Page 21 of The Bodyguard Undone

I won’t fail.

Three

Two.

One.

Thompson slams his gun into my face, right between my eyes.

“On your knees,” he screeches. His finger on the trigger.

With my hands free, I act like the machine I am. But I spare my last human touch on her.

Her head hangs down. She's held up entirely by the chains but she feels me looking at her, even though it’s a split moment. She knows what I’m going to do. She knows what I’m capable of doing. I’m a killer.

Stunned surprise registers in her eyes. Thompson doesn’t have the time to be stunned. I wrench the gun from his hand with one hand, smash his watch with the butt of the gun and break his wrist at the same time. I then chop into the side of his neck and he goes down like a puppet.

The first bullet goes into him. I’m not given enough satisfaction before I have to fight his guards off.

His men, who believed themselves too invincible are too surprised to act. By the time they raise the guns, I’ve taken down four of them and I now have two guns.

I stay close to Sophia. My body protecting hers from all around. Any stray bullets will go through me first.

It doesn’t take me long to finish them all off. I make sure they’re completely dead before I go to Sophia.

“Kayne,” she murmurs as I lift her into my arms. With Thompson’s watch broken, his whole security system malfunctions. It takes one jerk to get her out of the restraints from her wrists. The metal band around her neck slips off automatically.

She’s badly hurt and barely conscious. “Kayne.” She clings to me.

I want to go back in there and kill every man again. I want to kill the world. It’s the only way I know she’ll be safe.

~~~***~~~

Sophia

I wave in and out of consciousness. No matter how hard I try to get my bearing, and establish my whereabouts the more my head hurts, the more my body screams out in agony.

Kayne.

I know I am murmuring his name in real-time.

My sleep is littered with nightmares of being locked in a dungeon, electrocuted, beaten.

I see the haunted look in Kayne’s eyes, the one I feel he might never come back from. But I push it aside because I tell myself we’re okay and I’ll have a lifetime to erase it from his gaze.

I’m getting annoyed with myself that I can’t keep awake and so I try my hardest not to close my eyes.

Slowly the room comes into focus. I know this place. I know this bed. It’s where Kayne took my virginity. It doesn’t matter that it’s been my room since I was a child. It doesn’t matter that it holds so many other memories for me, but there is only one memory that matters to me now.

I’m in the palace. I’m safe. As if my head clears of the thick fogginess, I sit up and then have to lean back when a dizzy spell strikes me down.

“Sophia.”

The tiny voice belongs to my little sister, Lia. My heart opens up and I’m flooded with happiness.

I hug her to me, tightly. I don’t let her hear me wince as her tiny hands press into my bandaged back. I don’t let her know her tiny arms are crushing my sore body.

“Sophia. My daughter.”

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