Page 75 of Psycho

I moved methodically, meeting undertrained Hell Eaters on my way and ripping their throats out with my bare hands for the fun of it as I moved up, floor by floor.

Damon never popped his head out of any of the rooms, but I was sure he knew I was there. Death had a way of calling to men like us, announcing its presence and testing which side of it you would fall on.

On the killer side, or on the deceased side.

I heard Liv’s hushed cries of pain on the third floor, and I barreled toward it, finding her in the center of chaos as a swarm of Hell Eaters, Damon included, attacked Tamen.

Tamen was a skilled killer, better than even me in ways. But he had Liv behind him, tucked against the wall as he fought off a dozen different men.

And my vision turned red as I bellowed out in rage, tearing men to pieces on my way to her.

Chapter 35 – Olivia

Iwatched on in sick fascination and horror as Maddox raced down the hall, taking on the gang of Hell Eaters that had Tamen and me cornered at the stairwell. He looked so damn good, racing to help like a man on a mission, but one look at his black eyes as he found me around the chaos, and I shivered in realization.

Maddox wasn’t there, staring back at me. His psycho was in control, and I was fucking here for it. In a way, I had always wanted to know that side of him; the man that did the dismembering before he showed up on my doorstep with boxes filled with the only parts left of the men who wanted to kill me.

My psycho.

The psycho that looked like he would not stop until every man between us lay at his feet.

I tried to focus on him and how he and Tamen both almost effortlessly worked through the crowd of ten men, spilling blood and tearing chunks out of them with their bare hands. But mycontractions were nearly on top of each other, and I sank to my knees against the wall, closing my eyes and trying to close out the noise and smell of death around me as I fought my body’s urges to bring life into the world. It seemed insane to birth a baby surrounded by such death, but the harder I tried to stop the pain, the stronger it came.

“Madd.” I gasped, clawing at the concrete floor as a scream ripped from my lips. “She’s coming!”

A sinister laugh echoed over me, and I looked up in time to see Damon moving over me, blood spilling from his face in multiple spots. “My daughter wants to meet her daddy!” He jeered and my eyes flicked to his hand, where a knife caught the reflection of the dingy light hanging in the hallway’s ceiling.

“No.” I cried, backing away on my hands and falling to my ass as he got even closer to me, waving his knife in my direction. “Please!”

Even as I threw myself backward, his knife still moved too fast for me to avoid and the tip sliced through the gown and into the flesh of my chest, leaving a searing pain in its wake.

“Storm!” Maddox bellowed, and I clutched the wound as his hands wrapped around Damon’s neck from behind. It happened in slow motion, but the fear was paralyzing as I stared up at the two men fighting, eager for it to be over before it even started. Maddox had both hands wrapped around Damon’s neck, his fingers dug into the flesh and making it dimple like at any moment, they would pierce through the skin and embed themselves inside. But Damon would not go down without a fight, and I watched in horror as he spun the knife around in his hand and then arched it behind him, and directly into Maddox’s stomach.

“No!” I screamed in despair as Damon pulled the knife free and tried to plunge it in again, but Maddox twisted his wrists, and a deafening cracking sound echoed from Damon’s open lipsseconds before his eyes glassed over and his body went limp. I shook like a leaf on the ground, paralyzed with my eyes trained on the two men standing over me, waiting for it all to end.

Maddox huffed, throwing Damon’s body to the side like he was nothing more than a bag of trash as he fell to his knees in front of me. “Move your hands.” He demanded, but I just stared at him with eyes wide and my body frozen, watching the red ooze of blood stain his white shirt from the wound in his abdomen. “Storm!” He bellowed, placing both hands on the sides of my face and forcing me to look at him. “Move your hands so I can see the wound.”

“Your—” I stammered, letting him pull my hands away and trembling when I saw how much blood coated my fingers over the dry blood of the doctor, “Your wound.” I pulled at his shirt and revealed the nasty gash right in his side beneath his rib cage that poured blood out. “Oh my god, Maddox.”

“Shh,” He hushed, pulling my hands away from his stomach as he put pressure on the slice in my chest. “Stop, we need to get you to the hospital.”

“You’re bleeding more than me.” I got back into motion, pushing him back as Tamen hovered behind him, staring at us with that penetrative stare I had come to hate in the last few days. “God, Maddox, he stabbed you!”

“The baby,” Maddox ignored me and, as if on cue, as soon as his free hand touched my stomach through the gown, another wave of agony cut through the adrenaline and hit me like a brick wall. “We’re not going to make it, are we?”

I trembled, pressing my head back into the wall as realization dawned on me. I wasn’t making it to the hospital before our daughter was born. “No.”

“Okay.” He nodded and took a deep breath, before forcing a smile to his lips as I trembled in his embrace. “Tamen, she needs a bed. Somewhere far away from this.”

“This way.” The Englishman nodded curtly and started walking away down the hall as Maddox lifted me into his arms as I groaned an animalistic cry of pain.

“I have to push.” I hissed, fighting the urge but giving into it like my body was in control and I no longer had a say. “God, it hurts Madd.”

“Shh,” He kissed my temple, running through the hallway to a lower floor and into a room behind Tamen. It was a bedroom, and it looked clean enough, as Dane’s mysterious brother cleared his things off the bed and paced in the corner as Maddox laid me down in the center of the queen-sized bed as another urge to push took over. “You’ve got this, Storm.” Maddox crawled up on the bed next to me and snapped his fingers at Tamen. “Towels. Blankets. Whatever you can find for this wound and for the baby.”

“Yeah,” Tamen nodded, rubbing his hands over his face as he moved toward the door. “I’ll see what I can find.”

“Now, Tamen!” Maddox roared as I dug my nails into his neck and pushed again. “That’s it, baby. Just listen to your body and let it work for you. Remember what we learned in those videos, use the contractions to do the work for you.”

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