Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Uppercut to a chin, sending a body of a smaller man flying backward.
Punch to the liver, incapacitating another while I made my way toward the one I had been tracking for years.
The leader.
A man so vile I wasn't sure hell would even accept him. But I was going to send him there just to be sure.
He wasn't a good fighter, per se. He was just big. Big and strong and angry.
I took a punch to the stomach and one to the jaw before I could scuttle back far enough to use my arm, to slice my blade through his hand as he raised it.
Deep.
That was fucking deep.
If I could have been just an inch closer, I might have been damn near able to sever the fucking thing.
But it was enough.
To take him down for a moment just as uppercut guy came up behind me, arms encircling my upper chest and neck, pulling me clear off the floor, my legs peddling in the air for a second before I could get enough momentum to jerk my body downward. Feet planting, I pushed off, propelling myself upward, loosening the hold on me, so that when my feet would have touched down again, I fell to my knees instead, bowing him down with me, breaking his hold completely, allowing me to slam my blade upward into his throat.
It wasn't a slice.
A slice was clean and easy and quickly fatal. Like the guy back out in the hall.
This was a stab.
A stab to the neck that seemed to jab a hole in his throat, judging by the horrific, rasping sound coming from him.
The following slice wasn't mercy. Not in the least. It just took one thing off my plate.
His body didn't slump to the ground, it crashed, slamming headfirst into one of the metal racks as I spun around, a deafening sound.
Turning, I sought liver-guy, noticing Vance engaged with someone else, some guy who must have come running from somewhere else in the building because he hadn't been in the room when we'd surged inward.
Liver guy put up a pretty decent fight given the pain he had to have been in. A shot to the liver was one of the injuries I hated the most. I'd take a broken bone over a liver shot any damn day.
In the end, my jaw was hurting, my eye would be black, there was a trio of deep claw marks in my arm, and there was another body at my feet.
I was just about to gain my feet when I felt a hand grab me at the wrist, yanking hard and fast, nearly dislocating my shoulder before I found myself tossed onto the makeshift pool table, an ashtray jabbing me in the lower back as money fluttered into the air around me.
It was a bad angle. On your back with no easy escape. A giant, angry man towering over you.
He had giant hands, one making its way around my throat, crushing so hard I was sure he could manage to break my neck before he actually strangled me.
I was just grabbing the sides of the table to try to toss my body off the side when I saw two bloodied hands raise, one grabbing the hair to angle the head back, the other slicing across the entire man's meaty throat.
The blood spilled downward, gruesome as the life slowly left a man I had been hunting for ages.
It wasn't my kill.
There should have been a sense of defeat in that.
But as the body was tossed to the side, leaving Vance there towering over me, chest heaving, arms and shirt bathed in blood, eyes burning bright with the fight and what I could only call a sort of... protectiveness, well, I couldn't seem to muster any sense of disappointment about it.
The man was dead.
His operation would die with him.
Only for a short time, of course, before someone else stepped into his place, but it would save an untold number of children in the meantime.
"Are you hurt?" he asked when I continued to lay there, staring up at him, feeling a sort of squeezing sensation in my chest that should have been off-putting, but it was almost, I don't know, comforting. "Ace?" he demanded when I couldn't seem to muster words. The knife fell from his hands onto the table, his fingers grabbing at my clothes, dragging my shirt up, looking for the gaping hole, the flowing blood.
"I... I'm fine," I managed, swallowing hard. "It's all surface," I added when the worry didn't immediately leave his eyes. "Are you hurt?"
"Just a graze on my arm," he said, giving me his hand, helping me fold up on the table. "The water isn't off."
"What?"
"The water isn't off. That other guy, he came from the bathroom. I heard the water running. We can clean up," he added as I started up at him a little dumbly. Not because I didn't grasp his meaning, but because I hadn't heard the water. Why hadn't I heard the water?