Chapter 8
brOOKE
“It’s best you come back inside.” A beefy hand grabbed my arm and yanked me in from my front yard. Once I had my feet beneath me, I looked up. Cereal Man. “Don’t want any neighbors to get hurt now, do you?”
He looked like he ate a lot more than a healthy bran cereal. More like an entire refrigerator. He was built like one. Big and square. His eyes weren’t cold, but they held disinterest. He had zero qualms manhandling an innocent woman.
My place was small and compact, one in a long row of older, cookie-cutter homes. The yards were kept neat, but everyone worked during the day to make ends meet. There was no extra money for things like a simple doorbell camera that would record all this.
He was right, I didn’t want anything to happen to any of my neighbors. After yesterday, I knew their boss wasn’t too concerned about them shooting at innocent people.
I was going to die. They’d broken into my house and had been waiting for me.
It was a while since they’d raided my kitchen for a snack.
Since Roy had killed the shooters from the parking garage, that meant these weren’t the same men.
How many goons did the mob boss have? His men had missed me the night before, so I had no doubt they weren’t going to miss this time.
They were going to take me inside and shoot me.
I swallowed hard, my mouth having lost all spit when I’d found them on my couch.
I was so panicked that my hands tingled as I was led inside.
“I don’t know anything. If I did, I wouldn’t say anything.
Tell your boss that I’m just a junior accountant.
Boring. Look at my house.” I threw my arms wide.
“I don’t even own it. It’s just a rental. I keep my head down and work hard.”
“Quit your yapping.” The other guy gave me a beady-eyed glare, accompanied by a huff.
His brown suit jacket didn’t fit right, as if he’d gained a lot of weight since he purchased it.
He held a gun, his arm down by his side.
I’d watched enough crime shows on TV to recognize a silencer.
Oh, dear Lord. My knees buckled, and Cereal Man held me up with his hold on my arm.
“Jesus, when people know they’re about to die they do strange things. ”
“At least she hasn’t peed herself,” Cereal Man replied.
I hadn’t. Not yet. But if that was part of the I’m-going-to-die process, then it was going to happen very soon.
“Be a good girl and let us kill you the easy way,” the gunman said, his hand coming up, the weapon pointed at me.
I squeezed my eyes shut and whimpered.
Instead of feeling a bullet piercing my skull, I heard my front door slam open, then a roar like a lion at the zoo. I jolted, my eyes popping open.
There was Roy attacking the gunman. He had one hand wrapped around the wrist with the gun, the other around the man’s neck, lifting him off the ground, so his feet hovered over my carpet.
Then, with a flick of his wrist, the man’s neck snapped.
His eyes went unfocused, and his body drooped, as if all the energy had drained from it. Or he was dead.
Roy, breathing hard, let the man drop to the floor with a heavy thud.
I didn’t even know Cereal Man had let go of me until he went after Roy. I screamed then crouched down as if to make myself smaller.
Roy growled, the veins in his neck bulging, his jaw clenched. Were his eyes green now? He looked feral–totally unleashed–as he punched Cereal Man in the face, then grabbed him, spun the man around as if he weighed nothing, not well over two hundred pounds, and snapped his neck, too.
Exactly how the men in the parking garage died.
Christ. I’d been right to run.
With the two men dead and on my living room floor, Roy stood motionless. Breathing hard. His gaze wasn’t on the bodies. It was on me.
He eyed me with a fierceness that was scary. He seemed almost larger than in the hotel, as if he’d grown or morphed with his anger.
He lifted his nose as if he was scenting the air. Like he wasn’t entirely… human.
I took a step back. Then another one.
He might have saved me from being shot–not once but twice–but he was also a murderer. After what I’d just seen, he was definitely the person who’d killed the men in the parking garage. And now these two.
He. Was. A. Murderer.
Because he didn’t just kill. He killed efficiently.
Instinctively.
Like a Marine.
Like a predator.
He hadn’t hesitated. Not a second. Not even a breath. He’d eliminated them.
Yes, he’d saved me. But somehow…it felt like the beginning of something much worse.