Shield

by Anne Malcom

  Luke was immediately on guard at my exclamation. He knew I didn’t have an affinity to calling out things dramatically, and I guessed my face was painted in a look of horror.

  “What?” he demanded, hand on the butt of his gun.

  I didn’t answer, just skirted around him, sprinting toward the motorcycle boots just barely visible behind the car parked in the lot. And the thin, almost invisible but unmistakable stream of liquid trickling past the boots.

  Blood. It had to be a lot of it for it to travel that far.

  Obviously why Luke hadn’t noticed on his approach; his angle meant he didn’t see them, and then he’d been distracted by me.

  The few seconds it took to make it to the body were the longest of my life. Those motorcycle boots were the unofficial uniform of the Sons of Templar. Everyone wore them, some with variations. The only person I could rule out was Gage, since he had those cowboy spikes on the back of his. I would say only for decoration but I’d be lying.

  In those few seconds, I listed all the people those boots could belong to, each choice more horrifying than the last. Every single choice was a bullet to my heart, the thought of losing someone else in our family unthinkable.

  I skidded to a stop, going to my knees in the puddle of blood beside the man who had long left this world. There was no saving him. Not with half of his head gone.

  My white dress pooled around me, getting stained in blood.

  That’s why I don’t wear white, I thought with detachment. Bloodstains.

  My shaking hand went to what was left of his forehead.

  “Oh, Skid,” I whispered, a single tear trailing down my cheek. Skid was a kid. A prospect only a few weeks shy of getting his cut. He was quiet but as loyal as they came. He’d been taking care of my friend and Lucky’s woman, Bex, for as long as she’d been in trouble with drug dealers and an abusive ex-boyfriend. After she was kidnapped, raped, and beaten by those very men. He was never far from her side, and to this day, meant to be on her protection duty.

  My heart dropped about the second Luke’s bellowed, “Rosie!” preceded him coming to Skid’s other side, gun out.

  I glanced up at his blank face, regarding the dead body and then me.

  I gently closed Skid’s opened eyes. “He’s dead,” I said quietly, pushing up from my spot, wiping the blood from my hands on my already-ruined dress.

  The smell of blood and death danced in the air with Luke’s clean scent, polluting it. It was an ugly poetic example of just how vast our differences were.

  “Rosie, I need you to get in my patrol car, lock yourself in and call for backup,” he instructed, his voice cold, eyes scanning the empty parking lot for signs of a threat.

  I wanted to laugh and tell him just how similar to Cade he looked doing that. But he wouldn’t appreciate that, so I settled for saying something he’d appreciate even less.

  “Yeah, like fuck I’m locking myself safely away and calling more cops in here,” I scoffed. “This is my family. I’m not hiding, and I’m not sitting down while someone else, someone who hates them, is going in there”—I jerked my head toward the building—“firstly to see if there’s something you can to do finally bust them, and only secondly see if you can save whoever else is hurt.”

  He glared at me, the look somehow mingling with a tenderness that I couldn’t understand. “Rosie, I don’t hate them. Not now. Not with… everything. But I’m going to protect you, and I’m not letting—”

  He was cut off by a sound I was all too familiar with.

  A gunshot.

  I didn’t hesitate. I went running into the building where the shot came from.

  The thump of police-issue boots and the cursing behind me told me that Luke followed.

  Chapter Ten

  I went in prepared for the worst, my blood both ice and fire. Ready to face both grief and revenge. Because someone committed the ultimate crime of spilling the blood of our family and doing it inside our gates.

  We may have gone legit, but that didn’t mean that action didn’t have one consequence.

  Death.

  We’d had blood spilled in our family ever since we lost Laurie. And I’d had poison in my veins from that. From losing one of my best friends. And having to face it consistently throughout the past five years. I was used to fighting, to death. But I promised myself that I wouldn’t let it be any more of my family.

  I let out a breath when I burst in to see both Lucky and Bex intact. My eyes went to the bullet wound at Lucky’s shoulder. Well, mostly intact. Just a flesh wound. He’d live.

  He was circling a man who was bleeding from between his legs. A small grin tickled the corner of my lips, betting that the man had Bex to thank for that. She was bleeding from her head, focused on both Lucky and the man crumpled on the ground. He was familiar.

  “You’re going to die. But not yet. Not even in the near future,” Lucky said.

  Luke arrived behind me, breathing evenly. He didn’t declare his presence, obviously scanning for threats and seeing none, then pausing to collect evidence.

  “But it’ll happen. I’ve got a brother who’s so very anxious to meet you,” Lucky continued.

  And that was it, the moment I recognized the man. Devon. The son of the man who’d kidnapped Amy years before. Who had almost killed both Bex and me with a car bomb.

  As those thoughts filtered through my mind while witnessing a man I considered a brother holding a gun to someone bleeding out from a dick wound, I thought about how fucking dramatic our life was.

  And it could only go up from there. Or down, depending on your perspective.

  “Step away from him and put down the gun, Lucky,” Luke said, his voice even and hard.

  So he’d decided to make his move.

  Lucky’s response to Luke’s command was to swing the gun from the prone man to the doorway where we stood. It stayed raised as his eyes went to Luke, though he immediately lowered it when he realized he was pointing it at me too.

  I met Bex’s eyes, giving her a wonky sort of smile as if to say, ‘just another Tuesday in paradise.’

  Lucky wasn’t perturbed at Luke’s presence. “Can’t do that, Luke,” he said, voice casual. “This swine”—he delivered a swift kick to Devon’s midsection, resulting in little more than a pained moan—“is the reason Skid is dead. The reason Becky almost fuckin’ died.”

  I was putting all the pieces together. He was the reason Becky got kidnapped, why I walked in on her hacking at her hair in front of the mirror because she couldn’t even stand her reflection after she was raped. The reason why, for months, she was little more than a haunted shell of a person, forced to live inside the house of horrors that was her head.

  I knew what I needed to do, the only thing that could be done with Luke there that would both save my family and deliver the revenge that needed to be dealt. I reached into my purse, looking for the gun that was always there, along with my favorite lipstick—Mac, Ruby Woo, if you were wondering.

  Lucky focused on me, still addressing Luke, whose gun was still raised. “Why Rosie was almost blown into a thousand pieces.” The way he said it, giving Luke a pointed reminder of how close this man came to killing me, told me Lucky saw a lot more than he let on. “So I suggest you leave, pretend you didn’t see a thing,” he instructed Luke.

  Though I knew the situation was serious, I wanted to choke out a laugh. Asking Luke to forsake his badge and his morals by helping the club he despised to commit murder was like expecting Cade to cooperate with a police investigation.

  Luke’s gaze and entire body hardened. “My father may do that shit, but not me. I can’t turn a blind eye to this.” I felt his pause, his struggle, when, for less than a second, his gaze flickered to me. He was putting the pieces together too. Hesitation. That hesitation gave me the hope I’d been waiting for all my life, that little piece to go with my collection of moments that told me maybe there was something inside him that felt what I felt.

  I stopped believing in
hope before I stopped believing in Santa Claus. That didn’t mean it didn’t puncture me when his shoulders stiffened and the gun continued to point in Lucky’s direction. “Don’t make me shoot you.”

  Like me, Luke didn’t do empty threats. I knew he didn’t want to shoot Lucky. If pressed, like maybe if someone was removing some fingernails, he might admit he actually liked Lucky. It was impossible not to. Though he looked like a cold-blooded murderer, and certainly was one, he had an infectious smile and the sense of humor of a twelve-year-old.

  He was soft, under all that hard. With the biggest heart you’d ever see.

  Which was why he was able to break every barrier Bex put up after she was attacked. Why he went through his own personal Hell after rescuing her too late. Why he waited months for her to even speak to him. Did everything in his power to heal her, give her whatever tainted happiness was left for her.

  And she got that. My broken friend was put back together mostly thanks to her own strength, but also thanks to the kind of man who killed every single person responsible for hurting her.

  She was his world. And he was hers.

  Which was why she glared at Luke, looking ready to scratch his eyes out, gun or no gun. “Dude, in case you hadn’t noticed, he’s already been fucking shot,” she snapped, not betraying any outward trauma of being in the middle of yet another abduction. She was a diamond, she didn’t break easily. Or at all.

  I wasn’t about to let Luke chip at that. I reached up to tug his shoulder, in a gesture to get his attention rather than actually physically stop him. I braced against the reaction I got from touching him.

  “Luke, don’t do this. You know what he did. You know he deserves this. Just leave. Let us handle this.” My voice was small, as close to begging as I’d ever get.

  Luke didn’t pause, didn’t react outwardly, if not for a twitch in his blue eyes. Not enough, though. “I can’t do that, Rosie,” he said, his voice still flat, simmering with doubt and unease. “I don’t want to, but I’ll shoot him if I have to.”

  His voice may have been simmering with unease, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t telling the truth. Whatever small changes were working within Luke weren’t going to destroy something that underpinned his entire character, his ultimate and unyielding view of the law.

  My stomach was ash as I nodded, seeing that chasm between us once more, as if it had never been wider. “Yeah, I know,” I murmured, my hurt and heartbreak seeping into my voice.

  I couldn’t let that moment be the one when I let this shit get me down. So I didn’t. I moved. Right in between Luke and Lucky, in front of the gun, shielding Lucky, shielding the club. I paused to give Luke a pointed look as his aim wavered. “But you won’t shoot me,” I said, that time with more strength and resolve.

  I didn’t pause to regard what was in his eyes, the betrayal. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. I had a job to do. One mustn’t think too much about the job of killing when it needed to be done. I learned that after, because I didn’t think hardly at all when I crossed the room, pulled my handgun out of my purse and discharged a single shot. One that found its home in Devon’s skull, ending it once and for all. Delivering the justice the club needed, while at the same time protecting them from the strong arm of the law.

  A thick roar erupted in my ears after I did it. Killed a man. Despite my upbringing, I’d never done that before—well, at least not as intimately. I wasn’t sheltered. I’d seen a lot. Almost all there was to see.

  But killing was, until recently, a man’s job. Feminism may have gotten us equal pay and the vote, but in the Sons of Templar, murder was still exclusively a male-dominated industry.

  The girls and I were shaking that up a bit.

  I didn’t want them to; in fact, I wanted anything but to see myself through Luke’s eyes. Regardless of want, my gaze locked with his. Bile crept up my throat, not at the act of killing itself but seeing my reflection on Luke’s face.

  “Holy fuck,” Lucky muttered, pride in his voice as he broke the deafening silence.

  “You got that right,” Bex agreed, in a ‘you go, girl’ kind of tone.

  I fought hard to keep my composure, not to break down as I put the final nail not in Devon’s coffin but in the one of that secret Luke and Rosie fantasy that had been dying a very slow death.

  “You going to arrest me?” I asked flatly, already knowing the answer, though it broke my heart.

  Luke didn’t speak, or couldn’t, I didn’t know which. He shook his head. And then, as if a weight pushed it down, he lowered his gun in a gesture of defeat. His eyes stayed on mine, communicating everything and nothing at the same time.

  Then he turned his back on me and walked out.

  I saved the club.

  And broke my own heart in the process.

  Bravo, Rosie.

  But wasn’t that what love was?

  Destroying yourself for the sake of others?

  My hands were shaking as I struggled to put the key in my lock.

  The hands that pulled the trigger on a gun. Ending a man’s life.

  Splattering his brains all over the floor.

  I killed someone.

  The sentence came from inside my head, spoken by a strange disembodied voice that didn’t seem at all familiar. Spoken by the person, the monster, I’d created in that split second.

  I’d seen plenty of dead bodies. Kept company with plenty of murderers, otherwise known as my family. Death himself was like that horrible uncle who gave you the heebie-jeebies but turned up unexpectedly, never telling you how long he was staying before he left so you could relax, forgetting he existed until he returned again.

  Now he was there, breathing down my neck as I fumbled with my keys, putting a shadow on the day that I was sure had been cloudless before.

  Before I’d killed a man.

  But the worst thing was that wasn’t why my hands were trembling, why my mouth was dry, stomach full of bile.

  The killing itself was horrible, but not that horrible. Not something that would follow me around forever. Maybe it was because something was broken in me. Whether it was a product of my upbringing or just nature, it didn’t matter. The killing didn’t. Not really.

  It was because Luke watched as I did it. Watched me transition, finally, into the embodiment of everything he so despised.

  Before that, I was sure he thought of me as a participant of the life he loathed. An unwilling one who had nature and biology to thank for my place in the club, and was therefore somehow removed from it all. Somehow cleaner.

  Ending that bastard’s life saved the club. It also killed, messily and violently, any small, miniscule chance Luke and I had.

  Not that the chance was ever going to mature into reality.

  I had never been clean. It just took Luke that long to realize it.

  I sucked in a gulp of tainted air as I finally stumbled through my front door, slamming it behind me and sinking against it, worried my knees might not support my weight.

  But I shouldn’t have worried about them supporting anything since the painful impact of a fist hitting my cheek set me off them so I tumbled to the floor.

  I blinked up at the blurry ceiling, confused, and struggled against the blackness that threatened to turn into unconsciousness from the force of the blow.

  Then I wasn’t looking at the ceiling anymore. Two figures towered over me, sneering down at me.

  “You thought you’d scared me off, did you?”

  A boot connected with my ribs, and I choked out a gasp at the ricocheting pain through my abdomen.

  “You think I’d be scared off? By a woman?”

  I blinked through the pain, swallowing the cry that ached to get out from my throat.

  It wasn’t two men.

  Just one asshole.

  One I’d seriously misjudged.

  “You need to leave if you want to live,” I croaked.

  I eyed my purse, which had fallen directly in my entranceway, about three feet from where I was
lying. I was in a lot of pain, reasonably sure I had a broken rib, but I could make it to there.

  And more importantly to the gun, lying slightly out of my open purse.

  The one I’d already used to shoot someone that day. What was another dirtbag?

  Just as I was about to dart toward it, another brutal kick landed in my midsection.

  That time, even though I didn’t want to, I did cry out. And now I wasn’t reasonably sure I had a broken rib. I was certain I had several.

  Kevin had taken to wearing steel-capped boots.

  I must’ve blacked out, though it wasn’t black I saw but blinding white-hot pain, because when my vision cleared, Kevin was standing above me, holding my gun and grinning.

  “See?” He waved it before settling the barrel on me. “I’ve learned.”

  I coughed, the jerking motion sending pokers of agony from my ribs to my toes. “Do you want a medal, asshole?” I croaked.

  A storm settled over his face. He bent down, and I could see the madness and violence mingling in his eyes. “You don’t get to say shit,” he hissed, spittle flying from his mouth and settling on my cheek. “I’m the one in control here. Not you. I’m the one who’s got the gun. Who will fucking kill you if you don’t do everything I say.”

  I stared into the abyss of his eyeballs, frozen. Because I saw the truth there. He did fully intend on killing me.

  I was tied to the bed.

  In my underwear.

  I didn’t remember my clothes being taken off.

  I couldn’t decide whether that was a good or bad thing.

  The pain was the bad thing. It sucked. A lot. He’d decided that being in control meant he pretty much got to beat the shit out of me.

  He’d pistol-whipped me finally, and I’d lost consciousness. Which he’d taken advantage of. My entire body ached. My ribs screamed. One of my eyes was swollen shut.

  On a good note, I hadn’t been raped.