The F King: A Bad Boy Romance(101)

Sweet, fuck-off, adrenaline was flooding my system, making me want to explode, but this was a delicate situation. I focused on controlling my breathing and watching everything with laser precision as Rat One and Rat Two picked up baseball bats from behind the desk.

Rat One was holding the bat with his left hand above the right, a left-handed grip. That meant he would be swinging from the inside, crossing paths with his right-handed counterpart and getting in each other’s way.

Benny was puffing air in and out like a bull. I didn’t have to see him to know his cheeks were blowing out every time he exhaled. It was a fucking annoying sound to be honest, the loudest one in the room.

The closer the rats came, the louder he blew. If Al found him as annoying as I did, he might…

There. I felt the slight shift in the gun against the back of my head as Al looked at Benny with what I assumed was mild disgust. Now was the time to explode.

Ducking down and slightly to the side, I reached up and pulled Al’s arm over my shoulder. Making sure his thumb was facing towards the ceiling, I pushed up with my legs at the same time as I pulled down with my hands, snapping his arm at the elbow with a crisp crunching sound.

Al screamed and the gun went off. I saw Rat Two crumple over, clutching his stomach. I tried to grab Al’s gun, but didn’t have enough time to disentangle it from his fingers before Benny charged at me like the stupid fucking bull he was.

He was fast, I had to give him that. He was big. That too. All that weight, all that momentum, was his greatest strength and his greatest weakness. Standing in front of that was dangerous.

I ducked down and felt my right shoulder make contact at his waist, and all his weight moved over me as he missed with a mid-charge, right hook where my head had been a moment before. Straightening my legs and twisting to the right was all it took to relieve Benny of what little balance he had.

His feet came off the ground as he flew over me, crashing upside-down on to a flimsy coffee table on my left. I charged forward at Rat One, heading to his right hand side rather than into the path of the oncoming baseball bat.

Thankfully I was fast enough that he fucked up his timing on the swing, barely managing to hit me at all. The bat made contact with the side of my body just above the grip of his left hand. As a ratty-lookin’ slightly below-average size guy, he was probably the most out-matched in the entire room, and I sent him off his feet with a hip toss, ripping the bat out of his hand as he flipped over backwards.

I only managed to get a good grip on the bat as Renato raised his gun. Swinging for the fences, I smashed it out of his hand before he could point it at me, then caught his lower jaw flush with the back-swing as he was in the middle of cursing at me.

Tenderized. That’s what he’d said they were going to do to me, and that’s exactly what it sounded like when his jaw was sent off to the side of his face at an utterly grotesque angle. A wet meaty thump.

A strangled cry drew my attention back to Al, who was having even more of a problem getting the gun out of the grip of his dangling arm than I had, due to the obvious pain every movement was causing him. He almost had it, though.

Benny was just getting to his feet as I rushed towards Al. I leapt in his direction, kicking at his knee and hyper-extending it before he was upright again. He missed with a punch that wouldn’t have done much damage anyway, off-balance as he was, then screamed and staggered backwards. Fuck sake. If he was a smaller guy, that leg would have fucking broken.

There was no time to have another swing at the tree trunk though. Al was almost under control of his gun again. Switching to a left-handed grip as I rushed him, I swung the bat from that side, because he had no fucking hope of blocking it with anything.

Bat connected with skull and it was lights out for Al. He collapsed like a rag doll in an expensive suit.

I turned, just as Benny limped into me with enough speed to shunt me backwards. I took a step back to maintain my balance and my heel met with Al’s unconscious face.

I fell to the ground on my back, Benny falling on top of me. Instantly, I dropped the baseball bat, trapped one of his arms under mine and brought my legs up around his neck, locking him into a triangle-choke before he realized what was going on.

Squeezing as hard as I could, I cut off the circulation to his head, and saw that flash of pure panic in his eyes. In a last-ditch effort, he tried to lift me off the ground, no doubt to try and slam me back down again.

I hooked my arm around one of his legs to try and stop it. Even with his knee as fucked as it was, he had enough raw power and steroids that he almost managed to do it.

Rat One was back on his feet now, and he rushed over to try and stomp my head as Benny refused to lose consciousness. With guys with thick muscle-bound necks like Benny, you had to have the choke sunk in real tight.