by Sierra Dean
“You two,” the leader said. “Finish this shit.”
Ah, a challenge.
The two remaining goons, including the one who had suggested they should knock me out, carefully avoided their fallen friends and slowly advanced towards me.
“Just an FYI, you might want to take that guy to a doctor. I crushed his trachea.”
The leader looked down at the man near his feet who was still making desperate wheezing noises. He would most likely be fine, but I wasn’t kidding about the doctor thing. Like, dude wasn’t going to die here, but he was absolutely going to pass out any second and would need some medical attention.
Not my concern at the moment.
The two new guys were being pretty smart about their approach, moving in opposite directions, circling around to either side of me while their fearless leader remained in front. Soon I’d be surrounded, and since I only had two eyes, and those eyes could only focus in one direction at a time, I was left in a pretty awkward situation where I would be fighting at least two of these guys blind.
Peachy.
You’ve trained for this, I reminded myself. And I had, but training was one thing and being out in the real world was another. These guys weren’t going to obey any rules of polite combat. They wouldn’t play fair.
As if on cue, one of them pulled out a crowbar he had clearly tucked in his belt under his jacket.
“Well, that can’t have been comfortable to carry around,” I declared.
He sneered at me, then dove, swinging the heavy metal bar wildly. Since there was no finesse or logic to his attack, it was hard to counter. He was blindly slashing the bar through the air, hoping to make any kind of contact, and melee fighting was not something I could plan for. The sharp point of the bar smacked into my knee, and I stumbled, hitting the ground, momentarily blinded by the pain of it.
“Son of a bit—” I couldn’t even get the word out before the other guy, who was behind me, darted forward and kicked me hard in the ribs.
All the air in my lungs vanished, and now I felt like this might be a little instant karma for the wounds I’d inflicted on their buddies.
I was barely back up to my knees when one of them threw a perfectly aimed punch into my cheek. I saw stars and spit blood.
“I see you guys figured out how to fight.” I touched my tongue to one of my rear molars to make sure it wasn’t loose. I had a pretty decent dental plan with my coverage at the FBI, but they were going to get annoyed if I started just spitting up molars in street fights every other week.
My kingdom to have fangs again right now. I’d bite the ever-loving shit out of these morons.
I pushed myself back up, spit out more blood, and gave Captain Crowbar what I hoped was a really demented-looking, bloodstained, toothy grin. “I hope you don’t think this means you’ve won.”
He clearly had thought that, because he was staring at me, crowbar in hand, probably wondering if I was out of my damn mind. He would not be the first or last person to think that.
I closed my eyes for a second, re-centering myself. In the quiet of my mind, I could hear the advancing footsteps of one of them—it didn’t matter who—thinking they would be able to take me down once and for all. The steps were urgent, having lost any of the hesitancy they’d had when the two men first attacked.
I rolled backwards, tucking into a somersault, and the footsteps skidded to a halt where I’d been. I clambered to my feet, my whole body singing with pain but my mind absolutely focused. When I opened my eyes, all three of them were in front of me, exactly where I wanted them.
I stretched my neck side to side, worn muscles popping, and licked my teeth clean, the coppery taste of my own blood familiar and almost comforting. I knew what I had survived before this. Three thugs in a garage were not as much of a challenge as they might like to think.
“You.” I pointed to the guy with the crowbar. “Thank you for making this fun.”
I was standing next to where I had left my bag and used my toe to open the top flap. Inside was a new toy I had been enjoying the hell out of recently. The lightweight black baton didn’t look like much, but after I hooked my foot under it and kicked it up so I could grab it without bending over, I whipped it downwards, and the lightweight nightstick extended into something…different.
It wasn’t merely a club, but more like a carbon sword with no sharp edges. It was even shaped like my beloved katana.
No one would get accidentally beheaded with this baby, but it packed the necessary punch.
The three men gaped at the weapon, not sure what to make of a matte-black sword with no cutting edge.
“Bitch, you are nuts.”
“I’m not the one who brought a crowbar to a fistfight, kids. This is my way of evening up the playing field here.”
“Ah, fuck this.” The leader, clearly more sick of me than anyone else, pushed between the other two men. “This is getting boring.”
“Boring? Me? I think you haven’t been paying attention.” I touched my tongue to my split lip, which started to sting anew to reward me for my curiosity. “If you leave now, three of you can walk out of here, and two of you can get dragged, but all five of you will live. I told you I wasn’t going to go to Davos. You should have listened to me.”
“And I told you Davos doesn’t take no for an answer.”
I smiled coldly. “I don’t give a shit what Davos wants.”
“You will.”
“Ugh, you’re right, this is getting boring. Why don’t you shut up and fight me already?”
The leader obliged, coming at me with a practiced swagger that suggested he knew his way around a fight and wouldn’t go down easy.
Bravado like that, I had found, was usually earned, but also often led to the downfall of someone who should have been smarter. Look at me, after all. I was brimming with bravado, and the dude using a crowbar like it was a machete in thick jungle vines had been the one to take me down.
You get too cocky, you get your ass handed to you.
It was why I tried to maintain a healthy awareness of my own mortality when going into situations like these.
The guy kept his body low and tight, but as he charged towards me, obviously looking to grab me around the middle like the first one, he made a crucial error. He kept his head up. He should have used it like a battering ram, rigid, plowing into me like a linebacker.
With his head up, I was able to slam my fist right into his nose, and with the momentum of his body, the cartilage crumpled under my knuckles. I brought the butt of my carbonite sword down on the base of his neck. Not hard enough to break his bones, but certainly enough to keep him down.
I looked back to the two remaining guys. “What’ll it be? Broken bones, or walk away?”
In the end, they opted for both.
They got the broken bones.
I walked away.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I hobbled through my apartment door, my nice jeans soaked in blood and a pretty impressive bruise a-brewing on my cheek. I couldn’t see the bruise yet, but there’s something about a good one that you can just feel.
Normally I would let them run their course, but the lab techs had recently developed a fun new cream—mostly because of me—that was one part cover-up, one part healing agent, and could put a bruise to bed in about a day.
Lily and the rest of our lab team did not make nearly enough money considering how much cool James Bond-level shit they came up with. They seemed to have fun doing it, but really, I should probably be petitioning our bosses to pay them more. Between the carbonite sword and the bruise cream, I was happy to have the lab on my payroll.
I was barely inside the foyer when Desmond appeared.
He had been about to say something, but the words died on his lips. Instead he stared at me open-mouthed, taking in the blood, the red mark that would become a bruise, and the still-extended sword in my hand.
After taking a moment to collect himself, he asked, “Are you okay?”
“Peachy.” I leaned the sword against our hall table, since collapsing it would take way more energy than I had right now. I was positive at least one of my ribs was broken from where I’d been kicked, and the blood on my leg indicated the other guy had taken a decent chunk out of me with the crowbar. It would heal, but now that I was out of danger, I was feeling every ache and pain tenfold.
Desmond disappeared as I stripped off my jacket, and when he returned, he was holding an ice pack in one hand and our kitchen first-aid kit in the other. The expression on his face made me wary. Instead of appearing worried about me, he looked downright pissed off.
I hobbled past him and into our living room, where I stripped off my pants and left them in a little denim puddle next to the couch. Desmond sat next to me, and before I could protest his help, he lifted my injured leg into his lap. He handed me the ice pack. “Put this on your cheek, it’s starting to swell.”
I obliged him, pressing the cool packet to my puffy, aching face. It felt glorious and horrible at the same time. I tried to focus on that rather than the throbbing, stabbing agony in my leg as he poked at my injury, but apparently my body was more than capable of experiencing two kinds of pain at once. There would be no distraction.
He tended to the cut on my leg first with peroxide—which absolutely stung—and then layers of antibiotic cream and gauzy bandages. The wound dressing was expertly done, and even though the knee would swell up, I’d still be able to use it. Woo!
“Let me look at your face,” he insisted.
“I’m fine.”
“Secret.” My name was a growl out of his mouth, and I knew I’d been right when I read anger their earlier.
I lowered the ice pack and looked at him, my frustration rising in equal measure to his rage. “Are you mad at me?”
“You’re hurt,” was all he said.
“Yeah, and you should see the other guys.”
“That’s not funny.”
“I’m not trying to be funny. It was five against one, and this is the only damage I took. The rest of them are in various states of unconsciousness or maybe in an ambulance by now.” I’d texted Mercedes on my way out of the garage to let her know the location, condition, and general demeanor of the gentlemen I’d left behind, so if they weren’t in an ambulance, they were probably in a cell.
“You could have been killed.”
I gave an exasperated sigh. “Are we going to do this right now? Right now?”
“I can’t think of a better time to talk about it,” he snapped. “When you’re healthy, you act like you’ll live forever. But then you show up looking like this, and God knows what happens to you when I’m not around that you underplay or don’t tell me about.”
“I told you about the broken bone in Bolivia.”
“The cast told me about your broken bone in Bolivia,” he countered. “The only reason I knew about Mercy reaching into your fucking chest was because I was there. If it hadn’t left a scar, you wouldn’t have told me at all.”
He was right. I wouldn’t have. I was a big believer in the notion that if something didn’t kill you, there was no sense on dwelling on it after the fact. I wasn’t sure why he was so worked up when this was hardly the worst fight I’d ever been in, but now that he was on a roll, he had no intention of slowing down.
“This is insanity, Secret. You can’t just run into fights against men who are bigger than you, stronger than you.”
“Oh come on. Desmond, this is a bullshit sexist argument. I’m trained, and I’m a better fighter than anyone on the street, and you seem to willfully ignore that every time I get punched, which means you don’t believe I’m capable of taking care of myself and think I need my strong werewolf husband to look after me.”
“You won’t let me give you a bodyguard.”
“I don’t need a fucking bodyguard.”
“You need to protect yourself.” His volume was rising, and I knew this was going to be a legit fight, not a polite disagreement we could ignore. Lucky for him I was already in a fighting mood.
“God, Des, it keeps coming back to your need to own me. You want me to be here all the time, you want me to be a werewolf so I’m in your pack and under your thumb. If I didn’t know better, I’d think I was still married to Lucas.”
Oh yeah.
I went there.
If fights between married couples were like car racing, I’d done the equivalent of going from zero to sixty directly into a brick wall.
Kaboom.
“What’d you just say to me?” His dumbfounded expression told me he honestly couldn’t believe I’d struck so low so quickly, but the anger was still there, under the surface, and he was going to strike back with his own ammunition any second.
We argued a lot, yes, but usually it was normal young-couple stuff. This level of bitter animosity was reserved for the really bad fights, the ones that only happened every year or so. The ones where we both said things we didn’t mean because we knew the best way to hurt each other.
As it turned out, the more you love someone, the more you know how to cut right through to their heart.
I had a feeling we’d both be doing some serious apologizing later.
That was the thing. I loved him. I loved him more than I loved anything else in my life. And even though I was sick to death of having this same argument over and over and over and over, I wasn’t sick of him and never would be.
We would fight this fight, no matter how many rounds it needed to go.
At the end of the day, I’d still be his, and he’d still be mine.
But right now I wanted to punch him in the goddamn throat for making me say something so ugly.
“You heard me.”
“So now me wanting to keep my wife alive is the same as manipulating her, using her, driving her away from the people she loves. Okay, sure.”
On the plus side, at least we weren’t speaking ill of the dead anymore by bringing up Lucas.
I got up, in spite of my body protesting that this was an argument we could definitely have in a lounging position. Instead of agreeing, I threw the ice pack at him.
He growled, and I could literally see him radiating with anger. If he was anyone else, I would probably have been scared shitless right then, but this was Desmond, and he would never, in ten thousand lifetimes ever, hurt me.
“You don’t get to make my decisions for me.”
“I’m not trying to.”
I gave him a look that plainly said he must take me for a fool. “You’ve been trying to do that for years. It makes you crazy that I won’t leave Los Angeles.”
“Yes, what a villain I am for wanting to live in the same time zone as my wife. A truer monster never existed.”
The deadpan sarcasm was almost worse than the rage because it made me feel like I was the only one in the room being unreasonable, and that, in turn, managed to stoke my own anger.
This is why word fights are the worst. Give me a street brawl any day rather than having to deal with my husband being coolly logical when all I want to do is scream about things like a maniac. Since he was the one who started this, it seemed extra unfair he wouldn’t sink to my level.
If he wanted to fight with logic, we would do things his way.
“What if I asked you to move to Los Angeles?”
He blinked at me. Honestly, I’m surprised this had never come up before. I had made a lot of concessions with my job so I could come home regularly and be with him, but for obvious reasons I hadn’t ever suggested he come to me instead. I knew his job kept him here. But if we were playing it petty, then by all means, I had my own ammo.
“What are you talking about?”
“You could move, come live with me in L.A., be close to my work. I could stop flying here all the time. Wouldn’t it be so lovely and easy?” My sarcasm was more biting, and definitely at a higher level of asshole than his had been.
“You know I can’t move to Los Angeles.” He was snidely matter-of-fact ab
out it, almost disgusted by the suggestion.
I let his words hang unanswered in the air for a moment, hoping he would understand exactly how I had just won.
A flicker of recognition showed, but he didn’t say anything.
“You can’t move why?” I urged, wanting him to say it out loud.
Pettiness tastes like rotten lemons, but once you’ve taken a bite, you can’t stop chewing.
He glanced away from me then back, a flare of defiance showing me we were by no means done here. “Because my pack is here. The same pack you are the queen of.”
“And my job is in Los Angeles.”
“That’s such bullshit. There are FBI offices all over the country. There’s one downtown you have no problem working out of on the regular.”
“When I need to, but if you’d ever bothered to come see where I work, you would know it’s not the same. Our lab is in L.A. My partners are in L.A.”
“Your partner is right here.”
I took a deep breath, feeling a headache burning behind my eyes. It had started because I’d been punched in the head, but now it was being heartily fed by this little argument.
“We’re talking in fucking circles. You want me to be a werewolf. You say it’s for my own protection, but you know perfectly well it’s so you can have me here all the time, so I can’t live in L.A.”
“You belong here.”
“You mean I belong to you?”
He groaned audibly and got to his feet. He towered over me with a look on his face that quite frankly suggested he would rather throttle me where I stood than continue to go ten rounds like this. Same, dude.
“Why do you do that? Twist my words like that? You make it sound as if it’s so unreasonable for me to want these things, and to want to be with you, and you never stop to consider that your stubbornness is possibly keeping you from being happy.”
Oof.
“So this is all my fault? You think I’m being inflexible?”
“I think you’re being a bullheaded asshole who would rather put her life in danger over and over again if it mean she doesn’t have to admit that maybe, just maybe, her husband is right about something.”
