Dark Stars by Danielle Rollins (best affordable ebook reader txt) 📕

a worried crease between his brows. He stood very slowly, the canister of exotic matter clenched in one hand.

“Why would I care what happens to her?” he asked. He was dusting the dirt from his trousers, and so Dorothy couldn’t see his face, but his voice was thick with emotion. “She just tried to sell me to you.”

“He has a point, sweetheart,” Mac said.

Dorothy felt his breath on her ear and had to work hard not to cringe.

“Ash.” She had to force his name through her lips. He looked at her, his eyes narrowing and for a long moment, Dorothy just stared back at him, studying those golden eyes and thinking of the first time they’d met. What had he said to her?

Excuse me for saying so, miss, but it seems like you meant to get lost.

She smiled now, remembering. Her mind felt strangely blank.

Ash frowned, waiting for her to speak. To beg for her life, perhaps, or else beg him to trust her again. She had no intention of doing either. Everything she could think to say seemed so small and stupid. What’s done was done and, now, all they could do was wait to see how the rest of this would play out.

She said simply, “I wouldn’t trust him, if I were you.”

The edge of Ash’s mouth flicked, the beginning of a smile.

Mac swore, his grip around her shoulders tightening. Dorothy heard a click.

Down on the dock, Ash shouted, “No—”

Dorothy was vaguely aware of movement, Ash struggling to make his way up the stairs, the Freaks closing in around him. All of that seemed very far away just now. Dorothy clenched her eyes shut, every muscle in her body pulling tight—

Mac pulled the trigger, and a sound like fireworks filled her ears, the blast crashing around the inside of her skull. She tried to take a breath, but it was as though someone was holding her lungs in their hand, squeezing. Black lights burst before her eyes and pain tore through her. And then . . .

Well, and then there was nothing for a little while.

34Ash

The shot echoed through Ash’s head, seeming to ring in his ears long after it should’ve gone silent.

Time hitched. He almost thought it was a time-travel thing, how the world around him seemed to slow down so that he saw every moment of what happened next in vivid, excruciating slow motion.

Dorothy went limp in Mac’s arms, her head lolling to the side as blood spread over her temple. Ash stared at her, his eyes not quite focusing. He couldn’t make himself believe what had just happened.

Mac stepped away from her, allowing her body to hit the ground just as the smoke from his gun cleared.

“I’m done playing nice,” he said, smacking his lips. “Seems to me that both of you had your chance to make deals a long time ago. We’re at my hotel, surrounded by my people, and I’m currently the only one holding a gun, so I’m going to go ahead and make the rules.”

Mac hadn’t holstered his gun, Ash noticed. He glanced to where he’d dropped his own gun. Still a few feet away. Too far.

Ash lunged for it, but he was still a good foot away when Mac shot. He ducked the bullet, slamming into the ground, his fingers twitching, his mouth filling with dust and dirt. Wood scraped into his cheeks, and remnants of shattered glass bit into his skin.

He coughed, hard, and tried to push himself back up, but Mac was too quick. There was a click that could’ve been a thumb sliding over the hammer of a gun—that was probably a thumb sliding over the hammer of a gun—and then cold metal pressed up against the back of Ash’s neck.

“The two of you have been pains in my ass for too long,” Mac said. “Why don’t you just hand over that canister and we can both—”

Ash threw his head back, his skull connecting with something hard. A grunt, and a spray of blood told him it’d been Mac’s face.

“You son of a bitch!” Mac snarled. He still had an arm angled across Ash’s back, holding him down, but his weight had shifted, and Ash knew he was probably struggling to retain his grip on him, his gun, and his badly bleeding face. Taking advantage of the chaos, Ash hauled himself up to his forearm and threw his elbow behind him.

A sharp clang told him that Mac had dropped his gun, too.

They were both unarmed.

Mac curled an arm around Ash’s neck and tried to drag him backward, but Ash was larger than Mac, and he hurled himself to the side, sending Mac off his back and rolling through the ashes. He was seeing stars, and his arms and legs felt like jelly, but he made himself push up to hands and knees, blinking.

Where was his gun?

There—a flash of metal in the ashes. Ash grunted, crawling for it, and that was when he noticed Mac a few feet away, eyes locked on something in front of him.

Mac reached his gun first, and he pushed himself up to his knees, swiveling around. His gun was before him, finger at the trigger—

A half second later, a gunshot cracked through the air.

Ash clenched his eyes shut a moment before the bullet hit him.

35Dorothy

Dorothy lay on the Fairmont steps, her eyes clenched tightly shut. Pain beat in her temples, but it was a shallow pain, almost like the beginnings of a headache. She felt a throbbing ache in her shoulder from where she’d smashed into the stairs, and she was pretty sure the fake blood was getting in her hair.

She opened her eyes a crack and saw that everything around her had gone dim and cloudy. People were blurry, unfocused. The edges of her eyesight seemed to pulse.

Blast. It was possible that she had a concussion.

She eased her eyes open just a bit wider, and now she could make out a glimmer of light in Ash’s hand.