Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 113936 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113936 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
After the guards ran off, their footfalls disappearing down the concrete corridor outside, she went across and stood over the patient she’d put on Kane’s bed. Her hands shook as she pulled the shirt collar away from the throat. The anatomy was ravaged, veins and arteries cut, the windpipe exposed. His breathing was bad, uneven and ineffectual because of the tear in the airway.
He had only a minute or two left to live.
As if sensing her presence, he opened his eyes. One was bloodshot from some kind of impact, a fist or perhaps a blunt object.
“Help… me…,” he whispered.
Reaching out, she gently lifted his head. Slipping the pillow free, she lowered him back down in place, his cervical column now flat, his throat no longer compressed in any way.
Nadya stared at him, taking note of the hair color, the complexion… the name badge on the front of his uniform.
“I know who you are,” she said softly.
His mouth opened as he tried to breathe better, his tongue clicking as fresh blood dribbled down onto the sheets she had washed with such care.
“And I know what you did.”
With that, she covered his face with the pillow and put all her weight into holding the seal in place. As the guard’s torso jerked and his arms flailed, as his heels kicked at the foot of the bed and his hips twisted back and forth, she pictured Kane’s face.
While she killed the guard who had taken him away with such harsh hands, taken him to his certain death.
When all movement ceased, she eased back and lifted the pillow. The male’s eyes were trained on something up above him. Perhaps the Fade… but she prayed it was Dhunhd.
“May you rot in the earth,” she said in the Old Language.
CHAPTER SEVEN
As Apex had volunteered to go up and distract the guards, he’d been ready to fight. He hadn’t had much of a plan, but considering he’d found what appeared to be a steak knife in the back of the Monte Carlo, he was just going to balls-to-the-wall it and keep the guards busy long enough for Lucan and Rio to get the show on the road, so to speak.
Plus he really felt like killing something(s).
And he’d figured when the guards took him down, which they would because they had superior firepower, especially when compared to his absolutely-no-firepower, at least he could die with the knowledge that he’d done some damage on the way out.
Except now there was screaming up there. What the hell from the screaming—
Straightening from his crouch, he got a gander at… a massacre up on the road. The guards had stopped their vehicles in a tight row, the better to provide cover, and in the glow from all those headlights, six or seven of them were flailing around, trying to run, but getting dragged back into whatever was happening. Most of the action was out of view, but he could smell the blood—
Some kind of fragment flew up into the air, its arc bringing whatever it was into Apex’s orbit. After the thing landed on a bounce in the dirt, he glanced down. It was a hand, severed at the wrist, the gristle a glossy set of streamers for the opposing-thumb-and-then-some whole.
Fuck it.
As Lucan yelled for him to stop, Apex bolted for the fight, jumping across the hood, landing on the shoulder, and racing up to the cracked asphalt. Rounding the first vehicle, he—
Stopped.
A mere five feet away, on the pavement, a wolf was savaging the chest of one of the guards. As the male tried to beat the animal away, he got nowhere with that—and then there was no way he was defending himself against anybody: That set of canine hardware got past the shredded uniform and into the pecs, the sternum, the stomach cavity.
Like the shit was a meal.
“You want some beer with that?” Apex muttered as he looked past the funeral-in-the-making.
There were four other guards in various stages of lunch meat, the ones still on their feet soon to be on the ground, the ones on the ground soon to be immobile.
The immobile ones soon to be consumed.
Lowering his dagger hand and his pointy little steak knife, he stayed where he was, because why ruin somebody else’s party—but more to the point, holy fuck he was in pain. Getting blendered in a rollover was not conducive to being all hale-and-hearty, and as he took a deep breath, one side of his rib cage lit up like it was hooked to a car battery.
So yes, he stayed off to the side.
The gruesome deaths didn’t bother him. As a hired assassin, you better not be squeamish, and even though he’d been a prisoner for a while, it wasn’t like that camp had been Shangri-La. If anything, it had made him even harder.
And then it was over. Nothing left to kill.