It Ends With Violence (Saint View Psychos Book 3)

Book Preface

BLISS
Screams were the first indication that something was wrong.
Screams that drowned out the low, sultry music.
Screams that cut right through my chest with fear and panic.
In an instant, Psychos turned from a room full of lust and sex into a swirling storm of chaos with
me at the center.
“Bliss! Get out of here!” Rebel shouted in my face, but then she was gone, lost to the swarm of
people rushing for exits in various forms of undress.
I stumbled a foot in her direction, instinct telling me to follow her even though my brain wasn’t
cooperating. The crowd pushed me, sweeping me along with a force I was too shocked to fight.
We’d been having a good time.
Nash’s birthday had been everything I’d promised him it would be. Sexy. Fun. A roomful of
people ready to party, and a much smaller one with just me and him, no barriers between us.
Until my mom had let it slip about Nash’s past.
About how he’d used women. Pimped them out and made money from them.
I’d given my body up to Nash tonight. Let him have me in a way no other man had. My heart had
cracked wide open and let him in.
I thought he’d felt the same.
But he wasn’t the man I thought he was, no matter how much my mother tried to persuade me he
wasn’t like her abusive husband, Jerry, who’d sold her to any person willing to pay. Her assurances
the women had all liked Nash and he’d treated them well didn’t fly.
It was all too raw. Too wrong and too far away from the life that had become mine when my father
had given me a home in Providence.
Gunshots rang out. Piercing blasts of noise, one after the other that froze me to the spot in terror.
“What’s going on?” a man shouted above the din, his eyes wide and flickering erratically.
“It’s the cops!” a woman yelled back. “They’re shooting! They’re shooting everyone!”
Everything stopped.
People I loved were in this club.
One in particular who I’d seen slip from the room and out into the parking lot when Nash’s hands
on my body had become too much for him to watch.
I was mad at Scythe. He’d put me in a shitty position with War when he’d admitted to being the
one who’d killed his father. Then I’d had the displeasure of meeting his ‘fiancée’ while I was wearing
nothing but his T-shirt.
But earlier, Rebel had accused me of being in love with him.
In that instant, I knew it was true.
“Scythe,” I whispered.
He was out there somewhere, in the thick of the shooting and screaming and chaos. All I could
think about was getting to him. I launched into action again, pushing toward the gunfire while
everybody else ran in the opposite direction.
I sprinted through the coatroom and out the other side, pumping my legs as fast as they would go.
Through the open doorway that looked out into the parking lot, pandemonium reigned. Guns popped,
motorcycle engines roared, men shouted, women cried.
My gaze collided with his, right as he was tackled to the ground, mere feet in front of me. His
head cracked off the concrete with a sickening thud.
“Scythe!”
A team of burly, uniformed men pinned him down with brutal punches and kicks to every inch of
his body.
Prison guards.
It took me a moment to work out why they would be attacking the man I loved. Until I remembered
Vincent’s confession of a prison escape, and it all made horrifying, sickening sense.
They’d found him. They were going to drag him back to prison and I’d never see him again. Or
worse, they’d kill him right here in front of me. I’d been so worried about War finding out and killing
him that I hadn’t even considered Scythe’s past catching up with him. “Stop,” I screamed helplessly.
“Please!” I threw myself at them, barely getting a fingertip to one of the guard’s uniforms before
strong arms wrapped around me, holding me back.
I fought against them, my heart breaking and tears rolling down my face while they attacked
Scythe’s lifeless body.
“Bliss, stop. We have to get out of here.”
Nash.
I sank back into the warmth and comfort of his embrace but shook my head, unable to tear my eyes
off Scythe. “We have to help him!”
“We can’t. Not now. There’s too many of them.”
I shoved him off me, whirling around to face him. “We have to!”
He gripped my arms, fingers digging into my biceps painfully. “Dammit, Bliss. We’ve got a club
full of drugs and a parking lot full of cops offloading bullets. I let you go and you’re either going to
get shot or arrested. He wouldn’t ever forgive me if I let anything happen to you, and neither would I.
You’re coming.”
I shouted Scythe’s name as Nash lifted me off my feet and dragged me back through the club to my
office.
He threw open the door and stopped in the doorway, his mood changing instantly. “I should have
fucking known.”
His voice was laced with so much disgust I stopped fighting him and took in what he saw.
My mother with my safe open, loading all the drugs into her purse.
My heart broke all over again. Things had been going too well with my mother around, and she’d
somehow managed to convince me she really had turned over a new leaf. She’d had me believing
when she swore all she wanted from me was a fresh start.
Obviously, she’d just been biding her time, waiting for her chance to strike.
“You were just waiting for your moment, weren’t you, Kim?” Nash snarled, storming across the
room and snatching the bag she was filling. “Once a junkie, always a junkie.”
I expected her to wilt in on herself, to turn and flee, seeing as she was so very busted.
The last thing I expected from my spineless mother was for her to straighten her shoulders and
square off with Nash. She snatched the bag back from his hands. “Those cops are going to be in here
any minute now.” Her gaze darted between me and Nash. “Go, Bliss. Get out of here. I’ll clear this
out and hold it for you until this all blows over.”
There was a sincerity in her gaze that I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen before.
She held the look, her eyes burning with a surety that was unmistakable.
She wasn’t raiding the safe, she was protecting me.
I swallowed hard. I couldn’t run away. That was what Bethany-Melissa would have done.
Bliss didn’t let those she loved go down for something she was responsible for.
Bliss stayed and fought. “Mom, I—”
“Everybody get on the floor!”
The lights inside the club lit up in a blinding flash. Nash spun around, only to be met by a wall of
riot police storming the building.
None of us got another word out.
Two burly officers zeroed in on Nash and body-slammed him to the floor. A moment later, another
shoved me up against my office wall so hard my teeth cracked together and stars swam in my eyes. He
spat words in my face, each one undecipherable in the storm of noise.
Through everything, all I could see was my mother and the fact she never wavered.
Not even when the officers snatched Jerry’s gun and a full bag of drugs from her fingers, then
placed all three of us in handcuffs