Sliding the blade from his throat, my fingers slip on warm copper. Carlos collapses against me, his nearly-dead weight dragging me to the ground. It’s a welcome defeat. Triumphant. He spasms and gurgles, holding me in an involuntary embrace.
Still, I hold his dying body closer than a lover. I want to feel the moment his heart ceases to beat. When the life drains fromhis veins, he’ll be in my arms. The woman he tried to break. The fighter he forged in fire.
With palms sliding in the crimson stickiness flooding around us, it takes all my strength to shove Carlos to the side when his jerking ceases. My battered body screams for relief, a familiar form of fierce agony.
When I look at Carlos, glassy vacantness stares back. Two empty pits that once held malice are little more than soulless oblivion now. The confirmation slices invisible strings that have held me hostage since the day I fled, puppeteering my every move.
Carlos is dead.
I killed him.
I fucking won.
Lost in those void chasms, I fail to mount a defence against the heavy weight that cuts short my triumph with a tackle. One of Carlos’s men locks me in a grappling match, two steel-hands attempting to cinch around my neck to choke the life from me.
“Stupid bitch,” he spits in accented English. “You will die for that!”
The instincts I honed across hundreds of battles snap into place.Play dead. Reposition. Attack.My fingers clench around the sticky blade, waiting for Carlos’s brute to roll and flip me onto my back.
His ragged nails bury deep in my throat, miniature razors piercing my oesophagus. Fire fills me from head to toe as oxygen becomes a rare commodity.
“Señor Gael can have your rotting bones!”
The moment I slip the blade into his exposed midriff, I see it in his gaze. His pupils blast open, and his mouth flops with a shocked gasp. I pull back the blade, sinking it into his stomach. Then his side. His torso. Over and over until organs pierce and skin rips open.
I can hardly feel the movement of pushing him aside and wrenching myself up to advance on the next target. Fists flying. Limbs wrestling to gain the upper hand. My blade sinking deep into soft tissue and between bones.
Slash. Stab. Slash.
Blood replaces skin, forming a tight curtain across my whole existence. I’m drenched in it. The warmth. The triumph of unshackling a part of myself I’ve only ever accessed in the ring then buried the day that jet landed back in England.
Slash. Stab. Slash.
Human life shouldn’t be so easy to take. Little more than the snuffing out of a candle. Inconsequential. In seconds, families are destroyed, lives changed, lines crossed. Yet that doesn’t halt me from mowing down each obstacle in my path.
Slash. Stab. Slash.
None of it matters. Not even those watching the return of 768. Her inevitable comeback. The moment she overpowers my body to find a permanent home—one that won’t allow her to be buried again. She’s back and here to stay.
When my knees buckle, carrying me to the hard ground, the blade clatters at my side. Liquid death drips from my face, hands, torso. Coating rapidly forming bruises and mangled flesh. Evidencing the severing of mortal coils without so much as a single regret.
The world flashes in and out. Red-soaked carnage becomes bright strobe flashes, cutting reality into bite-sized trauma. Voices nearing. Footsteps. The blast of gunfire. Strong hands on my shoulders, fingers pressing into my wet cheeks.
“Em?”
I blink. Breathe. Shudder.
“Come back, dimples.”
Amber-orange eyes beg me for recognition.
“Let 768 go now. She did a good job, but I need you to come back to us. Come back to me, babe.”
“A-Ax?”
“Yeah. I’m here now. Sorry I’m late to the party.”
Clenching my eyes shut, it takes monumental effort to fight off the red lens across my vision. All I can see is blood. Everywhere, covering everything. Shredding my morals to the bare bone. Unleashing a monstrous, mind-numbing thirst to rain hellfire on every last threat we face.
