You said you believed in me, I thought, hoping he could hear it.Now trust me.
Maybe I was crazy, but I wanted it to hurt. I wanted Joe to show me what he was really capable of and, yeah, maybe part of me thought I deserved it. I fell for his shit and I deserved the consequences.
That didn’t mean I was going to live under them anymore, though.
Luci’s jaw clenched and he nodded once, but didn’t back away.
“Don’t what?” Joe asked. “Kill you? Oh come on, Dany. Someone’s gotta clean up the mess you made. I can’t just let you go.”
Though he held me still held me by the throat, I tipped my head forward and pressed my forehead to the tip of the barrel. “Do it, you dickless bastard.”
His laugh was malicious. “Now we both know that’s not true is it, Dany? I fucked you like the whore you are on top of my car.”
I took comfort in knowing that somehow, some way, he hadn’t. That it had been Lucifer claiming me all along.
“Do it, you fucking pussy.”
That was all his ego needed. Joe sneered and between blinks, the gunpowder filled my nose as he pulled the trigger.
For a split second, I felt everything.
The bullet hit between my eyes like a sledgehammer swung by God Himself. There was a blinding burst of white, a crack like the world splitting open, and then hot, wet nothing as the back of my skull slammed against the container from the force of the bullet.
Sound folded in on itself.
There was distant ringing, like someone had thrown church bells into a blender. The cold seeped into my scalp where my head had split open. Warmthran down the sides of my face in thick streams, pooling in my hair, slicking my neck.
Somewhere far away, someone was shouting.
“Holy shit. Holy shit, holy shit—”
Gravity loosened, like someone had cut the strings tying me to my body.
I floated.
Then the tether yanked.
Heat roared back through me from the inside out, a furnace kicking on. The torn edges of bone and brain and skin crawled, knitting, pulling themselves back together in a grotesque, itching drag. The pressure inside my skull went from crushing to suffocating to…less.
I dragged in a breath like I’d been underwater.
Noise slammed into me.
Joe’s voice, ragged and disbelieving. “No. No, no, no—”
My fingers twitched.
“Get up,” Lucifer murmured somewhere above me, voice rich with dark pride. “Show him.”
I opened my eyes.
It was all worth it to see his piece-of-shit face when I didn’t fall to the ground. To watch the color drain from his skin and the puddle of piss that pooled below his feet when I wiped the blood from my forehead and licked it off my fingers.
He fired again.
The second shot punched into my chest, right over my sternum. Then a third. Fourth. Each impact rocked me, snapping my spine back into the container with a dull clang.
He didn’t aim. Didn’t take his time. Just squeezed the trigger again and again and again, screaming something wordless as the muzzle flashed over and over, lighting his face in stuttering snapshots of terror.
