Page 38 of The Last Time You Break Me

“Oh fuck, sorry, Reg, man. I’m sorry. She had a fight, kicked two guys’ asses, then on her way out, I spoke to her. Got a phone call from Techi telling me to make sure she actually headedhome but when I turned back to her, she was gone. Her phone was on the ground.”

I broke the phone in my heavy grip and stalked toward the door. “Where are you going?” Dom called after me.

“To get my girl back,” I stated as I turned back to him.

“You don’t even know where she is,” he returned and there was something off in his deep green gaze that had my hackles raised.

“You think that matters? Do you think I won’t tear this damn world apart to find her? That I’m afraid of what will happen to me? That I’m afraid of what comes next? The only thing that comes next, Dom, is the death of any fucking person who has laid their hand on her. Do you hear me?”

His phone buzzed again as I forgot I held it in my hand. I glanced down as the screen lit up. Beyond the cracked glass a text appeared. Lara’s beautiful face flashed before me, beaten, bloody, and bruised. That image alone stole all the light around me and painted it red and violent. The air calmed, the sounds surrounding me faded and all I was left with was a remorseless, inhuman, blood-thirsty creature that was ready to destroy it all.

Words sat beneath the image but it took me a moment for my gaze to stop swimming with monstrous images and me to calm my breath enough that I could make sense of them.

Pretty in red, the little princess is soon to be dead…

Can you find her in time?

Come alone and find your package.

Will it be alive and breathing? Or bloody and mutilated?

1329 Dillard Street. Bring your best ;)

I must have read those words a thousand times. They played over and over again within my mind as I tried to force myself to remember the words printed on the screen of that phone after I dropped it to the ground and ran for the door. Dom called after me but nothing was slowing me down. Not even the fact that thiswas most definitely a trap. Nothing would stop me from getting to Lara, even in death I would find her and haunt the asses of anyone who thought to harm her into a fucking aneurysm.

I ran for the garage and instead of taking one of the decked-out and bulletproof SUV’S, I jumped on the back of a 2017 MTT and peeled out of the mansion as fast as the two-wheeled ride would take me.

Frazier’s kid had to be behind this.

So far this week, we hadn’t managed to get under anybody else’s skin. In our line of work, it was all about power and when you had a rival, it was known. To hide in the shadows would make you weak and nobody worth their salt would take you seriously, even if behind closed doors you were shitting a brick because you knew you messed with the big dogs.

This asshole though had no idea he just poked the cage of a hound sent from Hell itself.

I pulled up at the location fifteen minutes later. The local community swimming center sat on a desolate street. It was one that was founded for the youth who couldn’t afford swimming lessons and the community did what they could to change that. It was small, isolated and hued in a dingy kind of darkness. My heart thrummed in my chest at such a brutal pace that my chest itself constricted, tightening until the point of unbearable pain.

I had no idea what I was walking into.

There were a million ways this could go after being sent that damn address like it was a casual date for a hook up instead of a ransom for the life of the woman that I loved.

There were so many warning signs, but if I tried to make sense of my heroics, I’d lose my damn mind. I couldn’t stop, think, or slow. I had to charge, to run into battle with a war cry and hope that my determination was enough to get her out the back door alive.

I had no intention of making it out of there with my life if the choice brewed down to my life or hers.

I’d walk with the man of death himself to see her walk back into the life she loved to hate.

I shut off the engine and stepped down from the bike after I kicked out the stand and opened the saddle back and pulled out some supplies, and fitted what I could to my body.

The sky above me began to lighten as the sun fought for the spotlight when it broke through the dark and baleful clouds. The weather was cooled, a low thrill to the air that held your skin in a vice of knowing it toed the edge of becoming a cold chill. It was an ominous awakening as a new day dawned in late October. Even though I tried not to, I couldn’t help but wonder what the next few moments would bring.

It was easy being the man unafraid of anything. But no matter how accustomed you were to the danger, to the dark that was awaiting to taint your soul just that little bit more, the thought of what one second to the next could bring would always plague your mind.

Because that was all our life was made up of, wasn’t it?

Seconds.

And that was the difference between life and death.

Seconds.

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