Page 120 of Ruthless Reign

My teeth clenched in my jaw. “It’s okay, mo mhuirnín. Go to them.”

She looked between them and me and back again, as if making a choice I didn’t ask her to make.

One I didn’t want her to make.

But it became clear as I came down from the high of her…

They were still us.

I was still them.

“We need to get out of here,” Kaleb said, holding his hand out toward Becca. She dipped her head and squeezed past me to go to him, but as she got clear, I felt her fingers curl around my hand, tugging me along with her.

“Let’s go,” she said, and my lips pulled into a taut smirk.

“I’m right behind you.”

Hardin cleared his throat as we neared, staring at our clasped hands as Becca took Kaleb’s. I pulled my fingers from hers and met Hardin’s hard stare, waiting.

Not sure what I was waiting for.

To be shot?

Receive another punch in the face from a St. Vincent?

But after several tense heartbeats, he flipped a blade in his fingers so the handle end was toward me and held it out.

It was my mother’s blade.

“Saw it on the ground,” he said.

I took it, tapping the flat edge against my palm. “Thanks, mate.”

And then wiped the blood on my thigh and closed the blade, pivoting on my heel, going to a knee as I strapped it back into place on her right thigh and then replaced her gun into its rightful holster, clicking the snap into place.

When I looked up, her gaze was intent on mine, a flush in her cheeks.

“Here,” Kaleb said, tugging the small firearm from his ankle holster. Not his main, but his second. “That’s yours now, mate.”

“Hardin, we need to move,” one of the Saints hissed and we dispersed. He got into the transport to move it out of the way while the rest of us managed to fit into the pockmarked Bronco.

“Does your dad know?” I asked Hardin and Kaleb in the front seat.

“Not yet.”

My stomach twisted. “Call him. Tell him not to go to the auto body shop. Get everyone out of there. Out of his house, too. My da knows those locations. We need to go somewhere else. Somewhere he doesn’t know about. And then I’m going to need all of you to listen to me because what we do in the next twenty-four hours is going to dictate whether we walk out of this alive or wind up like that sorry sod in the passenger seat of that minivan over there.”

Hardin had his phone out and was dialing before I’d even finished talking.

Good.

They were listening now.

“What the hell are we all doing here?”

Dad’s voice echoed in the gymnasium of Kilborn University as he entered. The heavy metal doors crashed closed behind him, Ma, and Zade.

“Is everyone else here?” Kaleb asked, but he didn’t need to. We could hear them outside the doors. The drone of conversations going quiet as the doors shut. The bastards were probably trying to listen. Hell, I would be, too.

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