Chapter 63 #2
Blood spread from the corner of his mouth as his head knocked against the floor, and every ugly part of me wanted to keep going. He had brought men into the bayou. He had put his hands on Fiona. He had used her old name like she belonged to whoever had sent him.
My fist drew back again.
I stopped.
Not because Mac deserved mercy.
Because he had answers.
I caught his shirt in both hands and hauled him partly off the floor. “How fuckin’ long?”
His laugh came wet through the blood on his teeth.
I hit him once more.
His head struck the floor, and the laugh stopped. I stayed over him long enough to make sure his chest was still moving before I finally pushed to my feet.
Alive.
Barely conscious.
Good enough.
Then I looked for Fiona.
She stood against the far wall with both arms folded tightly across herself. Her face had gone pale, but she was upright, watching me, and the second I saw that she was okay, Mac stopped mattering.
“Come here.”
She crossed the room before I finished saying it.
My hands were on her the second she reached me, moving over her face, her shoulders, her arms, checking every place Mac had touched and every place she might have hit when I took them down.
“I’m okay,” she told me, catching my wrists.
“Did he hurt you?”
“No.”
“Fi.”
“He scared me.” Her fingers tightened around mine. “You scared the hell out of me when you threw yourself at us, but he didn’t hurt me.”
Air finally moved through my lungs again.
I pulled her against me, and she wrapped both arms around my waist. The shaking started once she was against my chest, subtle at first, then harder. I pressed my mouth to the top of her head and held her while I listened to the silence outside.
Mac hadn’t come alone.
The men around the cabin were still out there unless Gator had reached them.
I hated releasing her, but I forced myself to ease back enough to see her face. “We’re not clear yet.”
“I know.”
No argument. No panic. Just trust.
I shifted her behind my shoulder as I turned back toward the room. Mac still hadn’t moved. My pistol lay near what remained of the table, while the gun he had dropped during the fight sat closer to the couch.
I started toward mine.
Fiona’s fingers suddenly twisted into the back of my shirt.
“Jasper.”
Something in her voice made me turn before I understood why.
Mac was pushing himself up.
One knee beneath him, one hand braced against the floor while the other disappeared beneath his jacket.
Fuck.
I moved backward and shoved Fiona completely behind me at the same moment Mac pulled out another gun.
Backup piece.
I should have searched him.
The realization came too late. My pistol was several feet away, and Mac already had his weapon clear. There wasn’t enough time to reach mine, no time to close the distance before he fired.
Fiona’s hands clenched in my shirt.
I planted myself between them.
Mac raised the gun.
I saw the blood running from his nose and the shake in his arm from the beating I had given him, but the barrel kept coming up until it pointed at my chest.
Then a gunshot exploded through the cabin.
I waited for the impact that never came.
Mac jerked forward. Confusion flashed across his face before his body seemed to give up beneath him. For one strange second, he remained balanced on one knee.
Then he collapsed.
Blood spread beneath him.
I stared at the wound, knowing immediately it wasn’t from anything I had done.
The front doorway stood open behind him.
Angel filled it.
For a second, I couldn’t make the pieces fit. I knew the man holding the gun. Had known him for damn near half my life.
What I didn’t know was why the fuck he was standing in Gator’s cabin.
Then his gaze moved past me.
To Fiona.
The answer hit before I could ask the question.
I looked down at Mac.
He wasn’t breathing.
“You killed him.”
Angel never took his eyes off Fiona. “He pointed a gun at my daughter.”
Fuck.
I wanted to be furious. Mac had been alive. I had stopped myself from finishing him because we needed to know how deep this went, and Angel had just put a bullet through the only man in the room who could tell us.
Then I looked at the gun inches from Mac’s lifeless hand.
If Angel had been a second later, that bullet would have hit me. Fiona would have been standing behind me without a weapon, with Mac still breathing and me bleeding out at her feet.
There wasn’t a damn thing I could say.
Movement sounded from the porch. Gator came through first, Thore behind him, with the rest of the Bourbon Kings spreading around the doorway and outside. His eyes swept across the broken furniture, the blood on the floor, Mac’s body, and finally Angel’s gun.
“Gaw’d Almighty.”
“Not now, cuz.”
“I wasn’t gonna say shit.”
The look he gave Angel suggested that was a lie, but he let it go.
Angel finally lowered his weapon.
Fiona moved behind me.
Her fingers loosened from my shirt before she stepped just far enough to look around my shoulder. Every instinct in me wanted to put her back where she had been, especially because she had made it clear she wasn’t ready for this meeting.
I didn’t stop her.
Angel went completely still.
I’d watched that man face down people who made insane men rethink their life choices. I had seen him bloody, furious, cold enough that the room around him changed.
I had never seen him uncertain.
Fiona stared at him, and I knew she recognized the face from the photograph she had studied days earlier. She’d searched that picture for pieces of herself when he was only a name and a story.
Now he stood less than ten feet away.
“Angel?”
His throat moved before he answered.
“Yeah.”
Fiona’s fingers found mine, and I closed my hand around hers.
Angel noticed.
His gaze dropped briefly to our joined hands before returning to her face.
“You hurt?”
She shook her head. “No.”
He nodded once.
Nothing more.
He didn’t step closer. Didn’t call her Kaitlyn. Didn’t reach for something she hadn’t offered him.
He simply stood there with Mac dead between us and looked at the daughter he’d spent months trying to find.
For once, Angel waited.