I snorted a response. “Those shoes of yours are deadly.”
“Why do you think I wear them all the time?” She stuck her leg out and I noticed she did have crazy pointy and tall heels on even though she was now dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. She tilted her head to where the men appeared engrossed in the erotic scene on the stage. I wanted to kick Titus. “You’re gonna have to brawl with more than just me for him. You’re gonna have to fight Bax, the city . . . hell, you’re even going to have to throw down with him if you want him.”
I lifted an eyebrow as the music picked up and seemed to get louder. The girl was now down to nothing but her G-sting and she wasn’t dancing so much as she was writhing on the stage. She looked like she was making love to an invisible man.
“I’ve been fighting every single day of my life. Sometimes I think all I have left is fight.” If anything was worth the fight it would be any time I had with Titus before things inevitably blew up around us.
She gave me a real smile, not the one she used to con men out of money or get people to think she was just a dumb stripper. It made her look like an entirely different person. She went from a sex goddess to a normal woman, one that just happened to be amazingly beautiful.
“Fighting is all any of us know inside and out. It’s exhausting.” I muttered my agreement and seriously considered reaching out to pinch Titus in the arm as the girl on the stage acrobatically shifted to her feet and slinked to the edge of the stage. She spit the now stubby stogie out of her mouth much to her audience’s delight and pulled the gun she had in her leg band out of the garter. She pointed it out into the crowd. I thought it was a toy, maybe filled with water or those little plastic caps that made cute popping noises.
I was wrong.
Before she pulled the trigger, I was hit by a truck. Not really a truck but getting slammed to the ground with Titus’s full body weight sure felt like it. Gunshots echoed through the club, as did screams of pain from both men and women as the gun continued to go off. I heard Titus scream something at Nassir and then he was gone, his hands flying to where his gun rode on his hip. I went to scramble up after him but bodies were everywhere, running for the door trying to escape the melee. I turned my head to see where Key had ended up and gasped when I saw the bright red bloom of crimson that was decorating her chest.
On my hands and knees I scrambled across the floor, trying not to think about how gross that was, until I got to her. Her gray eyes were wide open and I could hear that she was gasping for air. A few moments ago she had tried to kick my ass and now she looked like she was dying right in front of me. I put my hands over the bullet wound and told her, “Hey, you can’t go anywhere. This place needs you.” I meant the city, not the sleazy strip club, and I hoped she knew that. “You get me, Keelyn.” Her eyes drifted closed and I pushed harder on the wound.
Her blood was hot and stick as it leaked through my fingers. “Key?” No response, so I pressed even harder and hollered, “Honor!”
Her eyes popped open and she snapped at me, “Don’t call me that.”
I laughed a little and then was roughly pushed aside by hard hands. I looked up at Nassir as he sank down on his knees next to us. Without a word he stripped off his expensive suit jacket and tossed it to the ground. It immediately got trampled under fleeing feet.
“You can’t die.” His voice was harsh as he pulled off his pristine white shirt and balled it up into a makeshift bandage as he pressed it to the nasty wound. The situation was dire, but even so I took a second to admire the landscape of smooth, burnished bronze skin he revealed. Nassir wasn’t built like a mountain like Titus, but he sure was pretty and I’d had no idea the enigmatic club owner had a massive tattoo that covered his entire back. From shoulder to shoulder and all the way down his spine and even into the top of his tailored slacks ink marked his skin. I couldn’t make out what the scene was and it wasn’t the right time to take a good look at it.
“I can do whatever the hell I want, Gates. You don’t own me.” Key wheezed the words out as she struggled to breathe.
To which he growled, “I would if you would let me.”