Unshackled

I narrowed my eyes at someone about twenty feet into the crowd. He kept glancing my way, and it didn’t look like he was here to dance. Found you. It had to be one of them. He turned away quickly, and I took off after him. Right into the sea, I maneuvered myself between the moving bodies and zeroed in on my target. It got my blood pumping faster, and I stopped seeing the noise. It was heady as fuck, but suddenly I only registered the people who stood out. Those who didn’t move.

For a moment, I swore I could hear myself breathe.

Then I gasped and froze when something got me. Something stabbed at my side. What the fuck— “Son of a whore!” I roared as the pain hit. Blinding, searing pain. I spun around and instinctively gripped the shoulder of someone trying to escape. I forced them around, and a second later, my fist connected with their face. And I knew that face. He’d been driving the Chevy. Fury took hold of me, my chest seized up, my vision tinted red, and I punched him again. Again and again and again. I flew at him when he tumbled to the ground; I grabbed his head and slammed it against the floor. “There won’t be another fucking war!” I yelled. “You hear me, you piece of shit?”

Before I knew it, someone hauled me off the floor, and it was Colm. He yelled in my ear. “You’re making a feckin’ scene, Ford! Get the other one. Backup’s here. I’ll handle him.” He jerked his chin at the fucker on the floor.

I swallowed against the dryness in my throat and glanced around. Yeah, we definitely had an audience. So I had to run for it—fast—before guards showed up.

I nodded quickly to Colm before I took off, and I did my best to reroute my lingering rage. I had to get the other guy. There was no other alternative.

The pain made itself known again by the time I spotted him. I clenched my jaw and put a hand to my side, and I instantly felt the wetness. Shit. The music kept pumping, the crowd was wild, the lights flashed, and I was fucking bleeding. Hauling in a much-needed breath, I ignored the sharp stabs that attacked my side, and I ran toward the back of the club, not giving a flying fuck about who I pummeled in the process.

Sweat beaded along my forehead and down my neck. The air started to feel stifling and thin.

We locked eyes right before he disappeared down a hallway, and I sped up, wanting to catch him before he ran out the back. If he was armed—I assumed he was—it’d take a single bullet to open a locked door.

I ran past a “Staff Only” sign on the floor that’d been attached to a thin chain and reached the door he’d just darted through, approximately two seconds after him. At that point, I stopped feeling the pain. My steps matched my pulse that was going through the roof.

Seconds later, we burst out into freedom and right onto a busy street, and it was the first time I heard the man. He was panting; there wasn’t a chance in hell he had the strength to go on much longer, despite looking more fit than his friend.

I growled in sheer desperation and tried to run faster. Faster, faster, faster—he was so fucking close. I could almost reach out and grab his fuck-ugly, baggy brown leather jacket.

He yelled something in Italian, first at two women to get out of the way, then something about fucking my mother.

Why did they always have to bring in mothers?

Grace had been a mother. They’d killed her. Shot her on the sidewalk in broad daylight.

I gritted my teeth so hard I thought I was going to crush my molars, but what he’d thrown at me worked. Reminding me of Grace pushed me to catch up to him, and I stopped breathing. As lights turned red right up ahead, cars slowed down. In the distance, I heard sirens.

One.

Two.

Just as he turned onto a quieter backstreet, I fisted the back of his jacket, hauled him toward me, and then I body-checked him into the wall of the nearest building.

“Oomph,” he grunted.

I punched him straightaway, not wanting to give him a second to recover. Once in the jaw, then once in his gut, before I grabbed his hair and pushed him down at the same time as I kicked my knee upward to connect with his nose.

“So fuckin’ done with this infestation,” I wheezed. “Youse just never die, do you? Goddamn cockroaches!” With those last words, I held up his head again and slammed my forehead against his nose with more force, and I finally heard that satisfying crunch of bone breaking.