Page 113 of Lone Star

“Obviously.”

From inside the house, he heard the crack of a gunshot.

~*~

Reese ducked down behind the sofa as gunshots zipped overhead. He heard rounds strike the marble on the fireplace. One of the huge windows shattered, the glass tinkling musically as it rained down on the floor.Thiswas why he hated Tenny. This going off book, reckless, stupid behavior.

“Are you bored now?” he snarled, surprised by the venom in his tone.

Tenny was surprised, too, if his lifted brows were anything to go by. “No,” he said, simply. “Stay here if you’re afraid.” And he stood, gun in hand, and vaulted back over the couch, returning fire.

I hate him, I hate him, I hate him.

Reese didn’t work like this, normally. He was the one who got the drop on people, who had the upper hand, not the other way around. Tenny was being flashy – why? To show off? To prove something to Reese? Or was it really a matter of boredom?

It didn’t matter. Right now, Tenny was providing a target for their assailants, and he meant to take advantage of it.

He tucked and rolled out from behind the couch, toward the kitchen, away from the broken glass. Got his feet under him, and took up a position behind an end table carved from heavy marble. The lamp that had been on it lay in shards on the floor, and its cleared top gave him a good view of the gallery above. Three men at the rail, two barreling down the stairs, on a collision course with Ten.

He considered, in the span between breaths. That’s what an effective killer did – thank you very much, Tenny – considered, in moments like these, who to kill first. Two quick shots would take out the men rushing at Tenny, and buy him some time, since he was flying in like he meant to go hand-to-hand rather than shooting them like he ought to.

But that would draw the attention of the men on the gallery, shooting now with wild inaccuracy and gouging big chunks in the floors. Them, he decided; he’d go for them, and let Tenny deal with the mess he’d thrown himself into.

One breath. Analysis, and on the next inhale, he aimed, fired, and dropped the first of the gallery thugs.

Clean center-of-mass shot. He wouldn’t be getting back up.

One of his companions let out a startled sound and glanced toward the dropped body, then swung his head around, searching for the source of the shot. The movement threw off Reese’s aim, and his shot caught the man in the throat. A messy gout of arterial spray fanned up the wall as the man fell back against it and slipped down out of sight.

He had to duck, then, as return fire chipped the top of the marble table. He wished he had his rifle; he always preferred to be in possession of the stronger gun in tight situations.

He heard the muffled thumps of impact, a pained grunt that definitely wasn’t Tenny. Heard a gun go skidding across the floor. The show-off.

He popped up, and took aim at the third man on the gallery, who’d turned his attention, mistakenly, to the fight happening at the base of the stairs. Reese took him with a clean torso shot, already glancing away before he’d fallen.

One of Ten’s assailants was down and either dead or unconscious. Ten grappled with the other one, to Reese’s surprise.

This was a big man, heavily-muscled, athletic, and aggressive, and not the sort of gang hanger-on just looking to drink and fuck and spend the boss’s money. This was a bodyguard of some sort; someone with some proficiency – and was taller and heavier than Ten besides.

Tenny delivered a sequence of sharp blows and karate chops to all the right areas, but though the man grunted and grimaced, he didn’t go down.

Reese looked for a shot, but couldn’t find one: they were too close, too intertwined. He couldn’t guarantee that he wouldn’t hit Tenny – not that the idea gave him much worry, but Fox might not like it.

Tenny punched his combatant in the throat, finally, and the man bent forward at the waist with an ugly choking sound. Tenny kicked him in the crotch, and then kneed him in the forehead. He slumped over and landed in a boneless, crumpled heap at the base of the stairs.

Tenny lifted his head, then, chest heaving as he caught his breath, hair askew, his lip split. He met Reese’s gaze across the room, licked the blood off his lip – and grinned. So suddenly, and so widely that it startled Reese. He’d seen Ten smile, and smirk, plenty by now. But it was always a crafted expression; part of a repertoire he deployed to please or antagonize or fool whoever he was speaking to. This, though, looked real. He was looking at the real Tenny – whoever he was – for the first time, he felt.

And then Tenny’s neck erupted in a shower of red spray.

Reese was used to things happening quickly; he’d been trained to think in slow, logical, complete sentences in the pulses of silence between the thumping of his heart; in the gaps between breaths. It was a kind of slow motion he hadn’t known how to describe until Aidan had forced him to watch all those silly action movies that got nearly everything wrong about the kind of work he did.

But this seemed to happen fast. Very, very fast. Blood fountained, spraying the wall, spraying up across Tenny’s face – which wasn’t smiling anymore, but was slack-jawed, his blue eyes huge. Ten was reaching for his throat, for the hole in the side of it, as he fell backward, and landed gracelessly on the marble, half-across one of the bodies he’d dropped.

The gunshot came after that, a sharpcrackthat echoed off everything, and vibrated up through the floor.

Gunshot. Shot. He’d been shot.

Reese’s brain leapt, sluggish a moment, but then he whipped his head around, looking for the gunman. He was up on the gallery, had just stepped out of a door there, and held a gleaming .45 in one hand. Reese saw the mother-of-peal grip, the lines of engraving on the barrel. An obnoxious showpiece of a gun where something matte and stainless would have been so much more efficient.

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