Page 182 of The Wild Charge

“Heh. Maybe you aren’t as stupid as your boyfriend.”

Tenny paused, leg extended, gloved hand braced on the face of the cabinet.Your boyfriend. All his rage, all his panic, swelled for one awful moment, and threatened to overtake him.

Then Devin spoke from behind the desks. “That’d be Reese, right? Your brother?” The shock of his friendly, conversational tone allowed Tenny to shake off emotion and keep moving. Past the cabinet, and the next; behind a tangle of chairs draped with a bit of blue tarp.

“I don’t claim to share blood with that dipshit,” Jax said, voice laced with anger, now.

Devin chuckled. “Funny. That’s the way all my young ones feel aboutme. They’ve never had a problem with each other, though. Well. I suppose King doesn’t like Charlie much, but he loves him, deep down. You don’t have to like your brothers, but you do love them, whether or not you want to.”

Jax made a disgusted sound. “You’re their old man? Ha!” A fresh volley of shots rattled the metal desk fronts.

Tenny used the barrage of sound to hurry along. He’d nearly reached the far side of the room at this point, and the door there, marked with crude lines meant to represent a staircase.

The second the firing stopped, Devin spoke again, words Tenny didn’t bother to listen to, because another sound reached him. The whisper-quiet swish of tac pants. He had time to drop, roll onto his back, and draw his knife, before a shadow leaped the desk he was hiding behind and dropped down onto him.

It was the younger one – Grayson, according to the file – and Tenny had a fast glimpse of his face, blank and businesslike, hauntingly like Reese’s in that moment of attack – before he brought his knife up in a swift arc and caught him just outside his vest strap, in the ball of his shoulder.

The blade slid in to the hilt; shiny flash of blooded steel poking out the other side. Grayson’s eyes bugged; his mouth formed a perfect O. The knife he’d been carrying in his right hand, as long and wicked as Tenny’s, clattered to the floor, useless. Tenny’s strike had severed the nerves at the top of his arm, just as he’d intended.

He was young, painfully young, and even if he’d been well-trained, he didn’t have the experience to change course in the heat of battle; didn’t know how to come back from a crippling blow. Tenny flipped him, straddled his waist, and pinned him down by the throat as he slid his other hand in his pocket, fingers finding the holes of his brass knuckles.

“Wait,” the boy said, desperate and scared-sounding. “Wait, just–”

Two strikes had his eyes rolling back in his head, body going limp and still beneath him.

He ought to kill him. Heknewthat. But his resolve wavered. He looked like Reese, like little teenage Reese must have, with his pale lashes and his narrow, fine-boned face.

Another slip. A lapse in concentration, in purpose.

A wild, angry cry overhead alerted him too late to his mistake, and then he was tackled straight off of Grayson and into the floor. He brought his knife up, hilt gripped in both hands, and blocked the strike aimed for his face. Jax cut his hand open on the blade, and didn’t seem to care, reaching for the sheath on his hip.

Tenny stabbed at his belly, aiming for soft flesh, blade skidding off ceramic vest panels in their frenzied haste to attack one another. He pulled back for a second attempt. Jax’s knife glittered beneath the harsh lights, leaving its sheath with a quietslink.

Then his face exploded.

It popped like a ripe berry squeezed between two fingers, a shower of blood, and bone, and gray matter. Wet heat slopped over Tenny’s face. A beat later, he registered the roar of an up-close .45 going off; the puff of plaster and sheetrock dust as the round passed clean through Jax’s destroyed skull and buried itself in the wall.

The body slumped to the side and collapsed with a juicy sound.

Tenny blinked blood out of his eyes and glanced up, a little wildly, to find Devin standing on the other side of the desk, expression calm. Grounding. When their gazes met, Tenny felt his heartrate slow. Something animal and desperate inside him found…comfort, of all things, in that steady, blue gaze that was so much like his own, each time he looked in the mirror.

“You alright?”

Tenny sat up, and wiped his face with his sleeve. “Yeah.”

“Get up, then.”

It took effort – more than it should have. The fine tremors in his limbs were the result of shock, he knew. His shoulder throbbed hard. He shoved it down, shoved it all down, and got to his feet, swaying only a little.

(Reese’s brother was dead, and he had no idea how Reese would feel about that.)

“What about that one?” Devin asked, nodding down at Grayson.

Tenny didn’t want to look at him. When he did, it was another slam against his breastbone.Reese. Heart in his throat, he reached down, and bound his wrists tightly with a zip tie. “We leave him.”

Devin lifted his brows. “Your call.”

By the time they’d reached the door to the stairwell, Tenny felt mostly steady again. He put his knife away and took up his rifle; swapped the empty mag for a fresh one as they climbed. It wasn’t his favorite weapon, but he’d modified the Beretta carbine himself, and it gave him reach across distances.

---