Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 100791 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100791 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
“Kenzie,” he croaked. “Last night... Last night was... bad.”
The Night Before
GENNY
She smiled. Lips parting, she made to say—what? I’d never know.
Gunshots rang through the night, ending our last goodbye.
“Ahh!” I threw my hands up, flipping over and covering Bee as bodies rained down on us.
Edwin, the nine-fingered wonder, dropped like a stone, and that hard fucking head dropped right on my gut.
“Ow!”
“I think what you meant to say, baby sis”—Bane’s car roared onto the lawn, bringing a hail of bullets pouring from the passenger’s side—“is thank you.”
“Get these assholes off me!”
“Close enough.”
Headlights blinded me—flooding the forest with squealing gears and honking horns. The cavalry had arrived.
The brothers still cowering on the porch kicked off, returning fire at Bane’s car, then Sunny’s, then Liam’s, then about a dozen fucking cars of people I didn’t know, but didn’t have to. The Scourges, the Sons of Saint, and Liam’s Prissy Sissys—he refused to name his gangs, so I did it for him.
They all came.
“’Bout fucking time,” I snapped, kicking free of my would-be assassins like the damsel in distress I was not. “I summoned you hours ago!”
“Yeah, and I begged Mom to reverse the adoption and give you back to your birth parents,” Sunny shouted back, bitching me out shamelessly as he rolled out of his car, crouched behind the wheel, and shot over the hood—picking off brothers one by one. “So we’ve all got things to be disappointed about!”
“You’re the one who’s fucking adopted!” I tugged Bee free of her load and dragged her behind the busted, shot-up car. She tossed me a wink and a grin when I tossed her my gun. Nothing was taking her down.
“Daddy Sin can’t have kids,” I called. “Sterile since birth— Oh, whoops! Mom made me promise not to tell you.”
“That’s not fucking true! You’re lying. Liam, is she lying?”
“Will you both get a fucking hold of yourselves?” our big brother shouted at us. “This is not the time!”
“Notice he didn’t say no,” I taunted as I took off across the lawn. I had to get to that bomb, but there was always time to fuck with Sunny.
I had my priorities in order.
Skirting around the house, I busted in through the back door. As suspected, all the brothers were outside facing certain death. No one stayed behind to hang around in the kitchen.
I hurried across the linoleum, turning my nose up at the mountain of dirty dishes, empty takeout containers, and the ant trail happily taking advantage of it all. It’s clear this cabin used to be a nice, swanky place with a bamboo island, quartz countertops, and stainless steel everything.
Unfortunately, it fell into the hands of human waste, and that human waste loaned it out to the scum of the earth.
I skidded to a stop in front of the oven. Slowly, carefully, I opened the oven a fraction, peering inside.
I breathed a sigh of relief seeing the bomb exactly where Edwin said it would be, then I breathed another sigh to see there were no surprises or tripwires—which was another reason why these Brotherhood clowns were so hard to take seriously. If it was me setting the bombs, I wouldn’t miss.
Ever.
I dropped the oven door down all the way, took a proper look, and cursed. “Of course the little shit forgot to mention he put it on a timer.”
It wasn’t urgent. The timer was still counting down from twenty-eight minutes and forty seconds. That gave the brotherhood plenty of time to clear out, but it wouldn’t have given me and my bros enough time to unchain all the hostages, clear them out, and then search the place for information. Or even worse, if we had held back and waited for the bomb squad to drive miles out of the city, the whole building would’ve gone up with my Cardinals and the hostages inside.
“You thought you were being smart, Eddy.” I carefully lifted out the bomb. “But you’re dead and dumb.” Placing it on the counter, I thanked all the deities above that my mother fell in love with a knife-throwing carnie, a neck-snapping boxer, a duplicitous conman, and a bombmaker. “It’s like you wanted to make sure your daughters grew up with all the necessary skills.”
Standing back, I studied the device.
I half expected something crude and homemade to match the halfwit energy infesting the place, but I wasn’t surprised that the bomb was the opposite. We’d long ago figured out that the Brotherhood was well-funded. They had enough money to buy the good stuff.
But too bad for them, so did my dad.
“All right.” I clicked my tongue, poking around the kitchen for something sharp. “A remote activator with a secondary initiator. You’ll try to distract with all the useless show wires sticking out of the top when the wire I really need”—I plucked a knife out of the drawer by the sink—“is on the bottom.”