Page 4 of Silent Vendetta (Vendetta Duet)

Do not cry. He doesn’t deserve it. You will make it out of this.

The cops were probably only a couple of minutes away by now. Hopefully…this was a busy metropolitan area with a law enforcement agency spread far too thin, so response times could vary.

Let’s go with two minutes, so start counting Luna—one hundred and twenty seconds.

One.

“What are you going to do to me?” I repeated.

Two.

Hunter rubbed his jaw and with a deep inhale; his shoulders rose and fell with an unexpected gentleness. His chest glistened with a light sheen of sweat while fresh scratches tore along his midsection from where I’d gotten him.

Hunter shoved his hand through his hair and began pacing. “You really shouldn’t have come down here.”

CHAPTER3

Luna

Hunter’s bare-footed steps echoed against the floor as he paced, his gaze locked on it as if it afforded him a solution to his nightmare.

I looked around the space, spotting one other small hallway in the far-right corner, but I had no way of knowing what it led to. Escaping through the original hallway to my left was my best bet if the cops took too long.

Which, based on Hunter’s frazzled appearance, might be the case.

Hunter’s usually immaculate hair was unkempt, strands askew in every direction, and dark circles shadowed his eyes, which darted around erratically. The muscles on his chest heaved up and down while his left fist clenched and unclenched, his right hand spinning the knife’s handle.

“Can you hurry it the hell up?” Franco snapped. “I have some stuff to say that you’re going to want to hear.”

Hunter glared at Franco. “Didn’t I tell you to shut up?”

“I told you, I know more,” Franco claimed, though I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Be quiet and let me think!” Hunter paced faster, that damn knife blade glistening with crimson smears.

While another drop splatted into a small puddle on the chestnut brown stone, having fallen from Franco’s open wounds.

My throat became a desert, but I used his distraction to pull at my wrists, testing how strong the zip ties were. Like I’d have the luck to have defective ones. All it did was pinch my skin.

“Untie me and I’ll tell you everything,” Franco said.

Glancing at the tunnel, I calculated my odds of outpacing Hunter this time.

Suddenly, he lunged in front of Franco with the blade angled to his face, his eyes wild and unrecognizable. It made me gasp, and it made Franco jerk his head back in surprise too.

“Shut. Up!” Hunter shouted.

Franco’s distraction could be the only opening I’d have to make a run for it.

“I’m bleeding, man,” Franco whined.

I shifted to my right hip.

“I’m getting weak, and if you take too long, I might bleed out, and then you’ll never hear what I have to say. You agree to let me go. I—”

But he never finished his sentence. Hunter kicked Franco’s temple with his heel, blood drops flying with the wet splat of contact, and Franco’s head fell to the side, dangling from an awkward angle.

His loss of consciousness robbed me of the only hope I’d had to get past Hunter, who looked at me as he began to close the distance between us.

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