Cold lethal intent spreads through me, hiking my breaths. My fists flex for destruction. My heart hardens for permanent, irrevocable death. I will end this.
My impulses take over, my hands dropping to my belt and yanking it free as venom simmers through my veins.
Lorenzo widens his stance. “Dude. Look what she did to my face.”
“You were on top of her!” Shane attacks him, arms swinging.
Lorenzo ducks, hooks him around the waist, and takes him to the floor in a series of punches.
I approach on swift silent feet, sliding the end of the belt through the buckle. A foot away, I stand behind Lorenzo. Shane sprawls on his back with Lorenzo kneeling over him. I’m certain Shane sees me, but they’re both throwing punches, blocking, grunting.
I shove the belt loop over Lorenzo’s head and hold my madness together with both fists.
Shane’s eyes, red and outraged, collide with mine. Lorenzo turns his neck.
I cinch the belt around Lorenzo’s throat, wrenching the end with the full strength of my wrath.
His body flings backward with the ruthlessness of my pull, thrashing across the floor, hands scrabbling at the noose. I hang on, yanking harder, fueled with malicious purpose.
Shane crawls toward Lorenzo’s bucking body and glares up at me with feral eyes. How am I going to fight him off while holding on to the belt?
With a bellow of rage, he slams a knee onto his friend’s chest, his fists pummeling Lorenzo’s face. I falter, stunned, and readjust my grip, pulling the belt with a vengeance.
Shane’s weight holds Lorenzo to the floor as I stand over them and wring the garrote tighter, tighter, the brutal imperative for this to end slicing through my wavering breaths.
Fingers clenched around the leather, I meet Ivory’s shattered brown gaze. I’m killing a man in front of her, coldly, consciously, and without apology. There’s no going back from this.
Her legs support her unmoving posture. Her hands hold Schubert’s dead body. Her eyes stay with mine, but she’s not here. She’s not with me.
Probably for the best, because I’m not stopping until this son of a bitch can’t hurt her anymore.
The phone in my pocket vibrates with an incoming call. The school? My parents? The fucking cops following up on suspicious activity? Fuck!
Lorenzo’s jaw gapes in a silent scream. Blood smears his face, eyes swollen, his complexion waning from red to blue.
I stand on one side, hands numbing around the belt. On Lorenzo’s other side, Shane presses him against the floor as his body writhes, legs kicking, fingers clawing at the leather around his throat.
Strangulation is an excruciatingly slow way to go. In those harrowing minutes, the enormity of what I’m doing has time to slither beneath my skin and suffocate my vital organs. I hold strong with the reminder that my responsibility to protect Ivory overrides everything else.
Lorenzo’s fingers fall away from his throat, and with a jerk of his leg, he loses the fight.
It’s finished.
Shane collapses on his ass, hands flying to the back of his head, his mouth hanging open with exertion. Horror. Shock.
Adrenaline tingles through my limbs as I drop the belt and press my shaking fingers against the swollen Destroy on Lorenzo’s throat. No pulse. There’s irony in that, something I’ll contemplate when our wounds are no longer raw.
I step back and shrug out of my jacket, sweating against conflicting bouts of relief and reality.
I just killed a man.
A man who broke into my house.
Who killed our cat.
Who attempted and maybe succeeded in raping Ivory again.
Because I wasn’t here.
My chest burns, my entire world rotating and spinning toward her. “Ivory?”
For the first time since I came in, she moves. Just her eyes, shifting them to mine. Blood rims her nostrils, stains her lips, and dots the front of her t-shirt.
My stomach twists. I need to take the cat, hug her, obliterate the distance between us. I reach for her.
She jerks back, her arms tightening around Schubert’s dangling body.
Not ready to let him go? Not ready for me to touch her?
I understand, but dammit, I feel her rejection like a fist to the heart.
A glance at Shane confirms he’s still dazed, staring at the body with unblinking, glassy eyes.
My pocket vibrates with a text alert. Goddammit. Whoever is trying to reach me has terrible timing.
I loosen my tie and toss it. Then I step in front of Ivory and brush my fingers across her jaw. She doesn’t react, her gaze distant, unfocused. When I lower my caress to the arm around Schubert, she releases an anguished cry and stumbles back.
Okay. I won’t separate her from the cat. “I just need to know you’re okay.”
Her demeanor goes cold, detached, except her arms, which hold Schubert tighter.
“I fought him.” Her voice is a hollow metronome. “Bit him. Scratched his face.”
“Good girl.” I want to pull her against me so badly, but if I do, I’ll unravel. I have to keep my shit together until this mess is contained. “Did he rape—?”