Page 39 of The Mafia Bloodline
Everything inside me snapped to focus.
“Roman,” I called, my voice a low growl beneath the music. “Permission to make this quick.”
Roman didn’t even look back. “No survivors.”
The crowd screamed a second later, not from fear, but from the sudden crash of light as the demon’s glamour shattered, revealing the thing beneath. Its skin flickered like charred flesh, eyes burning with molten gold.
Runa gasped, stumbling back, but I caught her arm before she fell. “Run to the wall,” I ordered, already stepping in front of her.
The demon lunged.
Time fractured, flashes of teeth, claws, the smell of smoke and iron. I was already moving before thought could catch up, knife flashing from its sheath, my body a blur between Runa and the threat. The blade met flesh with a wet, satisfying sound.
Viking roared behind me, launching himself into another two that had crawled onto the balcony. Lucien’s precision was surgical, every move efficient, every strike lethal. Roman fought like a storm made flesh, unrelenting, calculated, deadly.
And Draugr… Draugr was a nightmare of his own, pure brutality, snapping bones like twigs, his black eyes empty of mercy.
The humans were screaming now, chaos erupting as the glamour fell from every demon in the room. But our men moved fast guiding, dragging, pushing people toward the exits. Ensuring that everyone present forgot what they saw.
“Volken!” Runa’s voice broke through the din, it was filled with fear and fury tangled together.
I turned in time to see a demon emerge from behind the bar, its claws raised, eyes locked on her.
My world narrowed to that single heartbeat.
I was across the room before the creature took another step. My knife buried itself in its throat, and I slammed it into the counter hard enough to splinter wood.
It shrieked, black ichor spraying across my arm before I drove the blade upward, silencing it.
When I looked up, Runa was pressed against the wall, her eyes wide, not in fear of the demon, but in something that looked a hell of a lot like fear forme.
I reached for her, voice rough. “You’re safe.”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.
Because even as the last demon fell, the scent of sulphur and rot still lingered, and every instinct in me screamed that this wasn’t random.
Someone had sent them here. Someone who knew where to strike.
And as I held Runa close, my jaw locked hard enough to crack.
The peace we’d tasted tonight had been nothing more than bait. And the night had come to collect. Tomorrow night we would go hunting.
Smoke still hung in the air like a veil of ash, the scent of demon blood and gunpowder thick enough to choke on. Havoc…our club, our supposed sanctuary, looked like a warzone. Bodies were gone, already burned to ash by the clean-up crew, but the echoes of the chaos still lived in every shattered glass and overturned table.
We stand in a rough half-circle, every one of us bloodstained, silent, vibrating with fury. Roman was the first to move, his eyes like cut obsidian as he raked his hand through his hair. “They dared to come here,” he muttered, voice low, lethal. “They dared to walk into our house.”
“Not just dared,” Draugr growled, his massive frame tense as a wire. “They knew where to find us. That wasn’t chance. That was a fucking message.”
Lucien’s jaw flexed. “Then the message was received. Now it’s our turn to reply.”
But before he could continue, Sorcha stepped forward, her hand on his arm, her expression tight with both fear and fury. “You’reall bleeding,” she said, voice sharp enough to cut through the testosterone-charged air. “Maybe save the posturing until everyone’s not half-dead.”
Lucien turned to her, the lethal gleam in his eyes softening instantly. “We’re fine.”
“No,” she shot back, “you’re angry.That’s not the same thing.”
Layla stood beside her, “She’s right,” she said, voice steady despite the tremor in her hands. “We need to get out of here before anything else happens.”
