Page 9 of Iron Crown

Yes. That was a reasonable conclusion to draw.

Please, be a reasonable conclusion to draw.

“If you’ve done anything to my family,” I said to the intruder through gritted teeth, “you will unleash a hell of your own making.”

These bastards did not understand that if I had no wife and child, if they were ripped from me, they would unleash a bloody tyrant the likes of which history had never seen before—the kind that would make Vlad Tepes himself quake in his bathwater.

I would torture and impale them. I would drag them bloody in front of their children, and make their descendants weep…

The brown-eyed man’s gaze over the barrel of his gun blinked as blood splatter burst behind him, his hair scattering. His skull exploded in a shower of pink mist. Crimson covered my eyes as I frowned, shutting my mouth, wincing at the bitter, metallic taste of blood.

Fuck!

I ducked and grabbed my gun from the ground. A second shot rang out, and a man to my right grabbed his throat, gurgling and sputtering as his artery sprayed blood in a horrendous shower worthy of Quentin Tarantino. His fractured carpals and membranes mashed, like a blood orange stomped under a heel.

My finger grazed the trigger of my pistol, killing the third man who’d stood beside me.

Shiny looked over her shoulder, gun in hand, letting out a low, pleased whistle.

“What?” I asked, turning to follow her gaze.Bloody hell, I can’t read her mind. We didn’t have time for—

My wife was there, her purple hair wild, grazing her shoulders. Her eyes were cold and dark. As dark as my own, I feared. The eyes of a stone-cold killer.

It worried me.

“Cover us,” I ordered Shiny as I went to her, putting my own gun on safe, pointing it in a secure direction toward the ground.

She didn’t see me at first, her eyes on the men she had dropped.

“Kira,” I called, quietly, stepping toward her. She snapped from her stupor, her eyes landing on me, her face melting into a look of despair. “You’re alright? Our boy?”

Fear coiled into my chest, fearing the worst. Only her words could reassure me.

“Love?” I prompted, trying to get her to speak.

She nodded in a fast, shaky gesture.

“Cillian is fine,” she whispered, lowering her gun, but never once taking her finger off the trigger. “I killed the two that were coming for us.”

She was in shock. She had to be.

What the bleeding hell was Jericho doing sending my wife out to defend the castle, when that was whathewas supposed to be doing? I was going to have harsh words with that Russian prick.

Kira’s eyes flicked up to me. The darkness there melted like black ice on concrete, giving way to the warmth that I was used to seeing.

She frowned, “You’re covered in blood.”

She reached her free hand to my cheek, wiping at the cooling, viscous liquid on my skin. I felt the need to reassure her, “It’s not mine.”

She pulled her hand away, staring at her bloody palm. I knew that it was sick and depraved, but I looked at the blood on her hand and felt the ache of knowing that we were not handfasted. Maybe she would be amenable—

“I don’t want my son to grow up like this,” she whispered, staring at the bodies on the ground.

There was too much blood. There had been too much violence, and they’d been here less than a day!

It was also reasonable to not cut your own hand, and take ancient, strange blood vows. In an instant, my hopes of a gesture that had meant so much to my parents, to my cousin, hell, even to Shiny and her husband, would never be mine. I was jealous of them.

She swallowed. I watched the tension in her neck ease, as she looked at me with the authority of a Goddess. “Get your men to sweep the other rooms. We need to know if there are more of them.”

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