If Viola felt any ounce of real fear she masked it completely and smiled softly up at the shewolf, moving her wet hair away from her face with one hand as she looked up at Jaz and shook her head slowly. "I don’t think you actually want to settle this with a gun. Whoever sent you here didn’t include me in the kill order, so how about you put the gun down and we settle this the way we did last night. Jaz, right?"

Viola wasn’t stupid. If they had wanted her dead, Nat wouldn’t have told her to walk away. He would have shot her where she stood. And knowing there was someone behind this assassination pulling the strings, she was well aware that Jaz wouldn’t pull that trigger no matter how badly she wanted to.

Jaz gritted her teeth and kept the gun raised and Viola tilted her head and taunted, "Am I to assume you are scared of fighting me without a weapon between us?"

"Oh, fuck you!" Jaz snapped and threw the gun to the ground, telling herself she couldn’t kill the woman if they wanted their money, but nobody had said anything about not beating the living fuck out of her. She hadn’t been ready last night when the bitch came at her from across the bar counter. She was ready now.

Viola got to her feet, feeling slightly dizzy but holding her ground. All she needed was to get her hands on Jaz’s guns and weapons and she would get herself back to Sebastian and assist him the way a Luna should stand by her man, not run off like a coward with her tail between her legs.

She watched as Jaz pulled her hair back, cracked her knuckles and began to close the distance between them with a wide smirk.

"You want to fist fight me knowing I have my full wolf powers and you have none? Fine. I will give you exactly what you are asking for." She came at Viola with full force, swinging for her face, but Viola ducked under it and drove her fist hard into her abdomen.

Jaz cursed in pain but recovered fast and grabbed Viola’s drenched hair, swinging her back and slamming her fist into her chest twice before hurling her to the ground with the added force of her wolf strength behind it.

Viola hit the ground hard enough to knock every bit of breath out of her body and cramp her chest. She groaned but knew she couldn’t stay down, not even for a second. She saw Jaz’s foot swinging down toward her face and rolled to the side just as another series of gunshots reverberated through the trees around her, pulling her thoughts sharply back to her husband.

"You hear that? Your husband is being taken care of as we speak. We have over a hundred men surrounding this forest with weapons that can kill him instantly."

Viola felt her insides clench hard when she strained to listen and couldn’t hear Sebastian’s howl anymore, only the repeated cracking of gunfire. She tightened her fists in the dirt beneath her, and then she pushed herself up, grabbed a handful of sand and hurled it directly into Jaz’s face before making a lunge for the gun the she-wolf had thrown to the ground.

She almost reached it. Jaz, rubbing furiously at her eyes and cursing through her teeth, pulled a dagger from her belt and threw it in one fluid motion. It went straight into Viola’s back and she went down hard, landing right beside the gun with a cry that tore out of her throat before she could stop it.

"I am going to rip your throat out and I would like to see who tries to stop me today!" Jaz snarled furiously, storming toward the fallen Viola who was bleeding and groaning against the ground, her fingers clawing forward.

But just as Jaz reached close enough to grab her, her eyes went wide with terror as Viola turned over to face her with stone cold blue eyes and the gun already in her hand, snatched from the ground in the same movement, and before Jaz could process what was happening Viola pulled the trigger and the bullet went straight through her heart.

"Fuck me...!" Jaz managed before she dropped, dead before she fully hit the ground, a gaping hole blown through her chest with smoke raising from it. The bullets loaded in the gun were not ordinary and the kill was almost instant, surprising even Viola herself as she hadn’t known there was such guns and bullet to kill werewolves this fast.

Viola lay there breathing hard, watching the life drain out of Jaz’s wide open eyes. If there was any remorse in her own blue eyes for what she had just done, it had died a long time ago, the day she took her first life back in Moonwillow as the pack princess.

This was not her first kill and so she didn’t linger on it. She recovered and reached back trying to grip the dagger buried in her back, groaning as her fingers couldn’t reach the handle no matter how she twisted.

When another series of gunshots cracked through the trees followed by the sound of men yelling and groaning, Viola made the decision quickly. She couldn’t waste time trying to pull out a dagger lodged where her hands couldn’t reach.

She grabbed both of Jaz’s heavy guns off the ground, dragged herself over to the body to strip any remaining weapons from her, and then pulled herself to her feet and began making her way back in the direction of the gunfire.

Viola ran and walked, ignoring the burning pain in her back and the blood trailing steadily behind her with every step, her thoughts entirely fixed on the fact that everything had gone completely silent. No more gunshots. No more groaning. Not even the sound of wind moving through the leaves, which was somehow worse than the noise had been.

Viola quickened her pace, making sure to stay out of the open where she could be fired on without warning, moving through the dense bushes instead with the gun held up. But when she began to reach the scene, what she found there was so completely unexpected that her gun slowly lowered on its own and her eyes went wide.