Page 112 of Claimed By the Biker Brothers

But Knox tackles him hard. He drives his head into the floor with so much rage and strength, I hear Calvin’s skull crack as his eyes pop open, the life leaving them. A peculiar haze drowns his shocked glare as death takes a firm hold.

“Shit!” Ellie cries out and drops to her knee.

One of Marlo’s surviving goons is about to kill her.

Diesel jumps him. I haven’t seen that kind of anger in a long time, but it’s more than justified. Mentally, I sanction every horror taking place. I sanction the taking of every life as Knox and Diesel fight, tooth and nail, to end this nightmare before it can hurt more innocent people. Finally, the last of Marlo’s men ends up dead on the floor.

Red and blue lights flash outside. Sirens wail louder and louder, and I feel Robyn shaking in my arms. I press my lips against her temple. “You’re good, baby,” I tell her. “You’re good.”

“Jagger,” she cries out, holding on to me with a tight grip.

“It’s over, baby,” I say. “It’s over.”

Knox curses under his breath and stands up, panting with a furrowed brow as he looks at me. “That’s good Kevlar, Jag.”

“Huh?” I glance down over my shoulder. I can’t see much from this angle, but I can tell from the multiple pain points in my back that I absorbed more than one gunshot. “Fuck me.”

“Jagger!” Robyn sobs, and I pull back for just a moment to look at her. My lungs burn from the physical agony unfolding in my ribcage. The aftershock is coming. The adrenaline is wearing off. “Jagger, they shot you!”

“Bulletproof vest,” I manage, grunting in pain. “Ah, fuck.”

“Sit the hell down,” Diesel grumbles and helps me do precisely that.

Robyn stays close, utterly terrified, as Knox rushes to Ellie’s side. Only now does Robyn even realize that Ellie’s here.

“El?” she mumbles, her lower lip quivering. “What’s happening?”

Marlo tries to get up. A Glock meets her, held firmly by one of Ellie’s men. “Don’t even think about it,” he tells her.

She knows it’s over.

Some minutes fly by as the ambulances and the medical examiner’s vans roll in, other times, they move slowly as Sheriff Bentley takes each of our statements in excruciating detail.

“Everything happened so fast,” Diesel says, playing his part. “I’m not even sure what went down. I just know there were all these guns pointed at me. I had to protect myself.”

“He was going to shoot me,” Knox tells the sheriff, pointing at Calvin’s dead body.

Bentley isn’t entirely impressed. He looks at Spalding. “And who got him?”

“I did,” Ellie cuts in as a paramedic helps her out of her vest and examines her shoulder wound. Another inch in, and the Kevlar would’ve stopped that bullet. I was lucky, ridiculously lucky. “I had a clean shot, and I had to take it. He had his weapon trained on Robyn,” she adds. “I’ll give you a full incident report, Sheriff.”

“What the hell happened here?” Bentley exclaims.

“It was a hostage situation,” Knox says, trying to catch his breath as a bruise blooms pink and red all over the right side of his face courtesy of one of Marlo’s men, if I remember correctly. “They were going to kill Robyn.”

“Ellie,” Robyn manages, still staring at her friend with genuine disbelief. I can only imagine what’s going through her head right now. “Is that you?”

“You two have a lot to talk about,” Diesel grunts while under the care of another paramedic. His face took more of a beating than Knox’s. I’m starting to think I have it easy with maybe a couple of micro-fractures of my ribs. It’s hard to breathe properly at this point. “Ellie is DEA.”

“What?” I gasp, shocked.

“I’m sorry,” Ellie tells Robyn. “I promise I’ll explain everything.” She glowers at me. “And you three made everything worse. You should’ve given me a chance to—”

“To what?” I cut her off. “We knew about a crooked DEA agent working with Marlo and Calvin. You showed up out of nowhere, telling us you were supposed to meet Robyn precisely when she vanished. What the fuck were we supposed to think?”

“He’s got a point,” Sheriff Bentley mutters. “My God, this hot mess is going to take forever to untangle. I’ll need help, more Staties, more everything!”

Robyn gasps and tries to get up, but she gets dizzy and I hold her down. “Kyra’s upstairs,” she manages, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I need to see her.”

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