Chapter Five #2
It’s the hunter who was at the clubhouse. The one who killed Konstantine and left her calling card as a warning for me. The same one who killed a rogue vampire on our turf, as if it was a favor to me, and then vanished into thin air.
Her hair is pulled back in tight braids that don’t shift when she moves, built to stay out of the way.
Lean, muscular frame, all clean lines and control, strength without bulk, the kind that comes from repetition, not luck.
Her face catches the light for a second as she rises, sharp-boned, striking in a way that doesn’t soften anything about her, but makes the focus in her eyes stand out harder.
Black ink wraps her left arm, not decorative, not random, something deliberate in the lines, the kind of tattoo that means something to the person wearing it and a warning to anyone else who knows how to read it.
Nothing about her looks accidental.
Everything about her looks trained.
Both guns come up before she’s even fully upright, her movements sharp and automatic like her body already decided to pull the trigger before her brain caught up. Two shots crack through the bar almost on top of each other, loud enough to punch through the ringing chaos around us.
Not aimed at me.
Past me.
And through the open back door.
I catch movement in the alley a split second too late, something fast and pale coming out of the dark before both rounds hit home. Two heavy impacts sound outside behind the building, bodies slamming into concrete hard enough to rattle the dumpster against the wall.
But the woman doesn’t lower the guns. She doesn’t celebrate the shots. Instead, she stays locked in position, her eyes sweeping, her shoulders tight, already expecting the next attack before the echoes even die out.
Good.
Because the next problem sure as hell doesn’t come from the alley.
Movement flashes from the side of the room fast enough to blur. I turn just as one rogue clears the end of the bar with another right behind it, both of them moving low and aggressive, eyes locked straight on the nearest living target.
Her.
The hunger rolling off them hits the room like a physical thing.
I’m already moving before either of them reaches her, stepping across the wreckage to intercept…
“I’ve got this,” she demands.
She doesn’t look at me when she says it. She doesn’t need to. The confidence in it is enough to make me pause anyway.
The first rogue reaches her in a heartbeat, coming in fast and vicious with claws out and hunger driving every movement. Most people would have stumbled back from that kind of attack, but she steps straight into it.
Not panicked.
Not hesitant.
Like she has done this before.
The rogue swings high, trying to tear through her defenses with pure speed and brute force, but she closes the distance before it can fully extend the strike, moving right into the danger zone where the claws lose room to work.
Her hand snaps up, catching its wrist mid-strike, redirecting the hit just enough so it skims past her shoulder instead of through it, and she uses the motion, turning with it, driving her other hand hard into its throat with a force that collapses the sound out of it.
It stumbles.
She doesn’t.
Her knee drives up hard into the rogue’s stomach, the impact folding it over just enough to break its momentum. Not a wasted movement anywhere. Every hit is clean, efficient, brutal, and she’s already moving before the bastard even finishes reacting.
The second rogue comes at her from behind fast and ugly, claws reaching for her back.
Or at least it tries to.
She drops low at the last second, twisting out of the line of attack so the rogue blows straight past her. Then she’s inside its space before it can recover, one arm snapping around its throat while the other locks against its shoulder to pin the movement.
No pause.
No struggle.
Just a vicious twist.
The crack of its neck snaps through the bar sharp enough to turn heads. The body drops before the sound fully dies out, collapsing in a heap of dead weight and broken limbs across the floor.
Then she’s turning back toward the first rogue in the same smooth motion, already on it before the thing can fully straighten up again.
It drags in a ragged breath through a crushed throat, trying to recover enough to fight back, but she doesn’t give it the chance.
Instead, she closes the distance hard and grabs a fistful of its shirt, holding the rogue in place like she’s about to make a point.
Her free hand moves, and suddenly there’s a stake in it.
I don’t even catch where the hell she pulled it from. One second, her hand is empty, the next, she’s got polished wood locked in her grip and lined up dead center on the rogue’s chest, then she drives it in.
Hard.
The impact punches through the torso with a brutal crack, wood splitting bone as the stake buries deep into the rogue’s chest and hits the heart clean. The vampire convulses violently against her grip, body jerking once like every nerve fired at the same time.
She doesn’t flinch.
She doesn’t rush it.
She keeps the stake buried there another second, steady and controlled, making damn sure the thing is finished before she finally lets go.
The rogue collapses at her feet and starts caving in on itself the way dead vampires always do, skin tightening over bone while the body sinks inward like something rotten, finally giving up the fight.
The silence that follows lands heavier than the gunshots did.
I’m still standing there halfway through moving in to help, watching her straighten back up like killing two rogues barely got her pulse up.
Huh. Yeah… this woman is a badass.
Her chest rises once, controlled, her gaze flicking over the room again, checking for anything else stupid enough to come at her sideways.
Only then do the guns come back up for a final sweep.
Three seconds.
Then she lowers them to her sides.
Okay, maybe more Lara Croft than superhero, but either way, she’s fucking hot as hell.
The silence that follows is a different kind entirely.
I haven’t moved, standing in the center of a destroyed bar, blood on my hands, on my leather cut, and across the floor between us.
She is ten feet away, breathing the kind of breath that comes after a fight rather than during one, the body winding back from its own sharpest edge.
Glass catches in her dark hair where she landed through it.
A streak of blood cuts across her left cheekbone from a gash that’s already slowing.
Her tactical vest is splattered from a kill she made before she came through my roof.
She looks at me like none of this surprised her. Like she already knew I’d be here.
And the way her eyes move over me… not nervous or impressed, simply assessing. It’s like she’s already pulling me apart piece by piece in her head to figure out exactly what I am.
“You’re Scar.” Her voice is flat, stripped of every unnecessary thing. “I’ve heard of you. Five hundred years old and still playing biker gang dress-up.” Something moves in her expression that is not quite a smile, and she tilts her head to the side. “Cute.”