The F King: A Bad Boy Romance(54)

The one with the machete spoke first. “Y’know, for somebody with “Screamer” written on her door, I expected a lot more noise. Doesn’t bother me though, there’s still time.”

Screaming would probably only put some innocent college student into harm’s way.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“The fuck does it matter, bitch? All you need to know is that the Acardi Family sends its regards.”

The world slowed down to a pace where my entire life flashed before my eyes between each heartbeat, and I saw that machete rise as the guy lifted it for a swing. I leapt forward with every scrap of speed I could possibly muster, unfolding my arms to cock my own fist back as I went.

He was still halfway through a swipe of the blade that would have cut me off at the knees when I stepped inside the arc of the swing, too close for him to hit me, and trapped his arm under my own. With a swift uppercut, I impaled his stomach on the three short spikes of my makeshift knuckleduster, then landed another one on his neck, sinking them in and twisting as I pulled out.

The machete dropped to the floor, sticking into the ground tip-first as the man fell backwards, with his eyes bulging in shock and clamping his hands to his throat to try to stem the flow of his lifeblood leaving his body. He crashed against the wall and sank to his ass on the floor, gurgling. He couldn’t have known that it used to say “Badass” on my door, before the current nickname.

The man who’d thrown me into the room was wordlessly shocked by the turn of events. He was fumbling inside his jacket when he saw me reaching for the machete with my free hand. Judging that he wouldn’t be able to draw his gun before he lost his head, he found his voice and charged me.

“Fuckin’ bitch!”

I swung for the fences, but he managed to partially block my punch so the keys scraped along the side of his head instead of taking out his eyes. A second later, his forehead connected with my face, just below my eye, and I saw stars as his momentum propelled us both backwards.

My heel caught on the machete protruding from the ground and I felt a searing pain along the back of my calf, before I fell against the edge of my bed with my assailant on top, knocking the wind out of me. We both fell to the floor.

Gasping for air, I jack-hammered my fist into his torso, stabbing him as many times as I could while he frantically struggled to catch my wrist, punch me, smother me, anything to stop the wounds from adding up to something that would take his life.

I swung again and felt his fingers wrap around my arm, holding it fast. He punched me in the face hard enough to bring the stars back. In a daze, I felt my fingers pried open and my keys ripped out of my grasp.

My vision cleared again when I felt his hands wrapping around my throat. The first thing I saw when that haze lifted was all that hate in his eyes.

I tried to think. I tried to remember my training, but this was real life. In training, I was never distracted by a brutal assault before a lesson about self-defense technique. I never fought somebody who had been sent with the sole purpose of killing me.

You’ve got about five seconds to remember before you lose consciousness.





Ryan





The van skidded to a halt. The men up front jumped out, then the back door opened. The huge guy climbed in and put a hood over my head. He hauled me outside, marching me several steps and into the back seat of another car.

Somebody opened the trunk, and I heard some groans and weak protests as, no doubt, the two people who’d accompanied me in the back of the van were packed in. One of our two masked abductors climbed into the front seat.

“Don’t move, don’t try anything.”

I shook my head, as much to pacify him as to clear it. Under my fingers, amongst the trash on the backseat of a generally untidy car, I felt something that might just have been a paperclip.

Through the hood, I saw the unmistakable light of a fire flaring up in the direction of the van, and a few seconds later the driver got in. I heard the sound of wiring being ripped from under the dashboard, then the car started. Before the fire got bigger, we were off again, though at a comparatively leisurely pace.

“Don’t move, don’t try anything,” said the driver.

“I told him that already,” said the other one.

“Oh.”

One of them made a phone call. “Hey… yeah, we got him… He’s still in one piece… Yeah… We’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Hell of a day,” said the driver.

“Yup.”

I unfolded the paperclip and tried to focus on bending it into the right shape. I’d managed to pick the lock on handcuffs a couple of times before. When I could see what I was doing. When I didn’t have a countdown to death clock ticking down from “a few” minutes, overwhelming everything else in my mind.