Page 87 of To All the Guys I Killed Before

“Compared to mine?” Hugo laughs and crosses his arms over his chest. “Li’l bit, yeah.”

I’m dumbstruck watching him plant his feet and practically dare this motherfucker to shoot him. Why would he⁠—

He’s making himself the target so I can run.

I want to cry, I want to melt, and I want to punch him in the face. But if this sweet, overprotective man thinks I’m going to leave him behind with a gun pointed at his chest, he doesn’t know the real me yet. I dig past my fear and give a light, tinkling laugh that could’ve been engineered in a lab to enrage anyone who’s spent any time in the manosphere.

“No, but for real, it’s sooooo tiny.” I giggle again, sounding amused even though my head fills with images of Hugo shot, bleeding, dead.

Hawaiian Shirt goes apoplectic, swings the gun toward me, then Hugo, then, inexplicably, the dog before turning it back to me.

“Fuck you both!” He’s sputtering so hard drops of spittle land on my cheek. “You have no fucking idea what I’m capable of, you little bitch!”

I give Hugo a tiny nod, ready as I’ll ever be for us to execute this hopeless plan.

“Is he the little bitch,” I ask, “or am I?”

Hawaiian Shirt’s arm wraps around my windpipe again and squeezes until I’m struggling to draw breath.

“He is,” the guy hisses. “You’re just dead.”

The pressure on my throat falls away, but the pressure of the gun against my temple changes. It’s steadier than it’s been all night as the man’s intent coalesces around the trigger, the chamber, the bullet.

I have a fraction of a second. It’s now or never.

Sending up a prayer to whoever’s listening that I’ve created enough slack in the leash loops, I exhale hard, deflating my lungs as I drop all of my weight straight down. The gun slips off my sweaty skin as I fall, the nylon leash catching under my breasts and momentarily halting my momentum. But I wrench myself down ever harder, my skin burning as I force myself through. The remaining loops scrape over my chin and across my face as I drag myself lower, and then I’m free. But like hell am I following Hugo’s orders to run, not if there’s a chance I can help.

A roar fills the living room as my neighbor launches himself at the guy, grabbing the arm holding the gun and pointing it toward the ceiling. I crabwalk backward until I collide with the front of the couch, coughing and massaging my burning throat with one hand and sweeping the floor for my knife with the other.

The men crash to the floor, and the gun discharges with a bang. The Socrates print wobbles and hits the floor in a burst of glass. The dog starts howling.

Hawaiian Shirt throws a wild punch that Hugo twists to take on his shoulder instead of his jaw, and that’s when I remember that this is my goody-goody Boy Scout neighbor who’s not even a week off a major head injury. If he gets a second concussion while the first one’s still healing, it could be really fucking bad. Like, irreparable harm to his brain bad.

“Don’t!” I scream, not sure who I’m directing that to. Hugo lands a nasty elbow to the mouth that leaves the man stunned and bleeding, but when he tries to pin the guy, Hawaiian Shirt wrenches his right arm free. In what feels like slow motion, he swings the gun toward my neighbor just as my seeking fingers finally brush my knife.

I glance. I grab. I fling myself forward and bury the blade into Hawaiian Shirt’s calf. He howls and tries to kick me, but I roll away, taking the blade with me.

“You’re dead, bitch,” he screams, too focused on rolling to point that gun at me to notice that Hugo’s lifted himself to his knees. He catches the man’s gun arm with his left hand and grabs the front of his Hawaiian shirt with his right, lifting the man off the ground until they’re nose to nose.

“I told you,” Hugo grits out. “I told you not to fucking touch her.”

The muscles in his back flex as he pulls the man even higher. Then he drives his head down into the hardwood floor with a stomach-turning crack. The man gives an awful moan, the gun clattering to the floor as a white-and-brown bundle of fur zips past me to burrow under the couch, the purple leash trailing behind him.

Snarling, “You touched her, you fucking touched her,” Hugo fists both hands in the man’s shirt and drives his head down again, then again and again, his knuckles tight on the fabric as the floor below them turns red and the sounds of impact get softer and wetter with each strike. The man’s body goes from fighting to flailing to slack until his only movement is the erratic twitching of fingers of his left hand. The last gasp of mangled, misfiring synapses.

Then, like a switch being flipped, Hugo sits up, his chest heaving. The great gasps of air he’s pulling into his lungs aren’t enough to drown out the labored, rattling breaths of the man beneath him. Hawaiian Shirt is dying. In fact, he’s been mostly gone since the first blow. I know it, and Hugo knows it too.

Or he would, if he’s still in there.

He shudders once, hard, and I grip my knife and wait to see which man is in the room with me right now.

After another few breaths, he looks down at his blood-slick hands, then at the breathing dead man underneath him. “Fuck,” he says softly.

Moving deliberately now, he sets his hands on either side of Hawaiian Shirt’s battered face, moving it to the left, tilting it up. He’s looking for an angle that will produce one final, fatal blow, and I almost call out for him to aim at the base of the skull.

But he doesn’t need instructions. He’s already doing it. He lifts the man’s head and drives it down in one controlled strike. Those ragged breaths go silent in a single squelch of bone and brain.

Then my gentle neighbor turns to me, blood to the elbows, face blank.