***TW for violence/deaths***
The thing with being taken by surprise in a war is you're usually left with your mouth hanging open while your life spills out onto the floor just before you drop dead. You bring handguns to a fight you don't know is coming, thinking you're covered, but when the party starts and the surprise guests walk in with automatic weapons and three times the manpower, the fight's pretty much over before it even has a chance to start. Most of the Sinners hadn't even had time to draw their guns before they all were dead on the floor of that warehouse.
I'd knocked Effie to the ground and yanked my brother down beside us when I glanced over at him and saw he was still way too upright even though he was hunched over Gel's body.
Once the bullets stopped flying and I heard a deep voice say, "Room's cleared," I checked out Effie to make sure she hadn't been hit, feeling like shit the entire time I did it. As I helped her to her feet, the guilt crawling up from my stomach and into my throat threatened to make me sick.
I looked around, trying to shield Effie from the carnage. Graves was still alive, the only survivor of the Sinners massacre, with his trigger finger shot off and a bullet in his kneecap.
"I'm fine," Euphemia kept repeating, but I hadn't liked the vacant look in her eyes, the lack of color in her face. She'd just seen some shit go down that most people would never see in their lives, and the fear of whether or not she would have been next had her shaking uncontrollably in my arms. I kept her head against my chest, turned away from the dead bodies as at least fifty men dressed in black swarmed into the room and around us. One man came up to me, his face not giving anything away, his bulletproof vest barely visible over his black, long-sleeved shirt.
"Feroce," I said. "Took your time getting here. Was the McDonald's drive-thru busy or something?"
In the few times I'd met with him, I'd never seen him smile and he didn't now.
"Fuck off." He looked at Euphemia in my arms. "This your woman you told me about?"
Effie stiffened in my arms.
"This is Euphemia." I figured it was a good way to neither confirm nor deny since she hadn't liked his phrasing, but he knew her name so he could use that as his confirmation.
"So, your woman," he confirmed, and again Effie stiffened so I ran my hand up and down her back. "She's safe, so you achieved your objective."
"They still got her, and it was way too fucking close. We're going to have a talk about how almost everything we had in place didn't work," I snapped. It had been way too close and almost all of the measures put into place to protect her and prevent a situation like tonight's had failed.
"She's still standing at the end of it. That means I kept to our bargain and you'll keep yours."
The or else was implied, but after months of planning and putting the safeguards in place, after months of negotiating, of trading information back and forth, of promises made, it had all led to the surprise attack today. After I had time to dissect it, I'd want to go over this with Lucio.
"Status of their MC and their clubhouse?" I asked. That had been part of our deal, too. Total annihilation, not one Sinner left alive.
"None of the seventy-nine members of the Sinners MC will be home for dinner. Sad," Lucio said with absolutely no inflection, as if he was used to slaughtering so many men in one day. Knowing this brutal fucker, it might be just another day at the office for him. "All accounted for so no loose ends. Clubhouse is about to become a scorch mark on the earth in the next two minutes."
YOU ARE READING
The Body #3: Rogue and Euphemia
RomanceI watched as my boyfriend saved another woman when a rival club shot up the clubhouse. He never even checked on me as he took her to the hospital -- and I almost died. So I disappeared for a year, and when I came back, he was waiting for me. He want...
