34. Reckless Little Bird
“ S top!” Sol roars. “Hold your goddamn fire!”
“What the fuck are you doing?” I rasp, panicked. My chest caves in underneath her small, trembling, defiant body.
She whispers strongly against my neck, “Protecting my husband.”
“No,” I beg, voice breaking as my arms strain against the rope, desperate to shield her. “Get off me, Luna. Please , baby. Please .”
She only squeezes tighter, curling around my neck like armor.
“Fuck, fuck . My reckless, brave little bird…” I couldn’t give a shit about me, but Luna? I’m terrified, and my question comes out as a harsh plea against her soft neck. “What am I gonna do with you?”
“Let me save you.”
Those words knife through me, and my eyes burn.
“No. Not me.” I shake my head. “Don’t do this for me. I won’t let you die for me. I’m not worth it.”
Her hand cradles the back of my head, and her lips graze my ear. “You’re worth everything, Orion Fury.”
“Hold your fire,” Bossie finally orders, irritated now. The weapons ease up, including the crossbow and gun lifting off my back. A fraction of adrenaline leaves me on a shaky breath.
Luna presses harder against me, tulle pooling over my lap and tied hands.
I grip the bottom of her bodice where the tutu’s waistband overlaps it, pulling her closer even though every other fiber of my being wants to push her away.
My wrists graze her garter as she breathes in my ear so softly only I can hear.
“Don’t forget how much you trust me, Fury.”
Of course I trust you , almost rolls off the tip of my tongue, but I bite it back.
I keep my expression the same, hoping the swelling and bruises hide my confusion as I try to piece together what she means. When she shifts her weight, tightening her thighs around me, her meaning becomes clear-cut.
Literally.
My brave girl isn’t just shielding me.
She’s arming me.
Wasting no time, my bound hands work nimbly over the garter strapped to her thigh to free the Fury knife from the makeshift lace and tulle holster. The Wildes made a mistake not frisking my reckless little wife.
Her real tears mix with big ol’ crocodile ones, spilling down her face and onto my shoulder as she plays the biggest role of her life. She exaggerates loud, racking sobs to camouflage my awkward movements underneath her tutu while I saw at the rope around my wrists.
“Lawd have mercy, child. Pull yourself together.” Bossie snaps her fingers. “Go on and go get her, Bart?—”
Click.
Sol’s gun cocks with a deadly finality as he aims it at the throne.
“If anyone lays a finger on my daughter, son, or Orion, I’ll paint this white church red.”
How he got another gun I have no idea, but the room falls silent. The men holding Nox back let the younger Bordeaux go.
Luna twists to look at her dad, but the sudden movement slips the knife from the rope, nicking her thigh. Her eyes flick to mine, and my heart stalls out at the pain I caused there. My girl’s quick, though, and disguises the whimper into another sob as she squeezes me tighter.
“Sorry, baby,” I murmur, aching with guilt, but I get back to cutting. I won’t let her sacrifice be for nothing.
Sol and Bossie keep up their verbal sparring, with Sol’s voice rising over the thunder, echoing through the small chapel. I can’t focus on them, though. Luna’s cut slicks my wrists, helping them slide free from my restraints. I love and hate that it’s always Luna’s blood that saves me.
Please let her be okay.
I keep moving, pooling the rope in my lap. Then slowly, so fucking slowly, I lift my hands out from under her tutu to move onto the restraints at my chest.
“Closer,” I breathe under her ear. “Almost done.”
With the tulle no longer providing cover, Luna cries louder and grips my shoulders, her arms now concealing what I’m doing.
“Mr. Bordeaux,” Bossie sighs. “It’s hardly necessary to make threats in the Lord’s house.”
“Isn’t that what this stunt is?” he seethes. “You’re threatening my family, the Troisgarde. Hell, I don’t even like you intimidating the Furys at this point. Not when my daughter’s involved…”
He rages on, spitting French curses and lighting into the stoic matriarch like a preacher in a fire-and-brimstone sermon. The words blur together, and all I hear is Luna crying. All I feel is her warmth against me. All I can focus on is my wife and the knife between us.
Sol’s tirade distracts every eye in the room, buying me time.
I sever, twist, and pull until one of the ropes is frayed enough that it’ll give when the time is right to escape.
Luna shudders against me, relief racking her body, but she doesn’t let go, keeping alive the illusion that I’m still bound.
My heartbeat races against her chest as I grip the knife tightly.
“You know what, Bossie?” Sol snaps. “Before all this”—he gestures toward everything but me and Luna, ending at the pulpit Bossie reigns from—“I’d hoped you were the reasonable one in this feud. But I don’t think you and I are the type to see eye to eye with one another.”
Bossie settles back in her throne, smug. “Sure seems that way, don’t it?”
Sol sucks his teeth, and Nox shifts on his feet behind him, getting closer.
Using his father as cover.
No one else seems to notice, so I shift my gaze away from him. But from the corner of my eye, I catch the flash of Nox’s phone screen as he checks, then pockets it again.
What are you up to, Bordeaux?
“That’s what I was afraid of, Bossie. But now that you’re not only the enemy of my enemy, you’ve become mine as well.
So when my getaway driver insisted he come in with me…
” Sol juts his chin toward Nox, before smirking at Bossie.
“I took the liberty of calling in a new one. Turns out, there’s a couple of brothers who were champing at the bit to help out. You know, your other grandsons?”
My eyes bug out along with Bossie’s, and Sol laughs at her shock. “Figured they’d want to be in on this, wouldn’t you say, Orion?”
I take that as my cue and stab the pistol-wielding guard to my right in the thigh as Luna, still sitting in my lap, yanks the rest of the ropes off my chest. The guard’s shriek drowns out Bossie’s orders, and chaos breaks loose as the double doors explode inward, Hatch barreling through, snapfiring into the two men flanking them.
The wind howls behind him, slapping the doors against the walls and whipping rain at his back. Outside, a blacked-out SUV revs in the raging storm, nearly invisible but for Dash aiming his gun through the half-cracked window.
Until Bossie’s voice tears through the chapel.
“Kill them! Kill every one of ’em!”
My stomach drops at her unhinged hatred, and the room erupts in gunfire as Sol, Nox, and Hatch let bullets fly. The man behind me drops, still reeling from the stab wound in his thigh. I pivot around Luna to give his friend the same treatment, only to find myself staring down my own crossbow.
The guard jerks the trigger back… but my custom rig jams it, and he looks down, dumbfounded. I grin right before driving my blade into his gut.
He howls, doubling over. Luna snatches the crossbow from him, flips the mechanism like I showed her, then swivels on my lap to fire with all the aim that I had time to teach her.
Which was, unfortunately, absolutely none.
The bolt flies wide, missing both Bossie and Bart by a mile, snagging a lantern above the altar and sending it crashing down. Oil and fire splash on the carpet, lighting up the dry wood like a Christmas tree in March.
Oh shit.
“Time to go, baby.” I grab Luna’s waist to steady her, keeping my reckless bird from flying straight into danger, and cut the ankle ropes, not caring that the blade slices into my skin.
Then I grab her and run .
It’s hellish mayhem in all directions, every man locked in a fight, while two Wildes drag a spitting mad Bossie from the chapel like she’s the Holy Grail. Retreating cowards or not, they’re right to guard their matriarch.
And I need to protect my wife. Now.
“We gotta get outta here.”
“Yup, yup, yup. Totally agree.”
We trade weapons, right as the guy we took the crossbow from stretches his bloody hand toward her, now with a pistol in his slippery grip. Luna screams, but I wrench it from his hand and shoot him point-blank in the head. He plops like a sack of meat, and I drop the gun onto his back.
With my fractured ribs, split cheek, and swollen eye, I should be knocked out from pain. But my mantra thunders in my skull, drowning out everything else.
Protect her. Protect her. Protect her.
It jolts through me, and I clamp my bloody grip on Luna’s hand, hauling her toward the doors?—
She’s ripped away from me, screaming.
“Orion!”
Bart drags her kicking and screaming up to the dais, trying to steal my wife and carry her through the same doors they took Bossie through. The last feather, black and bloody, drifts from her bodice like an omen, and all I see is red.
I yank back the steel cable on my crossbow in one brutal pull, the string biting into my scars as I force it to cock faster than it’s meant to, and slot another bolt. I ignore the pain and lock my sights on him.
“Luna! Duck!”
She instantly goes limp, becoming dead weight in his arms and exposing him as she drops.
I let the bolt fly. In the next blink, the bolt’s buried in his throat.
He chokes and claws at it, trying to get a grip on the white feathers.
But my little bird takes flight, spinning up on her good ankle to plunge the Fury knife into his chest with a dancer’s grace.
“I’m not yours .” She rips the knife free before he falls to his knees.
I hop up onto the dais and smirk. “She’s mine .”
His shocked eyes beg for mercy, but I kick the stab wound in his chest, sending him flying off the dais and into the fire on the other side.
I hold out my hand.
“Come with me, wife.”
She grins brilliantly and reaches for me. If I were an optimistic man, I’d say the smile she returns might even mean she loves?—
A groan cracks from the ceiling. Luna’s eyes widen in terror as a beam teeters over her head… and falls.