Page 31 of That Girl is Trouble

My stomach twists. I have enough wherewithal to remember the loaded gun Axe stowed in my glove compartment. My car is a quick sprint away. Closer than the door to the club but farther than what feels safe. I could scream, but it might agitate him and spur him to do something… violent.

Or maybe I’m overreacting.

Maybe he doesn’t mean to be creepy. Maybe he doesn’t realize this feels like a threat. Not every man who sneaks up on a woman in a dark parking lot has a nefarious plan to rape and murder her, right? I smile at him, but he doesn’t smile back.

“I’m sorry,” I say lightly. “Garden’s all closed up. But if you come back tomorrow—”

“No… I don’t think I’ll be coming back tomorrow. I wanted it to be tonight.” His tone tells me that I’m not overreacting. It tells me to run.

He shuffles closer, but I sidestep him and race towards my car. The sound of his footsteps is heavy in my ears, and I can practically feel him closing in on me. Fuck these stilettos for slowing my sprint to safety. I reach for my car door, dumbstruck by the resistance I’m met with when I pull on the handle. Axe locked my car. Shit.

The weight of a body slams into my side, forcing all the breath from my lungs and knocking me to the pavement. My bare legs scrape against hard ground and gravel. The shock of it is shaken loose when the man grabs my hair and drags me farther into the shadows of the parking lot. I call out, but he’s already on top of me, crushing my chest and lungs and making it hard to breathe, to scream.

I slash across his throat with my nails and kick as hard as I can, but he dodges me as he pushes my legs apart with his knees. My wrists are suddenly restrained above my head and pushed painfully into the cold ground.

“Fuckin’ tease,” he grits. “Ignore me all night? Whoring around with all those other men? Fucking slut!” he yells.

I spit in his face, and he reels back. I take that moment to kick my stiletto hard into his gut and push, and when the weight of him lessens, I twist around and claw at the ground to push myself back up. The second I get to my feet, though, he wraps a hand around my ankle and pulls me to the ground again. My knees scream as my skin scrapes across the pavement.

And then it stops.

I jerk around, spider crawling away. In the shadows, two large figures drag a third deep into the bowels of the parking lot behind a few cars that have been abandoned for the night. On shaking legs, I push up and cautiously follow.

Relief hits me when I see him.

Axe.

He slams his fist into the jaw of my attacker. Head slumped, the man struggles against the second body holding him in place, but Axe doesn’t let up. He punches him again and again, barely letting him take a breath before going at him once more.

“Hey, Kitty,” he says casually before throwing another punch.

“Hey…” I say back, body still shaking.

Expression furious, he scans me from head to toe, inspecting my injuries. “You good?”

I nod, but he doesn’t catch the movement. He’s focused on my bloody knees and my scuffed thighs. Clenching his jaw, he nods at the other man, who, from here, I can see is Bane.

“Put him on the fucking ground. And shut him up.”

Bane obliges, a dangerous smile curling up his face as he pulls his buff off his head and shoves it into the man’s mouth. He pushes him onto his stomach and straddles his back. The man flails against his weight, but the click of Bane’s gun quickly stills him.

Axe clicks his tongue as he squats near the man’s head. “You shouldn’t do that. Touch things that don’t want to be touched.” He pulls at the man’s hair, yanking and twisting his neck in a way that looks painful. His voice drops low, and the calmness of it sends a hot shiver to the base of my spine. “You shouldn’t touch things that don’t belong to you.”

His angry eyes drift back to me, and he holds my gaze. Like he’s waiting for me to tell him it’s okay, that this man needs to be punished, that whatever he’s about to do is justice. I’m judge and jury, and he’s my executioner.

Still in shock, I have no control over my expression. I don’t know what he sees when he looks at me, but he pushes up and jerks his head to Bane. “Hold out his hands.”

Bane chuckles and shoves his gun into his boot before twisting the man’s wrists out in front of him, palms against the pavement.

Even with the buff muffling his screams, the man’s cries echo through the parking lot. Axe crunches the man’s knuckles with his heavy boot, pressing hard. The asshole on the ground moves to jerk away. But Bane is heavy on his back, and when Axe lifts his foot, readying to sentence him, the man can do nothing except wait for it.

It’s the sound of the bones breaking that makes my heart jump. Axe slams his foot onto the man’s hand, crushing it against the pavement. Just like the punches, he does it over and over again, delivering blow after blow. And then he moves to the other one. Even from a distance, the mutilation is obvious—fingers angled in all the wrong ways, knuckles bleeding, hands flat in places they shouldn’t be.

The man’s screams fade into sobs.

Bane laughs.

Axe squats back down, his voice a near whisper as he grabs another fistful of the man’s hair, craning his neck so he’s forced to face him. “That will teach you not to touch things that aren’t yours. Never. Come back here,” he says through gritted teeth. “And never. Fucking. Touch what’s mine.”

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