Page 72 of Grave Games

Then things moved hyper-fast.

I spun away from the hand that held the gun even as it went off. Heat singed my side as I stumbled into the folds of darkness and away from Marvel. Romeo moved faster than any human his size had a right to move and launched at Marvel. I heard the unmistakable sound of the gun clattering against the pavement before Romeo let out a feral growl, plucked out the knife I’d stuck into the side of Marvel’s thigh, and brought it down once, twice, three times into the center of Marvel’s chest.

The world suddenly went very still.

As if in a dream where sound dwindled away to nothing in my ears, I moved in slow motion toward Romeo, my eyes glued to Marvel as he lay motionless on the ground. A faint gurgle escaped him as the glitter in his swollen eyes slowly trickled away, before at last becoming lifeless.

Finally.

With his breath coming out in short puffs that vapored in the icy air, Romeo surged to his feet and hauled me into his arms, squeezing me so tightly I could barely breathe.

“You hit?” A scant second later he put me down and frantically moved his hands over my torso. “That final shot, did he get you?”

“No. No, I’m good.” And alive. Dear God, we’d both made it out alive. Everything in the world was perfect.

“No. Fuck, he got you. But it’s just a scratch, I think.” I gasped when his hand came away dark with a smear of my blood—how odd that it looked black in the dim light—before he yanked up my shirt to look at the damage. “Yeah, okay. Okay baby, you got your side grazed, but that’s it. Oh Jesus, Jesus,fuck, that scared me, Jesus…”

“I’m okay.” Then I gasped again. “But Josh and Ashtray—”

“We’re on it.” Tyr and several other Gravedigger brothers appeared out of the darkness while Romeo squeezed me to him so hard I was fairly certain something cracked internally. “Zee, Tomahawk, get Ash into the nearest vehicle and get him to the hospital, ASAP. Ajax, you done playing with Slash?”

“He’s still conscious. Hold on.” Somewhere in the trees, the sound of flesh impacting flesh sounded several times, then a terrible silence. “We’re good.”

“Transfer him into the Clubhouse vaults, along with what’s left of Marvel, and do it fast and quiet before the LEOs decide they want to check out what all the noise was about. Once we’re done with them, we’ll ship them off to Hades whenever the fuck I feel like it. Romeo, go ahead and have our fireworks guys stand down, and let’s start cleaning up the remaining spies—”

“Shiloh’s been hit,” Romeo interrupted, his voice glacial. “I need to take care of her.”

Dear God.

The world seemed to pause as the enormity of Romeo’s words hit with the force of a meteor.

Romeo just chose me over his Gravedigger brothers, even to the point of ignoring the spies.

He choseme.

The world swam around me even as my heart swelled so much it was a wonder it didn’t explode out of my chest.

“Understood. Zee, take however many men you need to round up those assholes we tagged as belonging to Hades. Let’s move.”

There was one glaring omission in Tyr’s barked-out orders. “Wait, my brother—”

“I’m… I’m okay.” Clearly not okay, Josh staggered to his feet, then doubled over with a groan of pain. “Fuck me, that hurt.”

I stared at him, my legs too shaky to move toward him without collapsing out from under me. “How…?”

“He’s got a shit-ton of body armor on underneath that hoodie, baby,” Romeo murmured in my ear, before holding me all the tighter when I began to shake. “You think I’d bring him out in the open for Slash to target without doing everything possible to keep him safe? Andsafeis exactly what you would’ve been if you’d just stayed by the bonfire,” he added harshly, looking up to glare at Josh while Zee and two other men got Ashtray into a truck someone pulled up. “What the fuck were you thinking, dragging your sister away from all the people who were there to keep her safe? If she hadn’t called me, then left her line open so I could hear exactly where you two were, you’d both be dead now.”

Oh, good. Good, good, good. Romeo had been able to hear me after all.

“There will be time to bitch at each other later,” Tyr said, shutting down the conversation with a voice made of steel. “Right now we’ve got a man down and spies to round up. Let’s get the fucking lead out.”

Epilogue

Three Days Later

The sun was almost warm as we rode through the wrought iron gates of Rosehill Cemetery. The weather was perfect, the kind that made you want to pack up your winter gear and dust off the picnic basket.

Certainly not the kind of weather that should happen during a funeral.

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