The metal rim connected with his gut.
He folded over it, gagging, all the wind driven out of him. I yanked the blade back and brought it up again from the other side, catching him higher this time, along the ribs.
He went to his knees, breath coming in short, shocked gasps.
“Please—” he hacked. “We just wanted a piece of the whore, too. She screamed so pretty for you?—”
I saw red, raising the shovel with the intent to swing for the fences.
He spat blood into the ice on the floor. His eyes flicked past me, toward the door, as if still calculating the odds of getting past me, as if there was any version of reality where I’d let him slip by and live a comfortable life somewhere else off my money.
The answer hit him about a second too late.
He lunged anyway, trying to get around me.
I met him halfway and slammed the flat of the shovel across his face.
The sound was wet and wrong. Blood flew in a dark arc, spattering the concrete floor and the side of a stall. Hayden went down and didn’t get back up.
“Stop, Ben!” Chrissy’s voice cracked. “Stop — stop, please, you’ll kill them?—”
I was breathing too hard. Heat flooded under my skin, my muscles shaking with the effort not to keep going until there was nothing left of either of them.
“That’s the idea, baby.”
Brett shifted. I turned toward him just in time to see his hand flash.
There was a small utility knife in his palm — one of the ones the staff used to cut open supply boxes. It caught the light a half-second before he drove it upward.
Pain tore across my side, just under my ribs, white-hot and bright.
The shovel slipped in my grip for half a beat.
I roared and brought the handle down like a club. It cracked against his forearm. The knife clattered to the floor. Brett yelped, rolling onto his back, clutching his arm.
I planted my foot on his chest and shoved him flat.
“You signed a contract,” I growled, voice low. “You swore you understood the limits. You went off-script. You tried to take what’s mine. You tried to hurt her.”
“It wasn’t supposed to—” He coughed, breath hitching. “You’re the one who set this circus up, Stonewood. You wanted her tested?—”
“I wanted her tested,” I snapped, shoving down harder, “not hunted… not by anyone but me.”
His eyes went wide.
I hit him with the shovel one last time, hard enough that his head snapped sideways and then lolled, his body going slack.
The barn dropped into a sudden, ringing silence.
The only sound left was the ragged rasp of my breathing and Chrissy’s quick, shallow, panicky inhales.
Blood was running hot and steady down my side now, soaking the waistband of my sweatpants. The cold air bit into the wound with vicious teeth.
I turned away from the two men on the ground to face Chrissy.
She was pressed back against an empty stall, half crouched, hands braced on the boards behind her. Her chest rose andfell fast. Tears streaked her cheeks, but her chin was tilted stubbornly high.
Her gaze dropped to the shovel in my hand, then to Hayden and Brett, then slowly dragged its way back to me.
