In a matter of seconds, everything had changed.
Someone tugged on my shoulder while someone else tried to pull Cooper from my arms, but I wouldn’t let go of him. I clung to him as if I was somehow keeping him safe. But it was too late for that. I had already failed him.
Seconds passed, maybe minutes. More people came, and the sound of an approaching ambulance wailed in the distance.
The world sped up again as reality hit me in the face, and my body began its own fight for life. My shirt stuck to me, sticky and cold, and I realized I’d been shot. Blood spilled from the bullet wound in my chest, and I could feel my life draining from my body. But I felt no pain. I was numb. So fucking numb. I clutched my brother’s lifeless body to me, not wanting to let him go.
Shooter, my best friend, dropped to his knees beside me. “You gotta let him go, brother. We need to get you some help.”
Not wanting to hear it, I pushed him away and began to scream with broken-hearted agony.
But it was only a matter of time before I finally succumbed to my wounds, and my world faded to black.
One Week Later
It was raining. Fat raindrops beat against the top of the coffin as I watched with dead eyes while they hit the gleaming shell and exploded like glass. Rain poured down my face in icy rivulets and dripped from my parted lips. I was barely breathing. I was barely existing. One day out of the hospital and here I was, burying my kid brother—the kid I was supposed to protect.
The man who murdered him also shot me in the chest. I was lucky, they said. It could’ve done more damage. Things could be so much worse.
But I felt nothing.
No pain.
No discomfort.
No gratitude for being alive.
Because I was fucking dead inside.
Beside me, Rosanna was barely holding it together beneath her umbrella. She was wearing sunglasses, despite the rain, and her tears dragged down her cheeks, and her chin quaked with heartbreak. Next to her, our thirteen-year-old daughter, Hope, sat between our twin sons, Bam and Loki. They held her hands, their faces stiff, their determination to be strong for their sister apparent as they vigilantly fought their own tears.
Behind them, Cooper’s best friend, Bronte, sat as still as a statue while tears plowed down her young face, the crown of wildflowers in her hair sagging beneath the weight of the rain.
The graveside was full of family and friends and my Kings of Mayhem brothers, the rain not deterring a single one of them. Umbrellas dotted the gloomy afternoon in splashes of color. Grown men with stiff faces and sunglasses stood beneath the downpour.
But all I could see was my brother’s coffin, and all I could think about was how I had let him down.
Rosanna began to sob into her hands. I wanted to comfort her, I did, but I had nothing to give her.
Last night, we had cried together. Clutched each other in a desperate embrace as we’d slid to the floor in tears. She had held me, and I had held her, and then we’d gotten drunk together. Fall-down, angry drunk.
She didn’t blame me, she said.
It wasn’t my fault, and she still loved me more than ever, she said.
But I could already feel the gulf widening.
It was only a matter of time before what we had died too. Because one day, her pain would sink further into her soul, and she would come to realize that this was all my fault.
Those bullets were meant for me.
Not the man we loved as a son.
I was a King, and we were at war with rival bootleggers. The attack against the club happened because we took exception to the Iron Fury trying to pedal their moonshine and weed in our territory, so we had burned down their stills and destroyed their distribution lines. The shooting was retaliation. It was the first blood to be spilled, but it would not be last. Because I was going to find every single motherfucker responsible, and I was going to put each and every one of them in a hole in the ground.
Agony clawed at my heart, and as my brother’s coffin disappeared below the grass line, I couldn’t stand it any longer. With a cry I couldn’t control, I fell to my knees.
How could this be it?
How could he be gone?
The pain was like a torturous hot poker searing a blistering path through my heart. They say tough men are forged by blood and pain, but sometimes it felt like I was dying beneath the weight of it. Like I couldn’t endure one more moment of the excruciating pain moving through my veins.
Now was one of those moments.
A pair of strong hands lifted me to my feet. It was Bull, the Kings of Mayhem MC president. The King of Kings. He drew me in, and I gave into the unbearable agony and broke against him, my fists balling against his leather cut as I let my grief consume me.