Page 175 of Devil Mine

I’m powerless to stop my anger from boiling over.

“You know exactly how traitors die,” I growl. “You’ll die a traitor’s death. It’ll be my pleasure to send you into the afterlife.”

The smile wipes clean off his face. He walks up to me and drops into his haunches so our faces are level.

Behind my back, my hands work conspicuously to dig the blade out of the sheath built into the interior side of my trousers.

“I was going to kill you right now,” he announces. “But I’ve decided I’m going to keep you alive while we all take turns fucking your wife. I want that to be the last thing you picture, the last thing youhear, before I kill you.”

I roar savagely, the sound unlike anything I’ve ever made or heard. I throw myself at him like a rabid dog, but he easily stands and steps back. A sick, sour feeling burns my throat.

“I’ll go first,” he says smugly, cupping his cock obscenely through his trousers. “Put him in one of the rooms, I’ll be back for him later.” And then he walks out.

The bottom falls out from beneath my feet and I lose my shit. The thought of another man touching her, of another man positioning himself between her legs and taking her body for his own pleasure makes me sick to the point of pain.

Nausea twists my belly and I dry heave. Bile and saliva hit the floor as my stomach turns against me.

The falcon whose name I don’t even remember laughs cruelly. He circles around to my front.

“Look at this whipped pussy. Literally hacking up his guts at the thought of us testing out his wife.”

I spit out the remaining bile and snap my black eyes up to meet his. He must see something in my gaze that warns him because the smile wipes abruptly off his face.

I turn on my knees and use my legs to kick his feet out from underneath him. He falls to the ground and I throw myself down on him, the knife now firmly clutched in my hands driving into his flesh. With my hands tied behind my back, I’m attacking him blindly. He yells when the knife sinks into his belly. I pull it out immediately, going higher, searching for weaker flesh. I hack at him, in and out, in and out, until I feel the blade sink into his throat. He dies with a pathetic gurgle.

The other falcon stares, wide-eyed and afraid. He’s younger, inexperienced. He probably had no idea the magnitude of the decision he was making when he was roped into this mutinous plan.

It doesn’t matter. He made it anyway.

He stands, frozen.

It gives me the time to maneuver my tied hands from behind my back, over my feet and to my front. The process is excruciating. My shoulder rips out of its socket as I dislocate it to free myself. The agonizing pain tears through me, still nowhere near as searing as the pain in my heart.

The falcon jerks into action when he sees I have my hands in front of me, but it’s too late. He comes at me with a knife and I knock it out of his hand with a simple move, adrenaline keeping my injured arm from being a hindrance. Then I use the chain of the handcuffs and choke him to death.

It’s as his dead body slides down mine that an ear-splitting, hair-raising, dread-filled scream rips through the air. I’d know it anywhere.

“Tess!” I roar, a guttural scream that rocks the walls of the bomb shelter.

Buzzing erupts loudly in my ears. I realize that it’s the sound of my blood thrashing madly through my body.

My shaky, frenetic hands search the first body, then the second, until my fingers close around a pair of keys to open the handcuffs.

I’ve got the first one off when a sound worse than her screams tears through the silence. I didn’t think such a thing existed until I hear the very recognizable, very loud bang of a gunshot.

Followed almost immediately by a second one.

I start running before the echoes have even stopped. There’s no word in either language I know to describe the terror that slams into me. It undoes my chemical makeup, rewrites the strands of my DNA, and changes me forever.

Truth is, I’ve lost my grasp on my sanity.

I’m met at the door by a third falcon. I drive the open handcuff into his neck and sever his carotid, not stopping to watch him fall at my feet.

I run through those halls barely aware of where I am or what I’m even doing. I’m on autopilot, my body knowing who it needs to find without needing to get my brain involved. Pure, animalistic need pushes me through those hallways. The need to find her and kill anyone who touched her. My injured arm hangs limply at my side as I run faster than I ever have in my life.

I don’t let myself think about what state I’m going to find her in. Alive, that’s all that matters.

Alive, alive, alive.

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