Page 92 of What I Should Have Known

Much like I once was.

Much like I still often was.

But, amongst the depraved, tortured corners of my soul, waited someone who was warm and kind. Feisty.

And after this damn prom shit got fixed, someone who would be mine.

Inhaling deeply, the rain crashing thick droplets down my neck, I felt none of the piercing cold as the thought of Kat warmed my heart. Breaking down barriers that I hadn’t realized I’d built, she’d come crashing into my world to make it better.

Fuck was I grateful that she’d forgiven me for hitting her with that bottle cap.

Stooping, a crack split the air as I reached for the flower.

A crack I was all too intimately familiar with.

The bullet sliced right above my back, narrowly missing me. Snapping my hand to the revolver waiting in my waistband, I ripped it out as athwunksaturated my ears.

And a scream shot through the air.

The blood stilled in my veins. My muscles seized by the haunting sound of a bullet ripping flesh.

Duncan.

Duncan right behind me had just been speaking. His voice now a haunting echo in my mind. “I bet Crow had to teach Viper how to properly pull out,” hesaid. A damn fucking joke.

Cement flashed across my vision, blackened from the night sky. Dust swirled in the air as my laugh twisted.

My peripherals darkened. Nothing but the helmet of Ford in front of me was visible. A sniper had dropped someone I called friend. Someone I called brother.

And I’d laughed.

I’d fucking laughed.

My fingers tightened on the gun, pointed forward. A weapon that no longer collected dust in a glove box.

Wait, forward.

A glove box. A revolver.

I wasn’t overseas. Snapping my mind away from the deserted village that every thought swam toward, I breathed in sharply. That was all in the past. That sound. That bullet. That event. I was in the middle of a beautiful grove.

With Kat.

But that scream was real and hadn’t come from Duncan.

Lifting my gaze from the flower in one hand, my focus slid down the sight of the revolver and locked onto a face of none other than Wyatt across from me with two men I only vaguely recognized on either side of him. Wyatt’s eyes were wide, frozen over my shoulders. The rifle he had tucked against his body remained trained in my direction, but a smidge too high.

If I’d stayed standing for another half a second, it would’ve hit me.

So, why had he screamed? Where had thethwunkcome from? A bullet hitting a tree trunk did not sound the same as when it hit flesh. I knew the difference too intimatelyand—

My muscles convulsed, twitched. A rattle shot through my bones as I slowly spun on my heels, denying the devastating thought that shot into my head.

“No,” I whispered as the four-wheeler behind me came into view.

Duncan’s grin flashed in front of me. Everything real was as fuzzy as the sky full of rainy clouds.

Blood clung to the back of my neck, sticky and hot. My laugh rang through the dark, echoing long after he crumpled to the ground.

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