But I am tasting him too.
In a way he’ll never expect.
I strike. And then — blood; his tongue, caught between my teeth, and I bite down with every ounce of hatred and animal desperation I have hoarded for him. I taste copper and salt and rage, and I clamp my jaw shut until I feel flesh break.
He jerks back, shrieking, a red veil spraying from his mouth. “You bitch!”
I’m already on him.
I scream — raw, primal, animal — and I hurl myself at him with everything in me. My fingernails slash at his face, aimed straight for his eyes. He screams as one nail catches skin, dragging across his cheek. He hits me with his forearm, slamming me into the wall. Pain explodes across my ribs, but I don’t stop. I lunge again, nails raking, teeth bared, kicking, clawing, grabbing fistfuls of hair and ripping. I’m half-blind with rage, years of terror igniting into something volcanic, unstoppable.
“You won’t touch me again!” I shriek, spittle flying. “I’m not your fucking victim! GO TO HELL!”
He punches me in the face, fist crunching my cheekbone, and for a second I see fireworks. My head hits the wall, ears ringing, but instinct takes over. I spit blood at him, the bright red spray hitting his lips and cheek.
He wipes his face with the back of his hand. “You stupid bitch,” he slurs, tongue thick and mangled in his mouth. “Look what you did!”
“Yeah,” I growl. “I am. I’m a fucking bitch who’s through being afraid of you.”
Teeth bared, I leap at him, trying to bite the side of his face. He recoils, but not fast enough — I catch his earlobe between my teeth and yank, tearing the flesh. He howls, shoving me so hard that I tumble over a pile of old rags and land on the ground, skidding on my knees.
But I get back up.
“You think I’m still scared of you?” I spit. “You think you can make me run?”
He lunges.
I duck, slam my knee into his groin, then rake my nails across his jaw. He cries out, and for a second,a whole second, I think I might win. Then he grabs the chains I’d been bound with. With a smile, he brings it whistling through the air, and it crashes into my skull.
I collapse onto the cold concrete, vision melting into smeared colors. My ears ring. My limbs go numb. The world narrows to a tunnel.
Viper stands over me, breathing hard, blood oozing from the wounds in his mouth and on his face.
“Should’ve stayed the sweet little thing you used to be,” he snarls. “This would’ve made this so much easier for you. But now, I’m going to take my time.”
The last thing I see before darkness swallows me whole is his bloody mouth turn into a smile.
Chapter Forty-Four
Breaker
The car rattles and bucks beneath me, every loose bolt and straining gasket threatening to surrender, but I slam the accelerator anyway, redlining through the mud-streaked back roads with the force of a man whose body is already half grave and half flame. My right hand is welded to the wheel, knuckles bone-white and tendons straining; my left hangs in my lap, each jolt sending a fresh telegram of agony up my arm, across my battered chest, into the core of what’s left of me that isn’t just anger and panic and a singular, keening need. My phone is wedged between my shoulder and my ear.
“Officer Alvarado,” I say. My breath comes out ragged, lungs raw from fighting, from running, from the constant anticipation of the next gut-punch. “I need you to run a trace.”
“What kind of trace?” she replies, crisp and clipped. Always professional and by the book. Even now.
“Credit card activity,” I say. “Name on the card is William Hickok. With one ‘c’. Cowboy spelling.”
There’s a pause.
“That’s oddly specific,” she says carefully. “Why do I have a bad feeling about this?”
“It’s about to get worse,” I say, and there’s probably a laugh in there somewhere, but it would kill me to let it out. The steering wheel jumps in my grip as I swerve around a pothole, the tires skidding on wet gravel. “Just run the trace. Please.”
The silence stretches, heavy with things neither of us is allowed to say. It’s a code I respect, but I want to reach through the phone and shake her, make her understand how every second is a nail in Riley’s coffin if I fuck this up.
“Breaker… what happened?” Her voice cracks, just a little, and that’s enough to undo me.
