Page 9 of Royally Ruined

It was the most insane claim ever. Anyone looking at this mess would know it hadn’t been the unconscious stripper who’d pulled the trigger. That left only Scotch. But somehow ... I knew she wasn’t lying.

My eyes darted to Darien. He was open shirted, so it was easy to see the wound. Bending down, I gingerly checked the area; he let out a pained hiss. Just a surface wound, thank goodness.

I snatched his suit jacket from the floor and pressed it against him to slow the flow of blood. “Tell me the truth,” I said calmly, looking at Scotch. She was so close to me. Almost as close as she’d been earlier in the dressing room and—No! I need to think about what’s happening in this moment.

Her bloodstained fingers gripped my wrists. There was no deceit in her clear voice. “I didn’t do it. He shot himself.”

I froze. “What?”

She let me go so she could scramble over to Gina. I was too aware of the empty spaces where her fingertips had been. “He was suffocating her! I hit him with that bottle over there to make him stop.” The champagne had rolled halfway under the couch—I saw it now. “Darien pulled a gun on me. We wrestled ... and he shot himself. It was all an accident.”

An accident? An accident was what was going to fuck over several hard months of building trust with the Deep Shots? My father was going to have our heads.

Something must have crossed my face that betrayed my grim thoughts because Scotch grabbed at the leg of my pants. She clutched it and the gun, and somehow, in a way I was wholly unprepared for, she clutched at my heart.

“Please,” she hushed out. “Please believe me. People can’t think I did this. We both know what will happen if one of Darien’s gang mates believes Ishothim.”

I worked my jaw, but my brain was struggling. I didn’t know the last time I’d been so thrown off. “It’ll be okay,” I said.

Scotch focused up at me. Her voice was clean and raw. “Promise me.”

Promise her?What an insane thing to ask. Did she think I was a wishing star?

Looking down on her where she knelt by Darien, knowing full well that this was a giant mess in every possible way, I prepared myself to tell her she was screwed. Done. No one could keep her safe from the results of her actions.

In my head I saw the bloody face of my sweet sister. Heard her plaintive cry for help.

I parted my lips; her eyes widened, her throat fluttering as she breathed in. I felt the distress in her soul. My words came out, solid as a thousand-year-old cliff rubbed smooth by the sea. “I promise.”

She squeezed me so hard the gun almost fell from her hands. It would have been better if it had, but I was too busy luxuriating in this rare sense of pride and pure fucking machismo to think the way I should have. The way I always had.

Then it was too late.

“What the—what thefuck is this?” Hawthorne blurted. He was leaning inside, gripping the sides of the booth so tight his knuckles were bone white. In a great swoop of his head he looked from Darien to Scotch.

He thinks she shot him.

Much too late, the girl jumped away from the fallen man and dropped the pistol. The curtains shook; the man who squeezed next to Thorne was bigger than any of us. We called him Ox, and it was a fitting name for the club security guard. “Damn, man,” he hissed. “Is that dude dead?”

There were too many witnesses to this mess. If I didn’t act now, there’d be a ton more—and they’d be far less friendly. I yanked out my phone and texted rapidly with my thumb. “He isn’t dead. Yet.”

Thorne peered over his shoulder at the room behind him. “Fuckity fuck.Rush and the others are going to go apeshit when they see their pal’s brand-new ventilation hole.”

“We aren’t letting anyone else see him.” I finished the text and sent it to Korvo—one of our grunts—before burying my phone deep in my jacket. I traced the outline of my gun; it was comforting. “I’ve got a man making sure no one is going to get upstairs.” The gunshot couldn’t have gone unnoticed, and we’d have a crowd of agitated gang members with weapons on us in minutes. “Take Darien out the back staircase. Get him to the Bucket.”

Thorne made a face. The Bucket was a hole-in-the-wall private practice on Wicker Street, a poor excuse for a clinic. The doctor who ran it was on our payroll, and he’d handle Darien without the authorities knowing. We couldn’t just roll up to a normal hospital with a gunshot victim and expect no questions.

Grimacing, my brother picked up the gun on the floor and put it in his jacket. Then he scooped Darien over his shoulder. The half-naked guy coughed, saying, “Motha ... fucka ... that hurts.”

“Shh,” Thorne grumbled, wrapping the blood-soaked jacket around them both. “It’s nothing a Band-Aid won’t fix.”

Darien groaned again. “Bitch ... gonna pay.”

Thorne tossed a suspicious look at Scotch. I followed it, shaking my head so slightly that it could have been missed. My brother didn’t miss it; he got my unsaid message.

We’ll figure it out later.

“Wait,” Scotch said. She was cradling the dancer in her lap on the floor. The young woman had been roughed up, but she was stirring. “We need to call an ambulance. Gina has to get to a hospital!”

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