“I will remove the door and take this man to the nether realm,” I say roughly. “Stay here so you are not harmed.”
I thrust the backpack at her, pulling out a gas mask and handing it over.
She crosses her arms over her chest, but she must see that we are out of time, so she takes the breathing mask and backpack. “I’m so pissed off at you right now!” She hurries several steps up the stairs, crouching with her arms over her head. Good.
I go back to the door, turn my back to it, and smash the explosive device with my elbow. It feels good to let the fear inmy chest outwards into action. The explosion blast knocks me forward, almost but not quite off my feet.
“Kharon!” Ksenia’s voice calls.
“I am unharmed,” I say, turning to look at the door. While a large indent was blasted into the door, it has still not been penetrated. I find one of the other explosive devices on the floor, so I pick it up, hold it against the door with one of my many hands, and smash it again with another elbow.
Again I am knocked forward.
When I turn back this time?—
Gunfire explodes out of the small hole that has been blasted through the door. Fury. All I feel is fury. My fears were founded. This gunfire would have been aimed at my beloved’s face had I not been here!
I roar, reach in with my hand, and tear the twisted steel until the door comes away with a horrific metallic squeal, revealing a small, square room.
I wave away the billowing smoke from the blasts, only to be greeted by the flash of more gunfire. Stinging bullets pelt my chest, and I growl, even more infuriated.
“Bring him to me,” Ksenia calls.
I want to end him right now. Through the haze of smoke, I can just make out the shape of a slim, pathetic man. Roaring so he can know some of the fear he caused my beloved when he attacked her and killed her father in a place they felt safe, I stomp into the small room. I grab the man by his neck, yanking his pathetic weapon easily out of his grasp with one of my hands and tossing it into the corner.
Behind me, a noise sounds—some mechanical song ringing on a loop. I hear Ksenia’s voice asking something in response. Words I can hear but don’t understand about why I didn’t tell her I brought asell fonein the pack.
I don’t respond because I’m a little busy finally laying hands on her uncle. He cries out and gurgles in my grasp, eyes wide and terrified as he’s lifted into the air by a force he cannot see.
I am pleased by his fear. The animal inside me I have not let out in many years feasts on his terror. My rage builds, waiting to be unleashed in satisfaction like it was upstairs. I will be what I was born to be again and send this creature to?—
But just then, a high-pitched scream sounds from the corner of the room. I turn to see a small child in a dressing gown looking terrified as I raise the man I can only assume to be her father high into the air by his throat.
THIRTY
KSENIA
What thehell?Is that akid?
I hold the still-ringing cell phone I dug out of a front pocket in the backpack and run down the stairs.
I can only blink in shock when I see Kharon holding my uncle by the throat, staring at a little girl cowering and crying in the corner. She can’t be more than five years old if that.
“Who is that?” I cry. The phone keeps going off, blaring in the sudden silence of the room. I can still hear the sirens in the distance, getting closer.
“My daughter,” my uncle croaks, hands scrabbling against Kharon’s grip around his neck. “Mercy.”
He hid the fact that he had a daughter from us. Because he planned to betray us all along.
“Like the mercy you showed me and my father?” I scream at him, then push a button on the side of the phone to silence it. It only starts ringing again moments later. My eyes ping all around the room. We don’t have time for any of this.
The girl cries even louder. A cold part of my mind whispers,so what if she’s collateral damage?The job you do, you always knew this was a risk. And if ever a target was worth it. . .
But then I blink, my whole body starting to shake at the coldness of that logic.
Am I really going to kill her father in front of her?
Just like they did to my mother in front of me all those years ago? Are we really going to start this cycle of violence all over again?
