The knife handle brushes my thigh.
A gasp tears from my lungs. Pure instinct and survival.
Before I’ve even thought it through, my arm swings. I plunge the knife into his thigh. It sinks in with horrifying ease. Like cutting juicy fruit.
Liam’s face contorts with shock, then rage, then pain. He grunts, clutching his leg, blood soaking through his jeans.
“What the fuck!”
His grip on my throat loosens.
“I did not cheat on Kade,” I hiss, raising the knife again and driving it into his shoulder.
He screams, stumbling back, blood spurting hot across my hand.
“You crazy bitch!” he wheezes.
“For the record,” I snarl, stepping toward him, “if you have to drug a woman to have sex—”
I stab his arm.
He yelps, collapsing onto his knees.
“—you’re the crazy one.”
His eyes widen. He scrambles back on the ground, palms slipping in the spreading pool of his own blood.
I don’t stop.
I can’t.
I push the knife into his stomach. He tries to grab my wrist, but his fingers slide off; too slick.
“You make me sick,” I whisper, voice shaking with fury and terror and something else. Something akin topower.
I bring the blade down into his chest.
This time a wet, awful gurgle fills his throat. His eyes glaze, pupils blown wide. I twist the knife—and the handle snaps in my hand.
“Eden?”
Fern’s voice is closer, running toward me.
I straighten slowly, breathing hard, staring down at Liam as blood bubbles at the corner of his mouth.
Fern skids to a stop beside me. “Holy crap.” Her eyes flick from the body, to the blood on my hands, to the broken knife. “Eden…”
I stand there shaking, chest heaving, staring down at what used to terrify me, and what I’ve just destroyed.
“I think he’s dying,” I whisper.
“No shit,” Fern mutters, staring as Liam wheezes twice, then goes completely still.
A strange, hollow quiet drops over the alley.
“For the record,” I add, voice flat, “he was about to rape me. Again.”
Fern’s whole expression changes to fury, fear, and loyalty snapping into place in an instant. “We’ve got to get out of here,” she says, already moving, already thinking. Then she glances at me, at my blood-soaked hands, my ruined clothes. “But not like that.”
