Page 53 of Running on Empty

Her gun was raised, her stance perfect. She clasped the gun with both hands, aiming it at the fucking idiot, and he just giggled like a child.

“Stevie…” I growled, stepping closer and she didn’t even spare me a sidelong look. “Not yet, beautiful. Not yet.”

I watched a war rage inside her, her eyes perfectly silver. Her lips were curled back into a snarl and I knew what she was seeing. What I’d seen as I’d been forced to trawl through all of those fucking videos, but so much worse. That sloppy leer, the way he wavered on the couch, utterly out of his fucking mind. He didn’t look like a predator, we did, and yet that’s what he was. And somehow that word seemed too great for him, indicating a power he didn’t have. He’d never have been able to take my Stevie down, not on his own, not with his brothers, without forcing her down to his level. He was fucking weak, pathetic and I told her just that.

“So tell me why I can’t put a bullet in his brain?” she growled.

“You can, just after we get what we need from him.” I reached up and pushed her gun down so it was aimed at the floor now, before turning to Snake.

“How we doing outside?” I asked down the comms unit.

“All being very good boys and girls,” Rusty replied.

“Good to hear. We’ll be out of here soon.” I lifted my rifle, aiming it at Snake. “Won’t we? You kept video files of every sex crime you committed,” I said to him.

“Too good not to take mementoes,” he said with a giggle.

“That means you’ve got a whole bunch more somewhere. Not videos, but files on Rush, its manufacture and distribution.”

“That what you want?” He went to reach into his pocket, but all of our guns snapping up to aim at him stopped him. “Fuck, I got a bag of the shit in my pocket. You can—”

“Not what we want,” Jax snapped. “The business dealings, who’s making it, moving it, selling it, that shit. That’s what we need.”

“Ahh and if you don’t get it, you’ll kill me?” Snake cackled then, flopping back against the couch. “Too fucking bad. That shit is all locked up so you may as well—”

The sound of the bullet firing was surprisingly quiet, despite me having screwed the suppressor on myself, but seeing it fire, Stevie having squeezed off a bullet that went smashing into Snake’s knee, still had me spinning around. Snake screamed, high and thin like a dying animal, but he wasn’t. He’d wish he was. Knee capping was one of the most painful wounds you could get that wouldn’t kill you, but it hit no major arteries, so he wouldn’t bleed out. He screamed and screamed, the sound of it something we had to stop right now before the neighbours were alerted, when Stevie stepped forward.

“Don’t, beautiful…”

The words were out of my mouth without thinking because she shoved the muzzle of her gun into his mouth, forcing it deeper when he gagged. Saliva fell in strings, the man’s guts lurching, but the vomit had nowhere to go as she pushed harder.

“I try not to think about it,” she said, perfectly crisp. “I make myself think of something else each time the memories surface, but now I’m here, with you? I can’t stop them; I don’t want to. I see you holding me down. I feel your pathetic little cock in my mouth, forced down my throat. I know the fear you feel right now, of trying to breathe, but you can’t.” She leaned in then. “And I’ll give you the advice you gave me. Breathe through your nose.”

His nostrils worked hard, trying to suck in air, but there was little that could get around the gun lodged in his throat, the man going redder by the second.

“I’ll let her choke you,” Ronan said, moving closer, before pulling out a knife from the sheath strapped to his thigh. “I’ll cut off that scrap you call a manhood and then let her shove it down your throat and see how you like it. But I don’t have to, not if you give us what we want.” Snake’s throat worked, as if he would answer us, but he couldn’t.

“Pull back, Stevie,” Jax said in a calm voice. “Let him speak. We need this intel.”

She jerked away and as soon as she did, vomit splattered on the polished marble floor, Snake’s breaths coming in noisy gasps.

“Locked room…” he panted out. “Retinal display.”

“Now this is the problem with kneecapping someone early in a negotiation,” Ronan told her in a matter-of-fact tone. “We need to move him to a new location and he can’t walk. No matter.”

My brother reached out and grabbed a big handful of the man’s white blond hair, using it as a handle of sorts to haul him up from the couch, the man’s screams hoarse and raspy now, blessedly muted. But rather than force him to walk forward on his blown out knee, Snake was dragged along the ground, leaving a bloody trail in his wake.

“Where to, fucker?” Ronan asked. “Because my castration knife is itching to come out.”

“You have a knife just for cutting men’s dicks off?” Stevie asked. “How did I not know that was a thing?”

“I use this curved one,” Ronan replied with a grin. “Digs into their groin muscles as I cut them.”

“So cool.”

But before they could continue the conversation, Snake mumbled some directions and Ronan used them to drag our prey further into the house.

“You were terrified of bringing Stevie,”Jax muttered to me.

---