Page 10 of The Torturer's Target

“I’m the last face you will ever see, you cold-blooded murderer.” She continued her slow walk towards him.

“What the hell do you mean by ‘cold-blooded murderer?’ Who the fuck are you?” Max's back met with the wall which halted him.

Tesiera’s smirk deepened. There wasn’t anywhere else for him to go. Time to finish this.

Angling her knife, she aimed it at his throat. “I hope you rot in hell, Maximilian Kingston.” She raised it high to strike.

Suddenly, a blaring alarm went off and the entire house flashed red.

Tesiera was stunned. That was when she saw his hand resting on something on the wall. Not something, she thought as he moved his hand. It was a button. A red button labeled ‘Emergency’.

There was a fucking alarm here?

The bedroom door burst open, and the two hefty men she’d seen before rushed in but stopped short when they saw her with a knife in her hand and their boss sliding down the wall to the floor, his thighs drenched in his own blood and a knife stuck in his left leg.

What the hell?

His protectors held guns, Tesiera noted, and one of them was already cocking his.

She whirled around and sprinted for the nearest window, the sound of heavy footsteps chasing her. But agility was one of Tesiera’s greatest skills, and before they could squeeze the trigger, she leaped through the glass.

“Did she just jump out? We are thirty fucking meters above the ground!?” Bose raged, racing toward the window with Clinton following hotly on his tail.

“Well, she will be deader than dead. Saves us a lot of stress—holy shit. “Clinton cut off suddenly. They watched with their mouth gaping open as the feminine figure somersaulted three times then rose from the ground and ran away into the night.

A grunt from their boss sprang them into action again. They pocketed their guns and hurried to him.

“We are so sorry, boss. Goddamnit!” Bose swore, his rage directed at himself.

“We gotta get the boss to the hospital. I’m calling 911,” Clinton said, tapping the screen of his cellphone. “Stay with the boss. I’ll gather our men to get the cars ready!”

Max couldn’t follow what was going on around him; instead, his mind focused on what the woman had called him. A cold-blooded murderer.

That a stranger would call him that hurt almost as much as the fucking knife wounds. For the life of him, he could not figure out why she would label him like that. He had never murdered anyone in in his entire life.

CHAPTER 5. THE SAME BUT DIFFERENT.

The private hospital room smelled of saline drips and disinfectant—a smell that Max didn’t mind as a doctor, but after smelling it as a patient for the past three days, he concluded that he hated it. He asked to be brought to this hospital because it would be easier to conceal the attack and keep it from getting out to the public than if he had been treated where he worked.

He had lost a lot of blood and required a transfusion after the trauma surgeon stitched up his wounds. Max had spent three days at the hospital, receiving treatments and stitches on his wounds. He’d been given medications, and now both his thighs and his left hand had bandages wrapped around them.

On the bright side, he would be getting discharged soon. Though, he worked in a hospital he finally accepted the universal truth that doctors made the worst patients.

“We may run out of places to keep flowers soon, sir. Harvey is the tenth child to give you flowers since you were admitted. And let’s not talk about the array of flowers and get-well cards that hundreds of nurses have brought in.”

“Five. Five nurses,” Max corrected with a chuckle and leaned back onto his pillow. He grunted at the twinge of pain that the movement created.

“Same difference, sir. Five is way too many,” Clinton insisted, which made Max snicker. “I know you hate being the patient, boss, but fortunately, you’ll soon be discharged.”

“I think you hate being on that chair more than I hate being in this bed. You’ve been as grumpy as me these past few days.”

“I’m pissed about what happened. I should have taken Bose seriously when he said he had a feeling that we were being tailed. I should have known better, dammit.” The big guy’s eyes darkened. “I’m going to kill that skinny-ass, red-headed bitch if I ever get my hands on her.”

Max said nothing. His bodyguards had been beating themselves up since it happened. Bose, especially. Max had spent the first twenty-four hours after the attack listening to Bose’s angry tirades and the very graphic details the man went into about how he would kill the attacker if he ever discovered who the hell she was. Which was exactly what Bose had gone out to do for the past forty-eight hours.

Max still hadn’t figured out why the woman attacked him. Granted, he had a few enemies who had come after him over the years, but none of them were as skilled as she was. Her face a constant image in his mine since he woke up the next morning attached to drips filled with saline and painkillers.

He thought about her striking hair, her poise, and the way she seemed so elegant yet dangerously lethal. A woman who handled knives with expert proficiency.

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