Page 29 of Heresy (The Lost Gospels #1)

TWENTY-TWO

A NEW KIND OF WEAPON

HEX

T he smell of cordite and fresh blood chokes the air. Grizz lies dead behind the barricade, a testament to his own treason. But the sight brings me no satisfaction. Across the room, my brother is dying.

The rage is gone, burned away and replaced by a chilling, razor-sharp focus. The chaos of the firefight, the shouts, the explosions—it all fades into a distant hum. My world narrows to a single, absolute priority: getting Rook out of this slaughterhouse alive.

I see the battlefield with a clarity that is almost preternatural.

The Santos are pushing hard through the main entrance, their numbers overwhelming the few loyal brothers we have left holding the failing barricade.

The back of the infirmary is our only way out, the path to the garage, to the armored van. To survival.

"Zero!" I roar, my voice the cold, hard command of a president, not the snarl of an animal. "Lay down suppressive fire on the main door! Give me thirty seconds!"

Zero doesn't hesitate, his face a mask of grim determination as he and the two remaining brothers pivot, unleashing a punishing wall of lead that forces the attackers to take cover.

I turn to the scene in the infirmary. Doc is frantically packing Rook's chest wound, trying to stop a bleed that is clearly winning. Rook's face is a ghostly, waxen white. And standing beside them, her face pale but her dark eyes sharp, steady, and infuriatingly calm, is her. Vera.

She is not screaming. She is not crying. She is watching me, her expression a mixture of terror and calculation. She is a non-combatant, a liability, a piece of property I should be leaving behind.

But my gut, the same instinct that told me she was a splinter, is now screaming something else.

I make a snap decision, a gamble that goes against every rule of this club, against every instinct for self-preservation I have. I unholster the Glock from the back of my jeans and shove it, hard, into her hands. The metal is a stark, black contrast against her pale skin.

Her eyes widen in shock, but she doesn't drop it. Her hands, though trembling slightly, automatically adjust to the weight, her fingers finding the grip.

"You know how to use one of these?" I snarl, the question, a test and a prayer all at once.

She looks from the pistol up to my face, and in the pulsing red emergency light, her expression is unreadable. She gives a single, sharp nod.

The unspoken trust, the insane, desperate alliance, is a shocking, electric moment that hangs between us.

"Good," I say, my voice a raw growl. "Cover Doc. Get Rook to the van. We move on my command."

I have just armed my prisoner, my obsession, and placed the survival of my best friend in her hands. The king has officially lost his goddamn mind.

"NOW!" I roar, the command ripping from my throat.

It's a blur of motion and violence. Zero and I lay down a wall of covering fire as two of my brothers lift Rook, carrying him between them like a fallen king.

Doc is right behind, his medical bag clutched in one hand.

And behind him, moving with a shocking, fluid grace, is Vera.

She holds the Glock with both hands, her stance steady, her eyes scanning for threats.

She is not a liability. She is a soldier.

We make a break for the armored van in the center of the garage.

The air is a hornet's nest of bullets, the sound a deafening, percussive roar.

I see one of my men, a young brother named Talon, take a round to the chest as he covers our retreat.

He goes down without a sound, his body a final, bloody sacrifice to buy us a few more precious seconds. There is no time to mourn.

They get Rook and Doc into the back of the van. The doors slide open, a gaping maw of safety. Zero provides cover from the side door while Vera, unbelievably, takes a position at the back, her pistol barking twice at a shadow moving near the far wall.

"Get in!" I scream at her, and for once, she obeys without hesitation, scrambling into the back. Zero piles in after her. I empty my magazine toward the main door, then throw myself into the driver's seat, slamming the heavy door shut.

The world inside the van is a vortex of sound—the rattle of gunfire against the armored plating, Doc shouting medical terms, Zero's rifle cracking as he fires through a gun port, and through it all, Vera's voice, steady and clear.

"Two bikes, right side! Gaining!"

I don't have time to question it. I floor it. The van's engine screams in protest, and with a deafening crunch of tortured metal, we smash through the main garage door and out into the dark, industrial streets of Red Hook.

We are not clear. The street is swarming with them. It's an ambush, a perfectly executed trap. Cain's hand is everywhere. A black SUV pulls up alongside us, its windows rolling down, the barrels of rifles glinting in the streetlight.

My entire being is focused on driving, on survival.

I swerve hard, the side of the van scraping against a brick wall with a high-pitched shriek of metal.

My mind should be on the road, on the enemy, but it's split.

I'm a beast behind the wheel, but I'm also acutely aware of the sounds from the back—Doc working frantically on Rook, Zero returning fire with a cold, professional fury, and her.

"Van approaching from the rear! Fast!" Her voice is not the scream of a terrified civilian. It's the clean, precise report of a spotter. An asset.

I look in the rearview mirror and see the headlights of a heavy van bearing down on us. I grit my teeth and push the engine to its limit, hurtling through the dark, deserted streets of my kingdom, fighting a war I didn't know I was losing until it was too late.

I take a hard right down a narrow, unlit alley, the side mirrors of the van scraping against brick with a high-pitched shriek.

In the rearview, I see the pursuing SUV try to follow, but it’s too wide.

It slams into the corner of the building, its front end crumpling.

Two more turns, a short, jarring ride over a curb and through a deserted lot, and we're clear. The sounds of the chase fade behind us.

Fifteen minutes later, I pull the van into the back of a nondescript commercial laundry service in an industrial park on the edge of the city. From the outside, it’s nothing. Inside, it’s one of our sanctuaries.

We haul Rook inside, his breathing shallow, a rattling sound in his chest. The front of the building is a legitimate business, but the back is a clean, well-lit medical bay that Doc maintains for nights exactly like this. It smells of bleach and ozone.

The moment we get Rook onto the steel operating table under the harsh glare of the surgical lights, the tension shifts.

The loud, kinetic violence of the firefight is gone, replaced by a quiet, desperate fight for a single life.

Doc is in his element, a whirlwind of motion, barking orders for supplies, his voice calm and authoritative.

And I can do nothing.

This is a new kind of hell. I can’t punch this problem.

I can’t shoot it. My power, my authority as President, is utterly useless here.

I am just a man, forced to stand guard and watch as my best friend's life hangs by a thread, the rhythmic, failing beep of the heart monitor a countdown to my own personal apocalypse.

Zero stands beside me, a statue carved from granite, his usual cold composure fractured by the raw, helpless fear in his eyes.

Doc is working frantically, trying to clamp a bleeder in Rook's chest. "Pressure," he snaps, his hands occupied. "I need pressure here, now!"

Before I can even move, a smaller pair of of hands is there. Vera.

She is at Doc’s side, her hands now covered in Rook's blood, pressing down hard on the wound, her face a mask of intense, absolute concentration. "Forceps," Doc commands, and her hand is there, slapping the instrument into his palm. "Gauze." She's already tearing open the packet.

The sight of her, so calm and competent in this bloody chaos, is the most disorienting thing I have ever witnessed. She is not a liability. She is an asset. And she is handling the most important task in this room.

With the immediate crisis of Rook's bleeding managed by this impossible woman, my mind snaps back to the larger one. The war. The clubhouse.

I turn to Zero, who is standing guard by the door, his rifle at the ready. He is my Sergeant at Arms, my enforcer, my most ruthlessly efficient soldier. He's a combat vet; he knows what comes next.

"The clubhouse is a fallen fortress," I say, my voice a low, hard command.

"They'll be trying to loot our armory and burn the rest. You are to take every man who can still stand, return to the den, and hold it.

Secure the perimeter, account for our dead, and kill anything that isn't wearing our patch.

Turn our home into an impenetrable bastion. "

Zero's dead eyes meet mine. "And you, Prez?"

My gaze flicks back to the operating table, to Vera's small hands pressing down on Rook's chest, to my brother's shallow breathing.

"My place is here," I say, the words a final, absolute decree. "Now go. Hold the line."

Zero gives a single, sharp nod. He doesn't need another word.

He is my iron fist, and I have just pointed him at the enemy.

He turns and disappears into the chaos of the night, leaving me to stand watch in this sterile room, a king with a fallen kingdom, trusting its defense to his sword and his brother's life to a ghost.

"Forceps," Doc commands, and her hand is there, slapping the instrument into his palm without him even needing to look. "Gauze." She's already tearing open the packet.