How is this even my life? I think as the stained-glass doors in front of us are pulled wide, revealing a glittering sea of modern-day criminal courtiers, the upper crust of the underworld. Arguably so much more powerful than those that at least pretend to play by the rules. The only rules here are the ones set by greed and want and power. If you have the latter, you can satisfy the former, have whatever you want. Bleed whoever you want.
Grey is waiting at the front of the room, standing before the priest in a gray suit with wolf-shaped cufflinks at his wrists. He’s unbelievably handsome, with his sandy hair slicked back, his skin tan and smooth, his lower lip full and kissable.
This will be okay, I tell myself. This is going to be fine. If it were any other mafia man standing up there—like Ivan Wolfe for example—I would come up with a different plan. But even if I found a place to run to, even if the mafia were that sloppy and I was that lucky, I can’t risk Grey’s life when I gave up everything I had to save it in the first place.
On either side of us, wealthy and powerful families fill the wooden pews, watching with slitted eyes and pursing their venomous mouths as they size me up, test my mettle, and plan their calculated bites. The club—despite its lack of refinement—is just like this, so I’m used to it. Politics, violence, and power. That’s what it all comes down to.
The Don escorts me down the aisle as I lift my eyes up to the steep pitch of the roof, the murals on the ceiling, and the impenetrable stone walls. Sconces flicker from them, casting a strange, almost ethereal light over the procession while the priest watches us, draped in white robes with a crimson sash, like a manifestation of the Catholic God.
I stop near the edge of the dais, waiting as Alvise hands me over to Grey. He takes my hand and leads me up the few steps to stand in front of the pulpit, and then carefully, almost reverently, lifts the veil to reveal my face.
That’s when I smell it. It’s a smell that used to put me to sleep and then, later, frightened me to my core. It’s a smell that, at times, has turned me on. Made me act like a fool. Made me take four horsemen to my bed. Leather and motor oil.
I lean in toward Grey, just like he did to me the other day, putting my lips up against his ear as my fingers fist in the front of his suit. My knuckles, despite the bandages applied by the servant girls, are bleeding just enough to stain his dress shirt. That’s an omen if I’ve ever seen one, a promise of violence on the horizon like a bloodred sunrise.
“Grey, run,” I breathe, and then I’m pushing him back and a million things are happening all at once.
A single bullet whizzes down the aisle and hits the priest right between the eyes. His gaze widens just before he slumps to the floor at my feet, blood spattering the bottom of my dress. Crimson oozes from the wound in his skull as Grey kicks open a wooden panel on the front of a pipe organ and crawls through, dragging it closed behind him.
I look up, redirecting my gaze down the aisle just in time to see …
“Crown,” I whisper, remembering what he said to me that night. That fateful night that rearranged everything about who I was and what I thought I wanted. “I’m a straight shooter.” What a double entendre if I’ve ever heard one. Straight shooter, plays by the rules. Straight shooter, can nail a priest between the eyes from fifty feet away.
He’s not alone.
Daybreakers pour into the room like a disease, tainting the pretty church and all its glittering occupants. See, that was the wrongness that I felt this morning, the dark cloud of the club rolling across the landscape like a blight.
Bullets fly between the two groups as I stand there in my white dress with its silly train, the lace veil resting against the coiled perfection of my dark hair. My lips are gently parted, the smell of gunpowder and blood a familiar, almost comforting scent, like childhood, like home.
How fucked up is that?
How … much do I care?
I look to the right to see several of the mafia goons holding open a trapdoor in the floor. The Don, his wife, Ivan, and a good dozen of the most important Grey Wolfe alumni crawl through it before it’s slammed shut and locked. Another guard takes position over the top of it, aiming his Uzi toward the back of the room and the emerging cloud of devils.
A shot takes him in the neck, spraying blood from his carotid. It splatters me, hot and acrid, ruining my makeup as I blink through it and watch him hit the ground at my feet. The man’s body is still warm, still twitching in its death throes as I bend down and take the strap from his neck, putting it over my own.
For a minute there, I can’t decide which side to fight on: the side of the mafia or the side of the club.
The club is here to exact their revenge. More specifically, they’re probably here to kill me. The mafia, on the other hand, is a family I’m supposed to be marrying into, a tool that I can turn on itself, severing all the heads of this awful chimera that’s become my life.
My eyes lift up, searching for Crown amongst the carnage. I see him in the back, brutal, ruthless. He smashes a mafia man’s face in with the butt of his gun. He’s not the only one either. Beast is there, too, so covered in blood that I hardly recognize him. Sin … he’s holding an assault rifle, mowing down the guards in the rear balcony.
The only person I don’t see—besides my father—is Cade Grainger.
I look back at the fleeing wedding guests.
Even though it takes me some time, I guess I’m a club daughter after all.
I aim the Uzi into the fleeing crowd of luxury and jewels, and I start to fire. It’s easy to tell who’s who. The Grey Wolfe Mafia is dressed in their finest, in tuxes and dresses and diamonds. The club … well, the club is dressed in denim and leather, and flying colors.
My bullets spray the audience, and I find myself thankful beyond thankful that there are no children here. Any adult I see is culpable, is a part of this, benefits from its blood and poison. I become lost in that, in the bloodshed and the death, until someone grabs my arm.
I startle, swinging the gun their way, but stop when I see who it is that’s touching me. I might’ve known, just from the rough feel of his fingers through the elbow-length gloves I’m wearing, that it was Grainger. Goddamn motherfucking Grainger.
His umber eyes catch mine, and a million things pass between us.
The one that I catch on and hold tight to is this: relief.
He’s relieved to see me? Why? So he can strangle me himself, punish me for stealing Crown’s bike and freeing a hostage and running into the arms of the mafia?
He doesn’t look angry though. Instead, his face is drawn and tired, that scowling mouth of his pressed into a thin line.
Grainger doesn’t bother to take the gun from me, dragging me toward a door to the left of the pulpit and yanking me through. He slams it closed behind him and then turns to look at me.
I want to say something, anything really. It’s been three months since we’ve seen each other, but it may as well have been a minute. It may as well have been years. Time seems both meaningless and like an impossible chasm, all at the same time.
In a surprising move, he puts his hands on my hips and I gasp, letting go of the Uzi and letting it hang from the strap on my neck. Grainger lifts me up to sit on the edge of a table that’s pressed to the wall, knocking candles and other religious paraphernalia all across the floor. This must be a thing for us, this sacrilegious lust that taints the whole world filthy.