Ride me like you hate me

Raven

The gun was heavier than I remembered.

It pressed against the back of Damon Cross's skull, and the metal had gone warm in my grip. Fifteen feet away, the clubhouse roared on. Bass thumped through the floor. Someone laughed too loud. Not one of those men knew their president was standing in a dark corner by the stairwell with a stranger's barrel against his head.

"Ten seconds," I said. My voice came out thinner than I wanted. "Tell me what happened to my brother."

He didn't raise his hands. He didn't even turn around. A man with a gun at his head should smell like fear, but Damon smelled like smoke and leather and something cold underneath, like the air before snow.

"That's a lot of seconds for a girl whose hand is shaking," he said.

"It's not shaking."

"Raven." He said my name like he'd had it in his mouth for years. "It is."

My stomach dropped. Three hours earlier, I had walked through the front gate wearing a borrowed name and a cheap black dress, carrying a tray of beers nobody asked me to carry. Three hours of bikers grabbing my elbow, calling me sweetheart, flicking cigarette ash near my shoes. Three hours of smiling at men who might have been standing on the bridge the night Cole died.

I had practiced this moment four hundred times in a motel mirror. In none of those versions did he say my real name.

"Who told you that?" I pushed the barrel harder. "Who told you my name?"

"Nobody." Now he turned, slow, and the gun slid from his skull to his forehead like it had been made to go there. His eyes were gray and tired and completely steady. "You have your brother's jaw. Same stubborn set to it. I saw you the second you walked in with that tray."

"Then why am I still holding a gun?"

"Good question." He tilted his head. "Why are you?"

I hated how calm he was. I hated the faint scar through his left eyebrow and the way the club's patch sat on his chest like a crown. Most of all, I hated that my finger was tight on the trigger and my brain had gone quiet and useless.

"Say his name," I whispered. "If you knew him, say it."

"Cole." Damon's jaw flexed once. "Cole Calloway."

My hand jumped. Just a flinch, barely anything, but he watched it happen, and something moved across his face that I couldn't read. It wasn't triumph. It looked almost like pain.

"Don't," I said. "Don't say it like you miss him."

"Are you really going to kill me without knowing the whole truth?"

"I know enough."

"You know what somebody wanted you to know."

"Shut up."

"Four years," he said quietly. "And you've never once asked who handed you your version of the story."

"I said shut up!"

"Okay, okay, easy, sweetheart. Nobody needs to get loud."

The voice came from behind me, low and lazy, close enough that I felt the warmth of a body at my back. Every muscle in me locked. I knew without looking that I had made a mistake. I'd watched Damon. I'd watched the door. I hadn't watched my own shadow.

A hand settled over mine, not gripping, just resting on top. Calloused fingers. A silver ring pressed cold against my knuckle.

"Well, hell," the voice murmured. "Little Calloway."

I turned my head an inch. Jace Mercer stood so close I could count the dark stubble along his jaw. His smile was crooked and easy, the kind that got men punched in bars. But his eyes weren't smiling. They were doing something worse. They were remembering.

"You know me," I said.

"Last time I saw you, you were eighteen and you bit a cop." He tilted his head. "Left a mark and everything. I was impressed."

"Take the gun," Damon said, without looking at him.

"I could," Jace agreed.

"Then do it."

"Yeah." Jace didn't move. His thumb slid along the back of my hand, once, slow. "But look at her. She came into the wolves' den with a tray of beers and a dream. I kind of want to see how this ends."

"Jace."

"What? I'm invested."

"You're both insane," I said.

"Probably," Jace said cheerfully, and I hated that my pulse kicked at the sound of his voice.

Damon lifted two fingers, the smallest gesture, and I realized the whole corner had gone still. Nobody was coming. Nobody had seen. He had walked away from his own party to this exact spot on purpose.

He wanted me to find him.

"I'll make you a deal," he said. "Lower the gun. I tell you one thing about Cole that nobody alive knows except me. One thing. Then you decide if you still want to shoot."

"Why would I trust you?"

"You wouldn't. You shouldn't." He held my stare. "But you'll lower it anyway, because you've been waiting four years for someone to tell you something new."

My throat burned. The worst part was that he was right. Every cell in my body was leaning toward his voice, starving for it, and that scared me more than the gun ever could.

"You killed him," I said.

"Is that what you came here to believe?"

"Answer the question!"

"Raven." Jace's voice dropped, no joke in it now. "Look at me a second. Just a second."

"No."

"Please."

I looked. I shouldn't have. His face was so close and so serious it didn't seem like the same man, and for one stupid heartbeat I forgot which of them I was supposed to be afraid of.

Then the window exploded…

Glass blew across the room in a bright, screaming sheet. A bullet punched through the wall inches above Damon's head, and the clubhouse erupted. Chairs flipped. Men shouted. Someone roared, "Down, get down!" and the music cut off like a throat had been slit.

Jace's arm hooked around my waist and yanked me backward. I hit the floor behind the brick pillar so hard the breath left me. The gun skidded from my fingers. He landed over me, one hand braced beside my head, his whole body shielding mine while another shot cracked overhead and plaster rained down on us like ash.

"Stay low," he growled in my ear.

"Get off me!"

"Gladly, soon as nobody's trying to kill us."

"Us?"

"Okay, you. But I'm in the way."

I should have shoved him. Instead I lay frozen, his heartbeat hammering against my ribs, his breath hot at my temple, the smell of rain and gasoline on his jacket. His hand had found the back of my head, cradling it off the concrete, and I hated how that small, careless kindness made my eyes sting.

Across the aisle, Damon crouched behind an overturned table. Glass glittered in his hair. A bullet had torn the shoulder of his cut, and he didn't even glance at it. He wasn't looking at the window or at his men.

He was looking at me.

Not with fear or anger. With a steady, terrible focus, like a man who had been waiting a long time for a door to open and couldn't quite believe it finally had.

The gunfire stopped. In the silence, a motorcycle screamed away into the dark, and the engine faded until all I could hear was my own breathing.

Damon stood. He crossed the broken glass without hurrying, stopped above us, and looked down at me. Blood had started to bead along his cheek where something had cut him.

"Someone knew you were coming tonight," he said. "And whoever they are, they just tried to kill you before I could tell you what your brother did."