Page 4 of Three to Fall

Hawk leaned back against the door, watching him. “Why don’t guys like him ever just learn to shut up? He’s literally just had his ass handed to him, and instead of just politely running away like his friends were smart enough to do, he has to run his mouth and piss me off all over again.”

I shrugged, watching the guy struggle to his feet. I allowed it, but only because he was zero threat by himself.

He touched his fingers to his face, the tips coming away with blood from the stream trickling out of his nose. He spat again, this time his saliva red. He smirked at Hawk. “There’s some more spit for you. Why don’t you use it to coat my dick? You want to suck my dick, cocksucker? Since you like it so much? You want it in your ass, you fucking pansy?”

A low growl rumbled from Hawk’s chest, anger flashing in his eyes, his fingers moving for his gun. Suddenly, I was really afraid that this guy’s homophobic slurs mixed with the danger Karaand Hayley Jade were in was going to be the thing that pushed Hawk over the edge.

I didn’t want a bunch of five-year-olds hearing gunshots outside their classroom or watching in horror as a pool of blood seeped beneath their door.

I stepped in front of Hawk, just a tiny bit, so my shoulder brushed against his. “He’s not worth it.”

The leader’s smirk turned on me. “You don’t want your boyfriend sucking my cock? What about your little girl then? Bet she—”

I threw my fist into his face so hard I barely had a chance to register his look of surprise. A red haze dropped down over my eyes, and I kept punching, slamming my knuckles into the piece-of-shit’s face, not feeling any pain, but knowing he was. His bones crunched beneath my fists and his blood spurted across my shirt.

Hawk didn’t try to stop me.

Soft cries from the other side of the door started up, and Miss Winters’s quiet voice tried to soothe the frightened kids. “Hawk,” she said quietly. “Are you still there?”

“Yeah,” Hawk answered, voice choked with emotion. “You all doing okay?”

“She’s crying,” she admitted. “They all are.”

It gave me a second of pause, but the leader laughed through the blood filling his mouth. “I like when they cry the best. Crying ’cause my dick is so big.”

Hawk glanced up and down the hallway. “No cameras.”

That was all I needed. I pulled the knife from my pocket, unsheathed it, and used it to cut through the leather of the man’s belt.

His eyes widened, and he tried to fight me off as I yanked his pants down, slicing through the fabric of his underwear. “Wait. No. What are you doing?”

Spotting a bathroom, and not wanting to do this when there were kids around, but knowing it needed to be done, I dragged him toward it, hissing in his ear, “You just told me you molest little kids, you piece of shit. You think I’m just going to let that go? You think I’m going to let you walk out of here with your dick intact?”

“I didn’t mean it!”

But a man didn’t say things like that as a joke.

Crying from inside the classroom got louder, as well as Miss Winters trying to shush them.

Hawk’s gaze met mine as he slid down the wall, sitting on the floor guarding Hayley Jade and the rest of the kids inside the classroom.

When he opened his mouth again, it was to sing the opening lines of “Hotel California” by the Eagles.

The same song I’d heard him singing to Hayley Jade at night through the walls of the clubhouse.

He nodded at me and raised his voice up loud enough to drown out the screams as I locked myself in the bathroom with a pedophile and did what needed to be fucking done.

2

GRAYSON

Iclenched my fingers, channeling all the pent-up rage inside me into choking the steering wheel. When what I really wanted was to wrap them around my brother’s neck and end his life the way he’d ended my wife’s.

Whip sat in the passenger seat as stonily quiet as I was, lost in his own thoughts. But X poked his head through the gap, bouncing impatiently in the back, too full of energy to sit still.

“Where do you think Trig’s been all these years?” X asked. “Somewhere awesome, for sure, right? Surfing in Australia? Trekking the Amazon jungles? Sailing the highest seas?”

Whip glanced back over his shoulder. “Yeah. And I flew to the moon on a rocket calledThe Delusional. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”

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