30. Logan
Riley screamsas Maddoc grunts from the force of my tackle.
I barely have time to register either reaction. I noticed a strange flicker of light outside the window that faces the back of our house, a disruption of the order that we’ve set up a strict security perimeter to maintain—and I moved on instinct. An instinct that instantly shifts my priorities to protecting Riley as someone dressed in black bursts into the room, firing at Maddoc again.
A bullet grazes him, painting a bright red line across his torso before it buries itself in the wall behind him. I lunge for Riley and take her down to the floor, covering her with my body while Maddoc scrambles behind the island, cursing up a storm as he takes cover.
“Oh, fuck no,” Dante shouts as the attacker slithers to the left, still fixated on getting a clear shot at Maddoc.
Dante barrels into him before he can, knocking his aim off and sending the bullet into our coffee maker instead.
Shards of hard plastic explode outward, one of them nicking the back of my neck as I twist around to shove Riley under the counter, out of the line of fire. It only takes a split second, but that’s also all it takes for the attacker to turn on Dante, viciously forcing my brother back with a series of close combat moves that give away his training.
He’s a mercenary. Probably ex-military; definitely deadly.
I dive for them, kicking the back of the attacker’s knee in a move that should have dropped him.
Instead, he grunts and rolls with it, pulling a knife out with what should have been his non-dominant hand when the roll traps his gun arm underneath him for a moment.
He slashes upward, forcing Dante to jump back, and Maddoc slams into him from the side.
They both go down, but the attacker’s training shows when he manages to evade a potentially lethal headlock I’ve seen Maddoc use before, and twists out of his hold completely, rising up to his knees.
“I don’t fucking think so, motherfucker,” Dante says, kicking the gun out of his hand before he can take aim with it.
The attacker pivots, driving his fingers into Dante’s throat and rolling out of the way when I try to take him down again.
He comes up with another weapon in hand, and this time he gets a shot off.
He aims for Maddoc again, but Dante clocks the guy in the back of the head with one of our bar stools, and the fucking bullet goes wide, shattering the edge of the counter right above Riley’s head.
Chunks of marble rain down on her, and the terror in her voice when she screams again fills me with a dark fury that eclipses anything I’ve ever felt before.
“Riley, get the fuck out of the kitchen,” Maddoc shouts, diverting his attention from the attacker.
Mine narrows, all my senses converging on the intruder with a single-minded focus that’s only possible because I trust my brothers with my life. More importantly, with Riley’s life.
Maddoc’s got her. I need to take the attacker down.
Dante has the same idea, but even two-on-one—three-on-one a moment later, once Maddoc gets Riley out of the fucking room—it’s an all-out brawl with the guy. He’s more than good. He’s lethal.
He gets another shot off that rips a line of fire across my hip, the bullet digging into the oven door behind me, and proves he really is ambidextrous when he shreds the shirt Maddoc threw on downstairs, leaving bloody slashes all across his chest before we finally wrestle the fucker down and disarm him and toss both his knife and the second gun out of reach.
“Who fucking sent you?” Maddoc demands, all three of us holding the attacker down.
Maddoc kneels on his thighs, keeping his legs down, while Dante pins the fucker’s right wrist to his chest in a position I know will allow him to break it if the guy is stupid enough to fight it.
His left wrist already broke when we finally managed to get the knife from him, and it lies limply by his side as I keep his head down. But when Maddoc flicks a look at me, I ease up on the chokehold so the piece of shit will have enough air to answer Maddoc’s question.
He doesn’t, which I’m sure Maddoc lets him get away with only because none of us actually have any doubts about who sent him here. There are still things we need to know, though.
Maddoc’s eyes narrow. “Who are you?”
The attacker meets that one with a silent sneer, obviously trained not to give any information up.
Dante’s eyes flicker over him, then go hard. “He’s an assassin.”
I go still, letting that sink in. Not just a mercenary. This is someone who’s trained specifically to kill, and who came here with a laser-focus on taking Maddoc out.
Of the three of us, only Dante was formally trained in that art. I have no idea what he sees, but I trust him implicitly. Which is why I become hyper-vigilant as Maddoc continues to question the man and notice the small, twitching movements he’s making with his left hand.
His broken one.
I take a split second to admire the way his training trumps the pain it must be causing him, but the moment I see him extract something small and metallic from his sleeve—a weapon clearly meant to be accessed even when he’s pinned down—I move before he can, twisting his neck in a sharp, practiced motion as he palms it and starts to jab the thing toward Maddoc.
His spine snaps with a clean break, his body instantly going limp as he dies.
Maddoc stares down at him, the room quiet around us for a moment. Then—
“Fuck,” Maddoc yells, slamming his fist into the side of the island next to us. Then he sighs, scrubbing a hand down his face.
“I had to,” I explain, turning the assassin’s left hand over to reveal the weapon he held there.
Dante sits back on his heels, shaking his head, and Maddoc nods. “I know,” he says, giving me a grim smile. “Thank you.”
Riley pokes her head around the corner. “Oh god.”
“It’s fine now,” Dante says, tugging her closer. “He’s dead, princess.”
“Fine? This isn’t fucking fine!”
She’s right, but the way she immediately stops herself, taking a deep breath and shutting down her freak out, makes me admire her even more.
She stares at the body for another moment, then dismisses him, taking the three of us in instead. “Are you all okay?” she asks, trapping her lower lip between her teeth as she looks at the bullet graze along my hip, then reaches tentative fingers toward Maddoc’s bloody chest.
“Nothing a few stitches won’t take care of,” Maddoc says, his eyes softening for a moment as he captures her hand before she can touch his wounds. “Don’t worry about that, butterfly. We really are fine.”
She nods, her eyes skittering back to the assassin and then away again. “He died before you could get him to tell you anything, didn’t he?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
She looks up at me. “Of course it matters! He was trying to kill us!”
“He was trying to kill Maddoc,” I correct her. “That alone tells us everything we need to know.”
“McKenna sent him,” Dante says, rage washing over his face for a moment. He springs to his feet, then lands a vicious kick against the corpse’s ribs. “That piece of shit tried to take Madd out.”
A grim cloud settles over the kitchen, and Maddoc breathes out a quiet curse. “He’s getting bolder.”
I nod, tightening my hands into fists to contain my rage about that.
“He’s not just picking away at your territory anymore,” Riley says, wrapping her arms around her middle as her body starts to shake. “He’s coming here.”
Dante pulls her against him, kissing the top of her head. “He ain’t coming here. He’d never make it this far. But yeah, princess. This was an open, direct attack on our leadership. This was personal.”
Then he smiles.
Maddoc’s eyes sharpen, and a calm settles across the violent fury boiling in my soul.
“What is it?” Maddoc asks, clearly recognizing the dark hum of ferocity behind that smile just like I do.
“It’s a fucking opportunity,” Dante says. “Could be exactly the one we need.”
“Maddoc almost dying is an opportunity?” Riley spits out, turning on him with rage in her eyes. “What the fuck, Dante?”
“I didn’t almost die, butterfly,” Maddoc says with a smirk, pulling her away from our brother and tucking her against his side. His body language becomes a little looser the moment she’s in his arms, and I allow myself a small smile, a warmth in my chest from the sight that not even the grim circumstances can extinguish.
“You fucking did,” Riley grumbles, ducking her head and dashing at her eyes. Then she punches him in the chest, his blood smearing on her knuckles. “Don’t do it again.”
“Okay,” he promises, holding her even closer. He tips her chin up. “I love you.”
She glares up at him, then sags against him. “I know,” she whispers. “Don’t let him take that away from me.”
“Never gonna happen.” Maddoc looks back at Dante. “What are you thinking?”
“We need proof that Austin is gonna go up against The Six, and the best way to get that proof is from the inside.” He pauses, making eye contact with each of us. “This could be our chance to do that.”
“This… dead guy?” Riley asks, her forehead crinkling in confusion. “How?”
“I’ll use it to get in with McKenna myself,” he says. “He wants Maddoc dead? We’ll give him that. Except I’ll pretend I’m the one who did it when his assassin failed, and the piece of shit will buy it, because he doesn’t fucking understand loyalty.”
I blink. Dante was trained as an assassin too. Except he wasn’t just trained as an assassin. He was originally sent here to infiltrate the Reapers, and he almost succeeded because his training also taught him to be ruthless, deceptive, and strategic.
“McKenna will think Dante made a power grab when the opportunity presented itself,” I say, the pieces falling into place in my mind.
Dante is right. If this works, it really will be a way to finally end this thing.
“What?” Riley blurts, her panic almost palpable. “No. He’s not going to believe that, Dante! No one would. You and Maddoc are like brothers.”
Maddoc wraps his arm around her middle, holding her against him. “We are,” he says, his eyes locked with Dante’s in grim understanding. “But like Dante said, McKenna can’t wrap his head around that kind of allegiance.”
“And he already knows that Dante defected from the Crimson Crows to join us,” I add, ignoring the fact that the plan bothers me on a purely emotional level that would be dangerous to let myself indulge in. Strategically, it’s brilliant. “It won’t take much for Dante to convince him that he’s just been leveling up.”
“And that I want to do it again,” Dante says with a grimace.
Riley’s expressive face makes it more than clear that she doesn’t want Dante to risk himself like that, but she holds her tongue while Maddoc thinks it through. I can see him running scenarios over in his mind as he runs a hand down her back, smoothing the long, colorful waves of her hair over it, over and over.
Riley must not believe he’ll go for it, though, because when his hand goes still, she whips her head up to glare at him. “No.”
He sighs. “Yes.”
“You can’t ask him to do that!”
“He’s not asking, princess,” Dante says quietly.
She opens her mouth to argue some more, and Maddoc’s face goes hard. This isn’t about his feelings for her. This is about Maddoc doing what he was born to, which is whatever it takes as the leader of the Reapers.
Including making the hard decisions.
Riley chokes back whatever she was intending to say when she sees his expression. “I hate it,” she whispers.
“And I fucking hate what he did to you,” Maddoc answers fiercely, holding her gaze. “This is how I’m gonna end it, butterfly. This is how we get retribution.”
She stares back at him, and we all see the moment she accepts it. Her spine stiffens and her chin lifts, and a feeling I’ve been avoiding examining up until now crashes through me hard. It’s almost overwhelming, but if we’re doing this, it has to be now, so I carefully set it aside to deal with later, and refocus on logistics.
“He’ll need proof,” I point out.
Dante nods, then grimaces. “Yeah. Fuck.”
Riley looks between us. “Proof of what? The… the dead guy?”
“No,” Maddoc says grimly. “We have to make McKenna believe Dante killed me. He’s gonna need some kind of confirmation.”
She swallows hard, her eyes flicking down to his bloody chest. “Like a video?”
“No,” Maddoc says flatly. He flexes his hands, extending his fingers and then pulling them into tight fists, and Dante scowls hard before he tucks that emotion away and forces his face to smooth out.
He’s good at wearing a mask. I have complete faith in him.
Riley still doesn’t get it, though. And then—her eyes widening in horror—she does. “You don’t mean… you’re going to bring him a… a finger or something?” she asks, all the color leaching out of her face.
“That’s easiest,” Maddoc agrees grimly. “Something more vital would be better, but—”
“But that’s not going to happen,” I cut in flatly, silently vowing to make McKenna suffer for my brother’s sacrifice, along with all the slow, painful suffering the piece of excrement has already earned for his other sins against my chosen family.
Dante meets my eyes. “You still got the pipe cutter we used when we had to clean up that mess at the chop shop over on Maine?”
I nod. It’s a quick, efficient way to handle minor dismemberments.
But when it’s finally time for retribution, I won’t allow it to be either quick or efficient for McKenna.
Not after this.