That gave me pause.
“All of them.” Shit, I didn't need options.
Shuddering, the man said, “Shipped girls are at the back, near the docks. The others are in the ballroom.”
If Flora was with the trafficked girls, Poet would get Veins in to save her, along with the rest. But if she was elsewhere...
By the time I got to the room he'd described, the one with the big oak tables, the piles of coke and quivering, frightened bodies huddled together in the corner, there was no sign of Flora. I tried asking around, but the women were all too out of it to tell me anything useful. I doubled back, locking the room behind me and left. I must have missed something.
Was she with the others? Could I take that chance?
Where the hell is she?
I entered a large pantry, cutting through into the hallway beyond it. There, I damn near crashed into one of the Knights who had slipped into the room to make a phone call. We stared at each other silently as the voice on the other end of the cell asked what was going on.
Standing opposite one another, our guns were drawn, but lowered “I'll have to call you back,” the Knight said, shutting his phone. It was the kind of tension that required a tumbleweed to roll through the middle of us.
“Beeker, did someone just come in—” said a voice behind me. The man in front of me—Beeker, apparently—dropped his phone and brought up his gun.
Caught as I was, I charged forward. It was all I could do. That, and hope to not get shot in the back. Beeker and I both fired; he missed and my gun jammed. My momentum carried me into him, all the same.
I hit him with so much force that we crashed through the door he was standing in front of. We fell into the hallway beyond, landing on top of some other biker that happened to be in the wrong spot at the wrong time.
“Ronin.”
The word was so faint that I wasn't fully convinced I'd heard it at all.
The shouting was definitely real, and the bullets that flew over my head from Beeker's friends behind me, even more so. I grabbed him and rolled us onto my back, just in time for the two other Knights in the pantry to open fire.
I didn't have time to recoil from the pain of a multitude of stabs as the jagged, wooden rubble dug into me. Disoriented, Beeker took a battery of incoming rounds.
I frantically searched for his gun, or a knife, or anything that would help me against the coming Knights. It was no use, between my Beeker-shield and the poor bastard that we landed on, there was too much debris for me to find anything.
Feeling that this was the end of the line for me, I almost laughed at how close I'd gotten to saving Flora, just to be shot to death.
“Connor!” shouted a dream that was too good to be true.
I turned my head so hard in disbelief that the tendons strained. For a fleeting second I thought I'd died.
Flora, the girl who'd robbed me of everything I held dear.
The girl I was willing to die for...
And she was only a few feet away.
“Here!” She tossed me her gun—my gun.
I snatched it out of the air right as the first Knight came through the door's threshold. Gun raised, he turned towards Flora. I put a bullet through his ear. The man's speed toppled him forward, allowing me to get a bead on the second, and now very surprised, Knight behind him.
The second biker unloaded, but I was too buried beneath his dead companions for him to hit me. When he ran out of bullets I nudged the bodies to the side, carefully aiming a few well placed shots into his heart.
I pushed all the bodies off me and crawled to my feet with a grunt. I stood before Flora covered in blood, dust and mayhem, like Lazarus risen from his grave.
Without a care for the filth, Flora threw herself at me. “I'm so sorry,” she said between kisses, so hard and fast that any doubts I'd had about her or us vanished. “I'm so, so sorry.”
Gunshots and the screams of the enraged and the dying echoed down every hall. I pulled away. We were far from safe, but I needed to look at her. Her beautiful shining eyes, upturned brows and soft features struck me harder than any blow I'd received.
With Hell around every bend, I squeezed her into a hug that was too tight for the devil himself to pry open. I almost said something to her I shouldn't have. It was on the tip of my tongue, words that could never be taken back once uttered.
Hesitating, I backed off and whispered my relief into her ear, instead. “I missed you.”
Flora's arms loosened so she could look at me, her eyes searched mine for proof that I wasn't some fever dream of dying hope. Her eyes told me that she'd never thought she'd see me again.
If I had stopped to think about the staggeringly high odds of us both surviving long enough to share in this moment, I'd have thought the same. Yet here we were, wrapped in bodies and tragedy, held together by the spite of a love that defied logic and fate.