Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 64366 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 322(@200wpm)___ 257(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64366 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 322(@200wpm)___ 257(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
And that’s when all hell broke loose. At Santori’s order I glanced over at Aldo. He took a couple of steps toward me with a gun in his hand, which officially answered the question of whether or not they were armed. Fantastic. But just as Aldo was passing Kage’s body on the floor, Kage spun up onto his shoulder blades, using his bound arms as leverage. In an instant, he had his legs wrapped like vines around Aldo’s, and he was taking the man down. Aldo’s two-hundred-plus pounds hit the glass coffee table, and his gun went off as glass shattered around him. Kage yelled out some crazy garbled-up war cry, or maybe he was trying to tell me something. Who knows? Whatever it was that he was trying to say didn’t matter anyway. I dropped back onto the balcony just as Santori lunged at me with the syringe.
When Kage had described to me how his mind shifted during a fight, allowing his body to perform actions from memory without thinking about them, it had sounded cool. But I hadn’t truly understood what he’d meant until that moment. Now I knew.
As Santori lunged at me, I panicked, my heart spewing beats like Uzi rounds. Then everything happened too fast to process. Fate or instinct put me in the perfect position to grab onto his reaching arm, and my body took over. Drills in Judo class that I’d done just to feel closer to Kage now surged to the surface, and I did the right thing for once. It was so smooth, everything clicking into place like it never had in class. Using his arm and his forward momentum, I got under Santori’s body just right to execute a perfect one-arm shoulder throw. The syringe stabbed me in the gut as I flipped him around and tossed him right over the side of the balcony.
The fingers of one of his hands grasped and caught on the balcony rail, and for the first time, he looked like he felt something. Apparently fear for himself is what it took to wake his dead heart. Before he could even bring the other hand up to get a better hold on the rail, I balled up my fist and brought it down as hard as I could on his fingers, feeling bones snap. He lost his grip, and I watched him all the way down.
Another gunshot from within the apartment snapped me out of my daze, and I ran, heedless of my own safety, to see if Kage had been hurt. What I saw surprised me. Kage was sitting up, rubbing his wrists where they had been freed from the tie. Aaron stood with his gun drawn on Aldo’s lifeless body, a fresh bullet hole in the dead man’s forehead trickling blood onto the floor.
“We’ve got to get out of here right now,” Aaron said. “I’ve got a car waiting at the underground entrance. If we’re here when the cops arrive, we’ll have some serious ‘splaining to do.”
“What about this?” I pulled the syringe out of my belly. It didn’t appear that any of the medication had been released.
“Bring it,” he said. “They don’t need to find a needle with your DNA on it. I already grabbed the one he used on Kage.”
We got on either side of Kage and took the elevator down one floor to the service elevator, which took us all the way to the basement. True to his word, Aaron did have a car waiting for us, and we collapsed into the back seat, where I was able to breathe again.
“What happened to Santori?” Kage slurred, reminding me that although he had just taken a larger man down and helped save us all, he was still fucked up from whatever drug Santori was planning on killing us with.
“Don’t worry about it, babe. I shoulder-threw and hammer-fisted his ass into oblivion. He can’t mess with us anymore.”
“That’s great,” he said, his voice thin. “I was so afraid he was going to kill you out there. And then when Aldo took off to help him—” He got choked up with emotion and couldn’t finish his sentence.
“Yeah, well there was no need to worry. I was a real badass. I’m thinking about joining the UFC.”
“Oh, brother,” Aaron groaned. “Now listen to this one. So full of himself.”
“I’m just trying to tell my boyfriend that he doesn’t have to worry about anything anymore. I’m trying to comfort him.”
“You’re bragging,” Aaron said. “I put a bullet through Aldo’s head for him. You don’t hear me bragging about it, now do you?”
I gaped at him. “Actually, yes. You just did. That was actually passive-aggressive bragging that you were doing.”
“Boss…” Aaron said, leaning around me to address Kage. “Boss.”
Finally Kage glanced up out of his drug-and-trauma induced haze and answered. “Oh. Yeah, Aaron. What is it?”