The air tears out of my lungs in a sharp, strangled sound.
“You bitch!” he snarls, spittle flying, his breath rancid as his hand clamps around my throat. Pain blooms, my vision prickling with stars.
I claw at his wrist, kick, twist, but nothing breaks his grip.
Hailey screams. Somewhere behind me, Lila scrambles and something metal clatters. They do not help me, and I cannot blame them. To them, this disgusting psycho must look like the devil himself, the monster who trained them to fear him.
His thumb digs into my windpipe, and panic floods me as the world narrows again, breath by breath.
“You think you can take me?!” he roars.
I can’t.
The edges of everything begin to blur. My lungs seize, my legs thrash uselessly against the dirt, and he shoves me down harder, pinning me beneath his knee. He presses until I can’t even force out a sound, until the fight becomes nothing but silent, frantic movement trapped inside my own skin.
It’s a cruel joke. The whole thing is one big, cruel joke.
I’ve been here before, and I know how this ends.
I’m going to die.
I hate the way my body feels, how it keeps trying even when it has no right to. I’m giving one hundred percent. No, more than that. I push past the point where muscles are supposed to stop obeying. Adrenaline surges through me, fear drives me, and I claw at him with everything I have because I’m fighting for my life.
But it’s still not enough.
My mind splinters. In the dark behind my eyes, I see the glow of my scythe and Pain’s eyes watching from somewhere I can’t reach.
Accept it.
That was what Pain told me, wasn’t it?
You need to accept that you’re already dead.
It’s the last thing I want to hear in the middle of a battle for survival, but it comes anyway, loud and clear. It cuts through my very panic.
Stop fighting. You are already dead.
So I do. I stop struggling. The fear drains out of me like water through a crack, and everything else dulls with it. The sounds flatten, my heartbeat quiets, and I stare past his shoulder at the slice of sky above us and think,Fine. Take me, then.
Maybe this is the end of my second run at life, but I will not finish it scared.
It’s been good.
It’s been nice.
Maybe now Death will have to find someone else to do his bidding for him.
The man tightens his grip.
Then something hits.
THUD.
His eyes roll back before I can even make sense of it. His weight collapses onto me, crushing the air from my chest in a different way, and for a split second, I think I’ve lost consciousness. But then hands grab him, drag him off, and cold air rushes into my lungs like a shock.
I blink up at the face of an angel standing over me. Call him an angel of death, because his hands are locked around a baseball bat and the wood is already streaked with blood. Burnt-orange hair, two mismatched eyes, a face twisted into a snarl.
“I’m going to kill this motherfucker,” he snarls.
