“C’mon, Gina, I’m begging you!”

Not a single waitress so far had been willing to cover for me in the VIP room, and I was starting to get desperate. The last thing that I needed was my dad’s best friend to find out that I was serving cocktails at a strip club.

So I started petitioning some of the dancers. It wasn’t a good look, especially since those girls did so much already, but the fear of familial repercussions was real.

So there I was, backstage, asking waitresses and talent alike to keep me from harm.

“I’ve got three tables that I’m already behind on, Chrissy,” Gina said. “Your family’s going to have to find out sooner or later.”

Before I could respond, she was already making tracks back out into the dining room. I could feel a pit opening up in my stomach. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to take it if my dad found out the truth about what I had to do to get by.

“Everything all right, Chrissy?”

I looked up to see Melody striding over, wrapped in a faux-silk robe that came down to mid-calf, her hair and makeup done up for her impending performance.

“No,” I admitted, slumping down into one of the unattended seats in front of a vanity. “I’m completely fucked.”

“What’s wrong?” she asked, sitting down in the seat next to me. “Did Gary find out you’re not supposed to be working today?” She pulled a pair of enormous heels from beneath her vanity and starting to put them on.

“No,” I sighed. “I have to work the VIP room, but the VIP is a friend of my dad’s… and he doesn’t know I work in a strip club.” I looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes were red, a side-effect of holding back tears of frustration. “If he finds out, there’s gonna be hell to pay. And no one’s willing to help cover me.”

“Jesus, that sucks,” Melody said, frowning as she finished up her heels. “None of them are willing to help?”

“No, and I’m running out of time,” I said, gripping my hair by the roots in an attempt to soothe the tension headache well on its way. “Even though the only reason I’m even here tonight is because Roxie needed her shift covered. I need to be back in there any minute now.”

“All right,” she said, looking around the dressing room, “I think Tina owes me a favor. I’ll get her to cover for you in the VIP room and you can take over her tables.”

“Really?” I asked, looking up, eyes wide. “I mean… thank you. But why? You barely know me.”

“True,” she admitted, “but I know how it feels when your family finds out you have to work in a strip club just to get by. I was exactly where you were once, and it’s the worst feeling ever—seeing them disappointed in you—so if I can spare you that…”

She trailed off, turning her gaze away before standing up in one swift movement, balancing gracefully on her stilettos as she offered me her hand to help me to my feet.

That was when we heard the first gunshots.

The sound of it made me stop dead, my eyes wide. I turned toward the entrance of the dining room as screams rose in a terrible, violent crescendo, punctuated by firecracker pops that echoed in my core.

Before I could fully comprehend what was happening, Melody seized my arm and yanked me close.

“We need to hide,” she said, pulling me toward the stairs the lead out and onto the stage.

“What’re you doing?” I hissed, trying to pull away, sure that if we went through that curtain we’d be shot. “They’ll see us!”

“Just trust me,” she whispered, pulling me back toward the stairs.

But instead of going through them, Melody pushed me down onto my hands and knees and tugged open a panel underneath the steps. On the other side was only thick, unyielding darkness.

“There’s a crawlspace under the stage. No one can see us in there,” she said, urging me to head in first. “Just get inside, and—”

The gunshots were getting closer. I could hear the scuffles of performers and waitresses attempting to take cover in the dressing room. The shouting outside the room was getting louder, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t understand a word of it—it all sounded like gibberish.

“Go!” Melody hissed, pushing me farther into the crawlspace until I was all the way inside.

Screams erupted in a new, shrill timbre before the light of the access panel snuffed with a metallic clunk. I couldn’t feel anyone behind me, and I knew that Melody had closed me in to make sure I was safe.

“Oh, God!” I whispered as my eyes adjusted to the dark, tiny points of light filtering in like stars through the sides of the stage.

I huddled in further back, putting as much distance between myself and the access panel in case one of the people who was shooting out there decided to be thorough. I could only hope that they were just as clueless about this place as I had been before Melody…

A lump formed in my throat as I realized that out past that panel was likely the corpse of the girl who had saved my life. Nausea overwhelmed me, but retching could end my life. With great effort, I bit back on my bile.

A bullet tore through the stage, boring a hole into the side of it. The bile in my throat was replaced by my heart jackhammering away at my larynx. Making myself as small as I could, I scrambled away from the splintered shaft of light now penetrating my hiding spot.

Gary’s voice cut through the barrage. Through the entrance wound in the wood, I watched him throw up his hands, as if they could shield him from what was to come. “No, please—” weren’t especially creative last words, as far as that kind of thing goes, but the way he said it…

Blood sprayed from his shoulder. He collapsed out of view. I watched in horror as one of the gunmen—a man in all black, his hair cut short with a thick beard, his eyes cold like iron—walked over to where my manager had disappeared and fired three more shots into his body.

I covered my mouth, biting down on the heel of my palm to silence the scream that threatened to burst forth as more and more patrons and dancers were cut down in front of me. I wanted to do something to help them. I wanted to save them. But how? How could I, when my cell phone was in my locker and I was just one, tiny girl up against a slew of firearms?

Later, I’d hate myself for closing my eyes. But I had to. I had to, or I would have done something stupid and gotten myself killed. So I shut my eyes and clapped my hands over my ears until the frantic pace of my heart drowned out the last of the screaming. The crying. The begging.

Until everything went still.

The silence nearly undid me. Somehow, it was more terrifying than the sounds of my coworkers dying had been. It was just so… wrong. A confirmation of the unthinkable. They’d all been mowed down. Every last one of them?

And for fucking what?

I couldn’t even begin to imagine. I couldn’t even fathom what the hell all this was for. Why us? Why here? What had we ever done to anybody to deserve this? I couldn’t make sense of it. The more I tried, the more all the feeling seemed to drain out of me until I was utterly, disturbingly numb.

Even when a few of the men began speaking, it was in a language I didn’t understand, a throaty, earthy kind of accent rolling from their tongues as they pointed to the door to the VIP room.

Two of them disappeared from view. I heard a door open. A moment later, they reappeared, dragging with them a heavy-set man doing his best to put up a fight. A few more gunshots followed as the rest of the dancers who had been hiding in there were shot just like the others, and the man I now recognized as my uncle Tony was forced onto his knees.

Uncle Tony.

No. No, no, please...

“You punks think that you can just walk in here and—” Uncle Tony screamed, using what bluster he could conjure up to seem like he wasn’t afraid… but even from under the stage, I could hear it in his voice. The tremor. The realization he was going to die. That nobody was making it out of here alive.

“You are going to be message for your boss,” the man with the beard said, his eyebrows raised in amusement at Tony’s attempt at courage. “That his time is over now.”

“I ain’t gonna tell nobody nothin’ for you pieces of shit!” my uncle screamed, struggling valiantly against the two men holding him on the ground.

“That is why it is not a message with words,” the gunman said, pressing the muzzle of his pistol right to my uncle’s head and unceremoniously pulling the trigger.

The man I had known since I was a little girl crumpled into a heap on the floor. Gone. Just like that, all trace of him… removed. He was only a sprawled sack of meat now, blurred by a sudden influx of cold, stinging tears.

The gunman barked something at the others, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. They shuffled out of view like a murder of crows fleeing the scene of their latest crime—the remains of their dinner.

I don’t know how long it was until I crawled out from underneath the stage. I had to make my way over the bodies of a few of the dancers who were still back in the dressing room when the shooters came through. They were still warm. I remember that. Warm, and wet, and… empty. Gone.

Just like my uncle.

And there were so many of them. Everywhere I looked, there were people strewn across the club, their bodies hanging limply over chairs and overturned tables, slumped against walls and lying flat on the floor in pools of blood.

Unfeeling, barely even comprehending what I was doing, I picked my way out into the dining room, stepping over debris and bodies to stand over Uncle Tony’s corpse. My uncle, one of the most feared men in Vegas, was lying cold and dead on the floor on his side. So close to him, I could see his eyes. How dull they looked, where life had sparkled before. How flat and vacant. Not like the man who used to get drunk at parties, all red in the face, and tell dirty jokes to kids barely old enough to understand them.

“Oh, God,” I whimpered, covering my mouth with my hands as I knelt down beside him. “Tony… I’m so sorry.”

Sorry I hadn’t somehow seen this coming. Sorry I hadn’t done more, or anything at all, to stop it once it arrived. Sorry I hadn’t been able to call for help. Sorry I survived.

Was I the only one? Was it really just me who’d made it out this nightmare still breathing?

I looked around. Yeah. Just me.

Gina. Melody. Gary. My uncle. All gone.

My whole body seized as another gunshot rang out somewhere near the kitchen. I turned my head so fast the muscles in my neck pulled and flushed with painful heat. The stutter-step of my heart crescendoed once again and I stood, stumbling backward, thinking maybe I could make it back to my hiding place.

At the same time I was sorry for surviving, I didn’t want to die. Not like them. Not like this.

I tripped and went sprawling, catching myself badly on the palms of my hands, wrists shrieking in protest and knees reverberating with a sharp ache. Oh, I knew her. That was Caramel, but everyone called her Carrie, because she was new and soft and sweet and like a little sister to the girls who’d been here forever, the girls who’d shut down the soft parts of themselves a long time ago, and…

“Hey. Hey! Stop.”

A man’s voice. Not like the others. And yet I tried to crawl away all the same, because he was a man with a gun, and men with guns had did this. Men with guns had taken away all I had.

He was closing in on me. He was going to get me. I knew it. I could feel him looming closer, feel him on my heels as I tried to navigate the broken glass and limp limbs and—

His hand closed around the muscle in my shoulder.

I screamed.

“No, no—hey!” he stammered, recoiling as I turned onto my back, hands raised to shield my face as if they could do a damn thing against a hail of bullets. “You’re okay. You’re safe. I’ve got you…”

Through my fingers, I could make out the great, hulking shadow of a man, tall and powerful and standing astride me. As I moved my hands, the lights crafted a halo behind him that made his dark hair gleam and his arresting eyes seem to shine in their sockets. That was all I cared about right then—those eyes, and how soft and warm they were. How their seafoam shade, glittering green and then a soft, comforting brown as he tilted his head, seemed to hold such yearning to protect me, to help.

No. He wasn’t like the rest.

But who the hell was he?

“Please don’t kill me,” I whispered hoarsely. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t see anything. I swear…”

“I’m not gonna kill you,” the man said, shoving his gun into the back of his pants. “I’m just gonna help you up. All right?”

He offered me his hand. He had coarse palms, like he worked with them a lot. Strong fingers that wound around mine in a tight grip as, effortlessly, he pulled me to my unsteady feet. I wobbled, and as this mountain of a man moved to catch me, his gaze slid to the floor where my Uncle Tony’s body was lying.

His face blanched. “Is that…?”

He didn’t finish his sentence, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to finish it for him. Lips pressed into a thin, pale line, my new best started pulling me to the exit.

“I hate to do this to you, but we gotta go,” he said. “And if that’s who I think it is, we gotta go now.”

“But…” I started, looking over my shoulder at the carnage. “My friends…”

I knew it was stupid. They were all dead. They weren’t coming back. And there was nothing I could do for them now. But it still felt like some kind of betrayal to cut and run while their bodies were still warm. Like when your pet dies and you have to transport it inside a garbage bag. It just feels… disrespectful.

The man turned, grabbing me by both my arms. He stooped to look me in the eyes, to mesmerize me with the color of his irises.

“Sweetheart. Whatever your name is. Your friends are dead.”

Revulsion panged in my gut. “I… I know.”

Softly, and a little more slowly, he added, “And if we don’t get the fuck out of here, we will be, too. So you gotta decide. Are you coming with me? Or are you gonna join them?”

It should’ve been an easy choice. A no-brainer. But after what I’d just seen, my brain was running at half-speed and double-time all at once. I barely knew which direction was up anymore. And I certainly had no idea who this stranger was telling me I should grab his hand and run.

“Who are you?” I asked him.

Now his lips curved into a grim and devastating smirk.

“I’m the guy with the motorcycle.”