Page 43 of Speed Trap

I vaguely noted the bricked corner at my back, how far the streetlights were from us, distant hazed orbs. The back light behind the shop had been kicked out or smashed leaving the alley shrouded in an all consuming darkness prepared for dark deeds.

My palms scraped the wall behind me, leveraging my body up only to slide back as my feet scrabbled at the loose gravel beneath my gummy boots. Glass tinkled with each kick.

“Oh, you don’t like living in muck?” Benson’s hand closed around my throat tight, lifting me up a few feet.

I stared into the black pits of his eyes, finding no humanity there. Terror bloomed inside me, obliterating everything else from my field of vision.

After everything, someone’s whacked out vision of the world was going to mean the end of mine.

No.

I lashed out with every last remnant of energy I possessed, lashing at him with my fists. Something solid grazed one, and my next hit connected hard. A slice of pain shot up my arm.

I dimly hoped the thing I had hit was Benson, and I hoped it had hurt him as much as it hurt me. Unfortunately, it didn’t lessen the closing grip on my throat. I swallowed, or tried to, but nothing happened. My stomach heaved from below, but all that achieved was to block my nose with an excess of bile that trickled down my chin.

The scent of vomit filled my shrinking world as a pair of pinprick lights pierced the darkness that narrowed my field of vision to Benson’s leering face.

And then that was gone, too.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

HAWK

Sunny’s still form pressed to my chest, illuminated by my headlights that bounced off the graffitied wall behind where I’d found her. I’d left them on as soon as I saw the old man’s frantic gestures outside the entrance to the alley, his mouth forming her name, and I knew.

Knew it was too good to be true that Benson hadn’t lost his shit in his traditional form and come after either of us. The police were on the line before I hit the end of the alley. I yelled the address to the operator as I leapt out of my car, eating the short distance between the large man bent over something at the end of the alley.

I didn’t need to take bets to know it was Benson and that the person he leaned over was Sunny. What I didn’t expect was the fist that slammed into the side of my head out of the darkness.

Instinct raged inside me as I wound my hand around the first thing I grabbed—a neck, perfect—and threw a body over the hood of my car. It made a satisfying crunching sound as I kept moving.

Benson proved harder to shift.

Sunny’s floppy form was clutched in his fist, his hand closed tight around her throat. Her eyes were glazed and open.

She couldn't see me. Couldn’t hear me when I screamed her name.

I saw red. And dark. All the things I trained out of myself. All the things I never let myself feel after that day with Benson.

The part of the story I didn’t tell Sunny about how Benson and I beat the shit out of each other that night when no one was watching.

Some scars ran deep. Others lay as open wounds.

Mine had healed over time, and with Sunny. Benson…his festered beneath his pretty boy facade, and tonight they boiled over in an excess of ruin and evil.

The energy I always held in reserve coiled tight within my body unspooled like a well oiled machine as I approached them. Despite Benson’s bulk, I threw him off her and turned on him, more than prepared to finally etch his penance on worthless flesh.

A pair of blue and red lights prevented that, for the time being.

So I turned my attention on Sunny, gathered her into my arms, held her tight to my chest. Tears dropped from my cheeks to hers, splashing on porcelain skin. I pressed my ear to her chest but—nothing.

A black void yawned inside me, sucking in every good memory in a moment.

The faintest sound tapped my ear once.

And again.

And again.

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