Page 50 of The Serpent's Bride
Raziel’s chief bodyguard.
Walking up behind John silently, she tapped him on the shoulder.
“Wh—” John turned. But didn’t get the whole word out. His eyes went as big as saucers as he suddenly looked up at a man twice his size.
“Sorry ’bout this,” she mumbled in Ivan’s voice as she rammed her new train-sized fist into John’s head. His head snapped back and, just like that, he was out cold.
She grabbed him by the front of the shirt to stop his fall, not wanting the other men to be alerted by the sound. Catching the gun before it clattered to the ground, she set John down to the tile and debated her next steps.
A gunshot would warn Mick and Smiley.
She could snap John’s neck.
Guilt stabbed at her. He’d been nice to her. He was a human in a fae clan.Herfae clan. He didn’t deserve to die. He must hate the Nostroms as much as she did. They were on the same fuckingside.
This was idiocy. Sheer idiocy. She should kill him. That was the smart decision.
She couldn’t do it.
But the others…If Raziel was going to believe her story, the others needed to die.
With a quiet, bass growl from a set of lungs that weren’t her own, she checked the number of bullets in the gun. Then she stepped over John’s unconscious body and went to find Mick and Smiley.
“It’s probably a trap.”
Raziel checked the clip in his pistol. Full. Good. “Of course it’s afuckingtrap, Deniel.” His cousin wasn’t the brightest vampire in the clan, but when one was up against an unknownnumber of armed fae-loving idiot humans, every additional ally was useful.
A call had come into Raziel’s home, not long after the abduction. The Iltanis had given them an address and a deadline—meet by midnight to discuss a cash settlement in exchange for Monica’s life, or she would be returned to them in a bag.
The place in question was an abandoned abattoir deep in the pits of the metropolis near the docks—where no one would care what would happen. It was a decrepit place, the windows shattered and dark, the brick exterior covered in moss and creeping vines. The Wild didn’t wait long to start reclaiming whatever structures were left to their own devices without anyone there to constantly beat back the encroaching corruption.
At the end of all this, Raziel would send a team to this place to have it burned to a crisp. Purified back to a state of pure stone.
The building looked even bleaker in the stark light from the round headlamps of his car. The metal double doors were half fallen off their hinges, rusted, and ajar, revealing nothing of the inside other than a gaping black hole.
It seemed fitting that a place built as a slaughterhouse would see bloodshed once more.
Mael was loading the drum of a machine gun into its receiver, clearly preparing for a heavy firefight. Raziel preferred handguns—Mael wasn’t a fan of subtlety. “I’ll take Remmy, Tooks, and Valiart. It’s a long, straight corridor into the depths of that building, and that likely means they plan to block you off from any sort of escape. We’ll need to find another way in from above or around the sides. But they have another way in, and so we’ll f—” His older brother broke short as a figure emerged from the darkness of the front door. “What thefuck?”
Raziel could not believe his eyes.
Looking like a nightmare, like something from a pulp horror novel, a woman stepped out from the gloom of the meat factory.
Or, perhaps to him, a dream.
It was Monica.
Her brown hair was tangled and hung around her face in loose strands. Her wedding dress was torn, charred black with soot in areas, and soaked in blood. Her face was spattered with it, streaked in gore. A deep gash on her arm was oozing crimson. She had no shoes, her champagne-colored stockings stained with dirt.
And in her right hand, held loosely down at her side, was a pistol.
Her expression was blank. Not troubled, not afraid—simply devoid of anything.
It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life.
Raziel was moving before he thought about it, rushing to her. He placed his hands on her shoulders. “Monica?”
“Three of them. Two are dead. The last one ran. There were others, but they’re long gone.” She wasn’t even looking at him, she was simply staringthroughhim. “The whole structure is wired with explosives. Don’t go in.”
