“Later. It just grazed me,” I lied. It was in my muscle, but thankfully hadn’t hit bone. After I’d found Rae I’d deal with it properly. For now, a quick wrapping of cloth around it andI was on my way. I wasn’t stopping now. “You could’ve killed him before he shot me.” I looped the sling of my rifle over my shoulder and let it lay against my back.
There were more rooms in the next hallway and I wanted something smaller when going through doorways. Something a shitbag couldn’t knock out of my hands while I was going through a door. My pistol would work well enough for me. Especially since Jury would be coming in behind me with the rifle.
“You and that piece of shit were in the way,” Scythe replied. “Flailing all over the fucking place. You’re lucky I got him before he shot you again. Next time take your target down faster and I’ll get to mine quicker.”
I chuckled despite the seriousness of the situation. “I’ll remember that for the future.”
“See that you do. Let’s go find your girl.”
Ignoring the pain, I moved forward with him and Jury, continuing to clear out rooms. There were only two doors left and I was starting to worry that we weren’t going to find her.
My jaw clenched when we smashed in the door to the second to last room. A man was there, holding onto Rae, and had a gun to her head. There wasn’t time to be worried about her because I needed to make the fucker threatening her bleed. I met her eyes briefly and saw the fear there, but she was holding it together. She wasn’t panicking.
“Let her go,” I warned the guy.
He barked out a laugh. “Why the fuck should I do that?”
“It’ll ensure a swift death for you.”
He looked at me in disbelief. “So, I let her go, and I die?”
“Of course. You touched my old lady.”
“You really don’t know how this negotiating thing goes, do you?” he asked.
“I don’t negotiate,” I growled. The barrel of my gun was leveled at his head. Problem was that he kept shifting and Rae was ending up in my sights just as often as he was. I couldn’t take the chance of shooting him. Not while he was holding her.
Motion caught my eye and I watched with interest as Rae pulled a knife out of the waistband of her jeans. I looked back up at the Iron Circle fuck. “Negotiating implies you have something to trade.”
His incredulous expression might have made me laugh if he wasn’t holding a gun to my woman’s head. “Her?” he said, jiggling Rae a little as he said it, in order to emphasize the word.
“I don’t need you to trade her. I’m getting her back on my own.”
He shook his head, his mouth hanging open. He didn’t know how to react to my refusal to follow the normal rules. I’d never been great at rule following. Had done it for the time I was in the military, but that was about it.
Jury was somewhere behind me, waiting quietly as we danced around the inevitability of this guy’s death. I was pretty sure Scythe was still in the hall. These rooms weren’t big enough to hold us all.
This guy was under the mistaken impression that he could get out of here. That he could use my Reaper as a shield and somehow make it out alive. First off, I wasn’t going to allow that. Secondly, he didn’t know my girl. A smile spread over my face, confusing him even more.
Then he was too busy bellowing in pain to try to figure me out anymore. Rae had gotten her knife and had lodged it in his side. She’d dropped her weight suddenly—and though she didn’t weigh enough to force him to let her go completely, she dropped a few inches—which is when she’d stabbed the fucker. That was when he made the fatal mistake of letting her drop to the ground.
Rae crouched and ran to the side of the room, out of the way so that I could fill this fucker full of more holes than Swiss Cheese. He tried to get one last shot in, turning his gun toward me, but I stepped in close, knocked the gun to the side and pressed my pistol to the underside of his chin. It was too quick of a death. He didn’t deserve it. He deserved pain and agony.
My round traveled through the soft tissue of his throat and mouth and into his cranial cavity so quickly he didn’t even know he was dead before it all happened. There was no realization that his life was over. He just fell in a limp pile to the floor. Sighing, I holstered my pistol, pulled my knife and cut off one of his fingers. I was shoving it into the pocket of my cut when Rae hit me full force and wrapped herself around me.
“Pyre!” She squeezed me tight. “I knew you’d come.”
I wrapped my arms around her, holding her body against mine as she wrapped her legs around my waist. Looking around the room, I grinned. There were a couple of dead men in here. “You do all this, Baby Girl?”
She let out a humorless chuckle. “No. I killed one of them,” she admitted. “And another back in the armory. And one at the old bridge. But most of this was Forge.”
I stiffened as I heard his name and looked over my shoulder at Jury. “Forge?”
“Yeah. You know him?”
“Met him once or twice. Don’t really know him though.”
“He’s one of their own… At least I think he is, but he killed a bunch of them to help me.”
