Chapter 39
The promise of a fight sizzled in my veins as I stalked through the trees. My fist balled over the palm grip of my brass knuckles. Leaf litter rustled up ahead, but a branch cracked to my right. I crouched low to the base of a tree on top of stones and its roots.
A hunched shadow crept past, each step of his boots purposeful.
He led with his pistol, his arms and weapon extended.
I flexed my fingers through the brass knuckles and readied for the fight.
It was flattering that Sosa spent so much on mercenaries at my expense.
Too bad they didn’t have as much to lose as I did.
I tossed a stone behind him at the next tree over. It clacked against the tree, and the tracker spun with the sound. With a quick pull of the trigger, a bullet exploded against the tree bark only a few inches off from where the stone hit.
I burst up at him, but the fucker reacted quicker than I anticipated.
He whirled around to face me, gun poised.
My metal knuckles hit his ear and cheek before he aimed.
His anguished grunt spurred me on. I wanted a real scream from him.
With three more jabs to his wrists, nose, and jaw, he went down to his knees, and the gun clattered to the ground. Still, he barely made a sound.
Gripping his insulated vest, I pulled my fist back.
“Did you shoot the first shot?” I needed to know if he was the one who made my wife bleed.
He spat at me. “Fuck you.”
I hit him again, his muffled groan music to my ears. “How many more of you are there?”
The asshole sneered, his mouth bloody. Eejit. Another punch broke his cheek, then his collarbone. Finally, that mocking sneer twisted into a pained grimace, and he no longer contained his mewls of pain.
“You don’t need your teeth to talk.” I hauled him closer by the collar of his vest. “The first bullet, was it you?”
“No.”
“Pity.”
With one twist, I broke his neck, and his body flopped lifeless to the ground. As I bent down to fetch his pistol, a bullet smacked the tree behind me, where I’d stood moments before. I dove for cover behind the nearest tree to adjust my grip on the gun.
Gunfire snapped against the bark in quick succession.
To my left, thick ropy roots flared half a foot above ground.
I rolled for the buffer they offered, aimed, and shot the shooter’s legs out.
Then it was about who could be faster, my legs or his will to shoot me dead.
I won and kicked out the sniper rifle from his hands, then kneed his nose. He landed in a ball at my feet.
The guy was scrawnier than I expected, with little muscle to hold up in a fight.
Probably the type to let his guns do all the talking for him.
With the way he lunged at my leg and snapped his teeth around my calf, I swallowed down my regret at not taking the kill shot behind the tree roots with a pained groan.
My fist smashed his cheek, and he let go, spitting some teeth.
Pain spasmed through my muscles as I shook my leg out. Jaysus, that hurt. Fecking cannibal.
“You seem like the type to take the first shot.” I gripped him by the hair and tugged his head back to expose his neck.
He tried to keep quiet. Like I’d let him.
With my thumb buried in the bullet wound in his calf, his face turned red with strain. Muffled grunts dragged out from behind his clenched teeth.
“You did, didn’t you? You’re the raging fucker who hurt my wife. Admit it.”
Leaf litter crunched beneath my knees, pebbles digging into my skin. His hand shot for the holster on his thigh, and I caught it just as he pried a throwing knife free. Mine now.
“Too slow,” I taunted as I plunged the knife into his lower thigh above the knee and twisted, then tore it out. “How does that feel?”
His howl was raw and everything that fed the dead piece of my soul.
“Let’s try this again. Did you or did you not fire first?” I aimed the tip of the throwing knife a hair’s breadth from his eye. “Lie to me, and I’ll cut out your eyeball.”
“I did,” he rasped through the pain. He barely put up a fight as I divested him of the rest of his belt of tools and toys. “To incapacitate. Not kill. You’re worth more alive. It wasn’t personal.”
“It felt dead fecking personal to me the moment your bullet grazed my woman.”
With one quick swipe, I slashed the blade across his back, tearing through clothes and sinew. The cut went deep and knocked against bone. His scream blew through the leafless branches and around the trees. It still wasn’t enough for the pain he’d caused her.
“Feel that? Does that not feel personal to you? ’Cause I’ll tell you, it bloody well is to me.”
“Cillian,” her voice called, a tinge of panic to it, but that wasn’t right. Not when she was supposed to be safe back at the hangar, away from this mess.
She burst through the trees like a wraith. Her body in that black outfit faded in and out between shadowed tree trunks as her long hair floated behind her. She ran at me with purpose, my curved knife braced back for throwing. For one excruciating moment, I wondered if that blade was meant for me.
“Get down. Now!” she yelled.
I dropped, crushing the assassin beneath my weight. The karambit knife spun through the air until it thwacked into the neck of a man only ten feet at my back. A bull of a man I hadn’t seen or heard, who would’ve given me a run for my money in a fair fight. This wouldn’t have been that.
He collapsed to his knees with a choked croak, holding the blade to his wound. Veins bulged along his forehead as he visibly fought his body’s demand to give up. Alizé hunched over, hands on her bent knees, and sucked in heavy inhales.
“You need to pay more attention,” she panted.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” I snapped at her. “It’s not safe.”
“More so for you than for me.” She rolled her eyes and pulled herself upright. “As if I would leave you alone to deal with however many men are chasing you, without Paulie and Shiner to assist. You’d do it for me. Wouldn’t you?”
I reluctantly grunted.
She flipped her tangled hair over her shoulder. “Then don’t expect any different from me.”
My chest swelled as she smashed another bit of my inner turmoil to smithereens.
She sauntered to the large assassin, her hips swaying tauntingly, practically begging me to take a bite out of her. When she ripped the knife out of his throat, arterial blood squirted out in waves, and my cock pulsed to match it at the strength she exuded.
She scrunched up her face in disgust. “Beurk, I hate this part.”
The man gurgled blood. He clutched his throat with one hand and flailed for purchase with the other. When he reached for her, she smacked his hand away. Slowly, his jerking body calmed until it stopped completely.
My brow arched. “You said you didn’t mind killing.”
The captured assassin beneath me tried to toss me off him with a muffled growl. I clapped him upside the head with the butt of my new pistol.
“Stay down.”
Her nose wiggled. “It’s the struggle I don’t like. And the look in their eyes. It makes me feel guilty.”
“Take pride in your aim at least.”
“I missed. It was his head I wanted.” She wiped my knife on the dead man’s pants. “That would have been quick and painless, with no need to deal with the sad bit of dying.”
“You should work on that.”
“If you carried balanced knives, I wouldn’t have to.”
Which reminded me…I tossed her the thigh holster belonging to the assassin beneath me.
“Will those work?”
The man bucked against me, but with one punch to his ribs, he collapsed back down under my weight, practically hyperventilating.
She pulled a throwing knife out and tested it, balancing its middle on her index finger.
“Perfect.”
With the tip of her tongue peeking out between her lips, she threw it, and it landed dead center through the dead man’s hand. Satisfaction lit up her face, and in that moment, she looked freer than she’d ever been. Untamed. Unbridled. Completely at ease and unequivocally mine.
“Christ, woman. Sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Her cheeks tinged with color as she rustled her fingers through her hair and tugged at the unflattering thermal outfit. “In this? Looking like this? Doubtful.”
“What I’d tell you about perfection?”
This bit of truth was hard for her. Her whole life she’d been fed that only a flawless exterior would garner her the attention she wanted. It was going to take time to chip those lies away and make her understand she was beautiful and desirable because of what she meant to me, not how she looked.
“Come on, say it, síbhean.”
“Perfection is overrated.”
“Exactly. One look at you, and no one would think you had a killer instinct. But they’d be dead fucking wrong.”
She held out my karambit knife. “Here, I don’t need it anymore.”
“Keep it. Extra weapons never hurt.”
With a shrug, she shoved it into her shoe just as gunfire clapped through the woods.
Our heads shot up, and we scoped the area.
There was no movement around here. It sounded further out to the north.
Shots popped through the still air, and voices roared between them.
Voices I recognized. Skipper and Shiner were still in this and getting closer.
“Package is here,” the living assassin cried through broken teeth. “Target—”
I elbowed him in the nose to shut him up.
“We need to go. They need us.” Alizé strapped the leg holster to her thigh, then stole the dead man’s gun. She jerked her chin to indicate the man beneath me. “What about him? Are you killing or leaving him?”
“I don’t do mercy. Certainly not to the man who shot you.”
She crouched beside us, lips pursed, twiddling a sharp throwing knife between her fingers. “Makes sense.”
Then she stabbed him in the shoulder. For a moment, as he wailed, she watched the blood soak through his clothes and pool around the blade before it trickled down the cutting edge.
A volley of emotions twitched over her face: distress for him, disgust with herself, anger at him, then finally determination.
It was a beautiful thing to watch her accept what she’d done and decide the next step.
“What happened to your guilt?” I asked.
“He almost took you from me.” She wrenched out the knife, then she struck again. And again. “Do you know how long I’ve wanted love? And he almost stole it.”
His bellowed yowls and weak attempts to get away just made her stabs that much deeper. His shoulders, his arms, his hands, his feet, his calves—they each met her knife. Nowhere vital, but no less brutal.
She tore up his muscles and destroyed any chance he might have to walk or hold a gun again. The sharp, coppery reek of his blood clung to the back of my throat as I beheld her rage in pure open-eyed admiration.
Finally, she pulled back. She stood, shoulders heaving, over his mangled, whimpering body and casually wiped off the blood from her weapon, then strapped it back in place in her leg holster.
“He’s all yours.”
After her stunning viciousness, she had left me little to work with. He was now nothing but a humpty-dumpty groaning mess who’d need a miracle worker to stitch him back together again, but watching her fury had been worth the leftovers.
“You’ve taken some of the fun out of it, sweetheart.”
“Look at it as teamwork. A husband-and-wife duo.”
It was more than I expected of a mob wife. “A partner in crime.”
“Exactly. You have my back. I have yours.”
I pushed the brass knuckles as far down my fingers as they went and glared down at the man below me who had dared to hurt her. Before he took his last breath, he shrieked through the pain of each broken bone my fists dealt as I made him viscerally understand that no one touched my wife.
“Go back to the hangar, síbhean.” I rose to my feet and threw the strap of the man’s sniper rifle over my shoulder. “I can’t be worrying about you while I’m fighting out there.”
“How do you know it’s any safer? How do you know one of them isn’t there waiting for us?”
I scratched at my cheek, loathing the possibility of that scenario. Another exchange of gunfire distantly snapped through the woods, and I cringed. I needed to get out there with my men.
“How did they even know you were here?” she continued. “In New Jersey of all places? Someone told them. Someone who is probably back at that hangar.”
Well, shit, there was no denying that logic.
“I’m coming, and that’s final.” She took off before I was able to voice another protest.
“Goddamn it, woman.”
Together, we jogged in the direction of the gunfight. Shots roared through the trees in a cacophony of ricochets the farther we went.
“Just so you know,” she said as we ran. “That, back there, wasn’t my version of romantic.”
Suddenly, a stray bullet pinged against a nearby tree.
We ducked behind a couple of packed trees barely wide enough to cover both of us.
Paulie and Shiner held tight about ten yards to our right, dodging shots, but Paulie favored one leg, and Shiner was shooting one-handed, the other arm loose at his side.
“I mean,” Alizé whispered, “I like being avenged as much as anybody else, but buy me designer shoes or a purse with a big bouquet of carnations and peonies, and those will make me swoon.”
“Before or after you’ve had your own chance of revenge?”
“After, of course.”
I arched a brow, unimpressed, still assessing the situation. “I’ll take it under advisement.”
To our left, one man had taken up position in a far tree, his sniper rifle trained on Paulie and Shiner’s position, while three more fanned out on the ground. From where we were, the sniper had no visual on us, but his legs stuck out in my line of sight. I aimed for it.
With one shot, the man nose-dived and hit the ground with a sharp thud and cry, but he managed to pick up his rifle and shot back in our direction with rapid fire.
The bullets struck dirt, trees, and hidden rocks.
I dropped to the ground, and Alizé leaped for safety behind another oak tree a few feet away.
Debris sailed through the air. Dirt clung to my tongue, and wood dust buried itself in my nostrils.
Every time I tried to join her, more bullets rained down between us, forcing me back.
“Stay there,” I mimed, my palm up and out.
“Like easy prey?” She mouthed, then shook her head.
She pointed at me and motioned for me to join my men. Next she pointed at herself, walked her index and middle fingers in the air, gestured to a cluster of trees, then tapped on her newly acquired set of throwing knives.
“No. No.” I knocked my forearms together in an X, but she’d already turned away. I gritted my teeth. “Alizé, for feck’s sake, get back here.”