Chapter 89
CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE
ARCH
“What the fuck is taking them so long?” I growled.
Rush glared at the fucker, sitting in a puddle of his own blood. His head was hung low, his lip was busted open in several places now, and both of his eyes were swollen shut. Neither of them had moved an inch in the past ten minutes.
I paced in front of them and ran a hand through my hair, wanting to tear it the fuck out. Astrid had better be there. She’d better fucking be there. If she wasn’t … I didn’t know what I was going to do. My hands were aching to kill this fucker right here and right now.
When Rush’s phone rang, he lifted it from his pocket and put it on speaker.
“She’s not breathing,” Cairo said, voice cracking, echoing through the phone. Frasier was flipping out in the background, and I could barely hear Calix. “We’re heading to the hospital with her.”
Cairo didn’t even finish his sentence before I was barreling toward the man, hands balled into fists. I slammed one into his beaten face, feeling satisfaction in the sound that his head made against the concrete wall before hitting him with another one.
He groaned, “She … she was alive when I left her. I didn’t … I didn’t touch her like that.”
Wrong answer.
My fist shot through the air and slammed into his throat. He choked on his own breath, gasping and coughing up blood. Rush stepped toward us, quieter than he usually was, his lips set in an eerie line. The fucker tried to scream again, but nothing but muffled panic left his mouth.
“You broke something that belonged to us,” Rush said, pulling a knife out of his pocket.
I didn’t know where he had gotten it from because the only weapons that Rush usually carried around were his fists, but it was sharp and pointed straight at the fucker’s face. My gaze flickered to Jo?o, who was smirking at the situation, and then I turned back toward them.
“Now it’s our turn to break you,” I growled.
“If you didn’t do this to her, then who did?” Rush crouched down in front of him and pressed the blade against his forehead, cutting into his skin until blood covered his face. “Start talking, or we’ll cut parts off that don’t grow back.”
“She’s … not the only one,” he said. “There are others. It’s a ring, trafficking.”
Jo?o walked over. “Trafficking? Sex trafficking?”
“Only the women,” he said. “They take children and men too. For labor.”
“Who’s they—” Rush began.
But I couldn’t stop myself from snatching the knife from his hand and slamming it into the center of his chest. Trafficking? They were going to fucking use our girl for trafficking?! I stabbed him again and again and again, my sight filled with red.
From rage and from blood.
Jo?o wrapped his arms around me and hurled me to the other side of the room. “We could’ve used that fucker.”
“I don’t give a fuck,” I said, dusting myself off and heading to the door. “He’s dead now.”
All that mattered to me now was making sure Astrid was alive.