Gage executed a three-sixty turn, building momentum as he met the first man with the long cane, striking him in the knee.
A sickening, bone-chilling crack sounded before he dropped with a primal scream of agony.
The second enforcer was already mid-rush as Gage pivoted toward the popping beads and stabbed the rod into the man’s ribs. The shock made him convulse violently before it shut him down. Collapsing him with his mouth open and eyes wide.
The third came in swinging, and Gage dodged him as if he were light work.
He dipped and drove the blunt end of the cane up under the jawline, clean and vicious, snapping thug’s head back, before he dropped to the ground, bloodied and unconscious, but still very much alive.
More beads popped like knuckles cracking, rapid little reports that drew a grid and turned the enforcers steps into mistake.
The next one tried to use his heft to rush and tackle.
Gage sidestepped him as if he were an annoying obstacle and struck him in his gut with the blunt end of his cane beforehe shot it upward and shattered his chin. In the same breath, he twisted his wrist and struck him again in the right jaw.
The enforcer collapsed in a rough heap, face twisted, body doubled over.
The last one hesitated…but not quick enough, his left boot coming down on one of the beads.
Gage pivoted in response, and slammed the steel bar into the bastard’s midsection, folding him over like a raggedy card table, before he shoved the electric baton against the side of his neck.
The current stole his breath, shorted out his muscles, and dropped him to the floor in a twitching heap.
Gage straightened his coat, relaxed and unbothered, as silence swallowed the room.
Scar gaped like everyone else. How had he underestimated him.
Gage was fiercer than a killer, because he left men breathing with bloodied, broken bodies and a brand-new kind of fear.
Pride warmed his insides.
He was watching the warrior angel—his partner—in real time.
He’d been so transfixed he hadn’t noticed the cold press of steel against the back of his head.
“Drop that shit, or he dies now!” A man barked at Gage.
Scar didn’t know who it was, it didn’t matter, as the pounding in his chest increased tenfold.
Gage froze a split second, before he jerked fast to the left.
An arrow whistled past his shoulder and over Scar’s head, close enough to make the hairs on his forearms rise.
He cringed at the sound of instant death the man behind him made before the pressure from the gun’s muzzle was gone.
He glanced in shock over his shoulder at the wicked black-and-green arrow protruding from the man’s throat.
The king started yelling, his voice cracking. “Get him! Get him!”
Nobody moved.
The room had watched five enforcers fall at the hands of one man, a gunman killed by an invisible crossbow, all while Gage stood there unaffected as if his name was Consequence.
Gage collapsed the long cane back into its compact form as he walked past the unconscious and writhing men at his feet with eerie composure.
“I never wished for anyone to get hurt,” Gage said in a level voice. “But my warning was clear. Do not make me ask again for what I came for.”
His electric baton buzzed with an obvious increase in voltage, the sound making the ones left standing shrink away.
