Dante grins. “There ya go.”
Logan’s lip curls up and he nods once, then goes back to whatever he’s doing on the laptop.
“Riley?” Chloe asks, her voice shaky as she presses against my side, shivering.
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “It’s all going to burn.”
“Damn fucking right it is,” Maddoc growls as he slides into the driver’s seat.
He drives away from the loading dock, pulling over once we’re a block away, and the three of them turn to look back at the warehouse. Chloe is still shaking, huddled next to me with her eyes squeezed shut, and I press a kiss against her temple, smoothing my hand over her hair as I turn to look too.
And just like I promised my sister—just like these three men promised me—everything is burning.
It’s fucking glorious.