The one he’d been beating on glanced up with eyes that were more tired than hostile. “Why are you looking at us like that.”

Because you’re going to die tonight, he thought.

Jim’s voice registered from a distance: “Vin? What’s up?”

Vin shook himself, and prayed those damn shadows disappeared. No luck. He tried to rub his eyes in hopes of wiping them away—and found that his face hurt too much from the punches it took to handle that kind of attention.

And the shadows prevailed.

Trez nodded over his shoulder to the club. “If you two can head in, I’m going to have a word with this pair of shit-heads. Just so that they’re perfectly clear on where things stand.”

“Yeah. Cool.” Vin forced himself to get moving, but as he came up to the door, he glanced over at the kids. “Be careful…watch yourselves.”

“Fuck you,” was what came back at him. Which meant they were taking it not as advice, but a threat.

“No, I mean—”

“Come on,” Jim said, muscling him back into the building. “Let’s go.”

God, maybe he was wrong. Maybe he just needed to get his eyes checked. Maybe he was going to get a migraine in another twenty minutes. But whatever the explanation, he couldn’t go back to where he’d been with this shit. He just couldn’t handle that.

In the hallway, Jim took his arm. “You get knocked in the head bad?”

“Nope.” Although, given how much his face was flaring up, that wasn’t entirely true. “I’m fine.”

“Whatever. Let’s give the owner a minute out back and when he comes in again, I’ll take you to my truck.”

“I’m not leaving until I see that—”

Woman. There by the locker room door.

Vin headed for her, shutting all of his paranoid, wingnut head spins down and concentrating on her. “Are you okay?”

She’d put a fleece on over her revealing getup, and the thing fell to her thighs, making her seem like the kind of woman you wanted to take into your arms and hold through the whole night.

“Are you all right?” he repeated when she didn’t answer.

Her eyes, those stunning blue eyes of hers, finally swung over to his face…and he felt it again, that high-bore charge barreling through him, enlivening him.

Her lips lifted in a small smile. “The question is more…are you?” As Vin frowned, she made a motion around his face. “You’re bleeding.”

“It doesn’t hurt.”

“I think it’s going to—”