Page 10 of Scars Run Deep

The white masks.

At least a dozen of them.

Then Jonah. Aurora.

They were battling them.

The two of them were trying to get to me, but being held back by the battle that was being forced on them.

They must’ve gotten out of the car when they’d descended.

And they’d probably been trying to wake me up ever since, trying to get back to me.

I watched Jonah throw his arms out either side, then launch himself at two masks, slamming them onto the hood of one of their vans. He fisted his hand in one opponent’s hair, then used it as leverage to smash his head into the hard metal over and over until his skull was brutalized beyond saving. He released him and the guy slid down the hood, his corpse hitting the grass and a muddy grave. A glint of a blade caught my eye before Jonah brought it down with a snarl and stabbed his remaining opponent in the chest. Over and over until blood was spurting, dousing him and the blade.

He stepped back and licked the knife clean.

But as he spun around, three others were there jumping on him.

Shit.

As I fought to open my door, the thing mangled from the crash, I caught sight of Aurora making a beeline for me.

A wall of masks blocked her way.

She fired, her bullet driving into the thigh of one of them and making him scream, his knee buckle and hit the ground. The others launched themselves at her and she became a whirlwind of intense, violent motion then. Even as her gun was ripped from her hold, it didn’t even still her. She drew her Taser and shoved it into the throat of the first guy who reached her. Just like Jonah had promised proudly, it dropped him instantly, his body a writhing mass on the ground in a second. She spun into a spinning kick as another came at her. It blew him back. She’d barely landed stably, when a push kick came into play next, knocking another away from her. As two more moved to grab her shoulders in an attempt to subdue her, she ducked against one of them, then spun and came up, using the momentum to full effect as she delivered a brutal right cross to the underside of the other opponent’s jaw. As it destabilized him, she grabbed hold of his shoulder, wrenched him down, then thrust her knee into his face.

Movement flitting across my vision pulled me from the battle a second later.

A crash sounded to my left, and the driver’s window was decimated in the next beat, making me wince as glass exploded and rained down over me, biting into the exposed skin of my face and neck.

Before I could react, two sets of hands reached in and grabbed me, then hauled me out roughly.

I hit the floor before I knew it, and then I was being dragged across the grass and then the rough ground toward one of their vans.

“What… do you want?”

“You locked in a cage.”

They were taking me.

Well, so they thought.

As they focused on just getting me to where they needed me, to that van, I gritted my teeth, fighting the disorientation. I focused on all the years of training, calling on the adrenaline and pushing down all the rest.

“Hurry up, faster!” I heard one of them saying. “They’re putting up more of a fight than we’d expected. We’re losing too many.”

“Somebody’s fucked with our intel,” another said. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.”

“The boss wanted both, but we can only manage one for now. Next opportunity, we get the girl too.”

They hauled me up against one of their vans, thinking from the glazed look in my eyes, my near dead weight, that I was suitably incapacitated.

Working with assumptions… that was never a good idea.

Especially not when it came to me.

I was a different breed.

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