Page 94 of Scars Run Deep

This fucker definitely didn’t.

It took barely anything for me to use it against him.

The moment he hit, I used his own power and momentum to haul him over my shoulder and into the cabinet right beside the guard.

I was there in the next second, fisting my hand in the back of his hair and slamming his face into it. One. Twice.

It knocked him out cold.

The guard made a move at me with his free hand and I reacted with an elbow to the face that had him screaming as blood spewed from his obviously broken nose.

I ripped the knife from his hand, his shrieks and screams intensifying and rolling through me in a strangely welcome way.

I heard the girl crying behind me, still on the floor. She hadn’t moved from her position. She was so scared that even with this going on, she hadn’t dared to shift at all. God, it was sickening.

And this shithead here had taken full advantage of it and used it and her pain and forced helplessness for his own satisfaction.

Blackness engulfed me as it all slammed into me.

The demented and depraved nature of it.

The freedom that had been stripped from these people.

The physical damage and then the mental reprogramming they’d been forced into.

And the fact that this was big money to those sick bastards at the seat of power of the Infidels.

It all crashed into those recordings of what Carson Monroe had done to my dad.

It blended together in one disturbing symphony of violence and sadism.

And as the guard used the mental assault I was enduring to smash his fist into my face, and I tasted blood on my lips, I gave into the blackness.

He came at me and I spat blood into his eyes, taking advantage of his shock and momentary disorientation to dodge to the side, pulling another knife at the same time. I ducked another blow from him, then came up and plunged my blade into his tank top, angling it and driving deep until I heard that telltale wheeze, confirming I’d punctured a lung.

I wrenched his shoulders down and drove my elbow into his back, forcing him to his knees.

A boot to the face had him sprawled out on his back, gasping to draw in a full breath that wouldn’t come.

I stalked over to the kitchen table where he’d left his gun earlier to grab that fucking glass.

I snatched the 9mm up, cocked it, then straddled the guy, pinning him with my thighs, then wrenching his head forward by his hair.

I shoved the barrel down his throat.

“Look away,” I called behind me to the girl.

She actually finally shifted, and then she was scrambling into the corner.

“These fuckers won’t lay a hand on you again. I swear it to you,” I told her.

The guard’s eyes were wide, his throat was convulsing around the gun as he fought to breathe. He tried to talk, likely pleas for me to spare his despicable life.

My finger was hot on the trigger.

I was seconds away from pulling it and delivering the world of evil.

And then a hand grasped my arm.

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