I had good aim. It caught him in the neck, sending him skidding into a ditch.
Had I killed him?
Who knew?
Did I give a fuck?
Not yet. Right now I felt feral, seething gasps searing my lungs. Adrenaline clouding my senses.Stay alive.I knew it mattered.
And goddamn, I fuckin’ tried. But there were too many. My front tyre hit a pothole. I kicked out my legs for stability, but the grip in my injured arm deserted me. I had no leverage, and I ate dirt.
The impact was brutal. I couldn’t tell which way was up until I landed flat on my back, ears ringing, every ounce of breath driven from my lungs. My helmet had done its job, protecting my skull, but the rest of me was battered to hell.
Everything but the angry bull inside me.
I scrambled to get up, ignoring the screaming protests of my dismantled flesh and bone.
A boot landed on my chest, forcing me back down, and a dark figure loomed over me.
Straggly hair. Body odour like rotting milk. Teeth that could eat an apple through a barbed wire fence.
In the darkness, Priest grinned, eyes gleaming like my worst nightmares. “Well, well, boys. Look at this. The entertainment came home to roost.”
…
A savage gasp woke me again, my heart thundering so damn hard I felt it in my toes, my eyeballs finally engaging enough to gift me an actual view of my surroundings.
I was in a van, one arm chained above my head, the other a bleeding mess at my side. My fingers were sticky with it, welded together. I flexed them, testing for soundness. They worked, but the wrench in my tendons should’ve scared the shit out of me. I didn’t stop to wonder why it didn’t. Why my brain had defaulted to a numbness I’d carried for eleven fuckin’ years.
Priest.
Nausea dizzied me. I’d spent a long time believing I wished him a painful death, but the truth was, the longer I’d been with the Kings, the less I’d cared. My kids. Logan. Nash and Orla. Watching Folk find his happy-ever-after. All those things had eclipsed the hate in my heart, and I’d left it by the wayside.
And even now, it didn’t come back to me. Nothing did, except the kind of fear that didn’t feel real. How could something that hurt this much exist?
Fuckin’ outrageous.
I tried my fingers again, a pained grunt hissing through my clenched teeth. Wiggled my toes. Bent my knees.
Everything worked.
I took another look around the van, vision rolling a little as my head spun, for the first time absorbing the fact that the damn-fuckin’ thing was moving.
My pulse still hurt. Sickness roiled in my belly, but I swallowed it down, forcing myself to focus on the interior of the beat-up Transit. Ply panelling. Rusted metalwork. Chains and ropes hanging from the dented ceiling.
A pair of tired yellow-green eyes staring right back at me.
In the painful seconds it took for all this to manifest in my hazy brain, the van came to a stop, the engine cutting off, the silence somehow louder.
I ripped my gaze from the companion I’d only just noticed, as if the hooks he was hanging from weren’t real. As if none of this was, and every new nightmare was just that—a bad dream I’d wake up from, my frayed nerves soothed by sharp nails and dirty humour that made my blood pump harder every time she opened her damn mouth.
A soul so kind just looking at him made fuckin’ angels cry.
Except, I didn’t wake up, cos maybe those were the things that had been nothing but a dream. Him. Her. The long, happy hours with my kids. The weeks and months I’d spent believing that, for once in my miserable life, I’d landed on my feet.
The van doors opened before I could remind myself of everything I had to be grateful for, regardless of whether I’d imagined my fuck-hot love life or not. Daylight shocked the shit out of me, searing my eyes. I reared back, trying to raise an arm to shield myself, but cruel hands grabbed me. Unchained me, and hauled me out of the Transit and into the rain.
Heavy drops soaked me to the skin in two seconds flat, my socked feet squelching in puddles.
