Page 238 of Vile Boys

BANG!

A bullet hits the wall right behind me.

Ares tries to shoot, but his gun’s gone empty, so he tucks it away and pulls out a knife instead. He chucks it right at the man who shot us, without a single inch of fear in his eyes. And it makes me wonder if he’s ever felt what it’s like to be afraid at all?

Despite the fact that I could easily cripple him for life or take him out for good with this gun in my hands … he’s still standing with his back turned against me.

As if it doesn’t bother him that I could end it all.

Or maybe he doesn’t care if I did.

Trust me.

I hear his voice in my head again, whispering to me, begging me to follow.

And when I look up, there he is, glancing at me over his shoulder before aiming to shoot at a man fleeing for his life.

He takes life like it means nothing, yet he’s keeping mine safe like it’s sacred to him.

And for some reason I can feel the little bits of hatred slowly unfurl from around my heart.

Suddenly, he spins on his heels and pulls me down. “Duck.”

He shields me with his body, hands firmly planted against the wall.

A knife is thrown right at us, and I blink once only to hear Ares groan as it pierces his back.

“Ares!” I shriek, unable to keep the terror at bay.

He peers down at me, the pain clearly visible in his eyes, but it still doesn’t make him break. Grinding his teeth, he tears the knife from his own back and throws it right back at his attacker, hitting him in the heart. An instant death sentence.

“Hey! That was my kill!” Caleb yells.

“Then fucking kill him before he kills me, goddammit,” Ares growls back.

“Twenty-five!” Blaine yells as he pulls his katana out of the guard’s body. “Who’s next? Don’t all beg at the same time, please.”

Caleb chucks his knife at the last guy’s head and plucks it out, licking up the blood. “Delicious. Twenty-five.”

“It’s safe now,” Ares tells me. “Let’s go.”

He grabs my hand and pulls me away from the wall, but I pause to look at all the dead bodies littering the floor. It’s insane the amount of people they managed to kill in such a short amount of time.There’s a river of blood in front of me. Chilling.

Ares grabs the check off the guard he just murdered, blood staining the paper as he holds it up. Five million dollars. All for me.

He pulls out a lighter and sets the paper ablaze, throwing it back onto the corpse.

“No amount of money is worth a single drop of her blood,” he murmurs at the guard before he looks my way, making me blush again.

My blood invaluable?

He tasted it on his tongue, licked my wounds like I was a delectable dessert. All while calling me hisAmbrosía…

He tucks the lighter back into his pocket, grabs my hand again, and pulls me along with him, but I can’t stop looking at the wound in his back, wondering why it doesn’t seem to bother him.

We make our way back to the exit, and Blaine wipes his katana on the last guard lying on the floor in the middle of the hallway. “You look a little pale. You guys were so much fun, but we have to run now. Toodles, darlings.”

I chuckle a little from his comments, then follow Ares back outside, and we run through the rain to his car. He sits down behind the wheel, while Caleb sits down in the passenger’s seat, and Blaine in the back with me. But all of them are looking at me.

---