As soon as I was sure he was within my reach, I kicked out, sending my foot under the wrist of the hand that held the needle. It flew up, twirling into the air before it hit the floor and rolled against the leg of the man doing a death twitch on the floor.
“You’re going to pay for that, you bitch,” he hissed out angrily.
My kick hadn’t done anything but heighten his agitation. We were all arms and shoves until his strength won out, and he reached for my neck like I predicted he would.
Classic self-defense training got me out of his choke hold before he even had a good grip. I yanked hard on his forearms, bringing him down and close enough for my knees to connect with his balls.
He screamed and gripped his man parts at the same time the woman managed to crack the door open. His bruised balls were being massaged by one hand while he continued to get at me with the other. Days of being drugged and picked at had me weak and winded, but I was determined to keep fighting.
The woman pulled the heavy door inward, but hadn’t stopped ogling me in battle with the man. I sent an upward palm to the man’s chin before I spun away from his grip and sent my fist pounding into his ear, knocking him off balance. I wobbled and sucked in quick sharp breaths to stay on my feet.
The man staggered, wobbling on his legs in an attempt to restore his balance. I took advantage of his off balanced position by using the wall to brace myself for the hard stomp I delivered to his left knee. The muffled pop the kick caused sounded like a beautiful musical note hitting my eardrums.
He went down sideways, causing his head to smack the wall and open up a gash on the side of his face before he slid to the floor. He attempted to lift himself, but his pain overpowered his strength and he slid to the floor in a whimpering heap.
Instead of stomping his face in like I had planned to, I turned my attention to the woman, whose dumb ass walked right into Tywin’s strong chest. My smile grew so wide at the sight of him that you would have thought I’d been announced the lone Mega Millions Lotto winner.
His smile was equally as big as mine and grew wider when he saw the man bleeding heavily in the fetal position at my feet. He spun the woman to face me like she was no more than a doll and kept her in place with a tight grip to the back of her neck. She was doing her best to plead her way out of the situation, her eyes begging as hard as her useless words.
“Please. I was just doing my job. Please,” she begged through racking sobs.
Ignoring the woman, I bent to pick up the needle before shoving it into the thumping vein in the side of the bleeding man’s head. Whatever was in the needle had him bucking against the floor like a man gone mad because I had given him the full dose. He clawed at his head at the same time his body balled into contortions and released with quick, harsh jerks.
When white froth began to bubble up and spill past his lips, Tywin and I watched, unaffected by the scene that had the woman begging harder and scratching to get away.
“Please don’t kill me. We can work something out,” she had the audacity to say.
When the man released his final awkward kick, sending his legs out from his crumpled body, I glanced up at the woman with the most wicked smile I could conjure up. Her face contorted in horror and even Tywin’s brow lifted. With his tight grip still at the back of her neck, he shoved her closer while I blindly stepped over the man to get to her.
“Get on your knees,” I ordered in a low and hostile tone that sounded nothing like myself but much more like the monster I had been trained to become.
She shook her head, “Please. You don’t have to do this.”
“But I do. And I’m not trying to be Parris.” I sneered at her. “You would have cut me into pieces to get what you were after and you would have enjoyed every minute of it.”
She proceeded to beg harder. Her focus had shifted to survival mode. “Please. Please. Find it in your heart to let me go,” she sobbed.
This bitch,I thought, shaking my head.
The ball of my bare foot pounded into the side of her leg from the hard kick I delivered. She cried like a wounded hyena before she crumbled to her knees. Tywin hadn’t uttered a word, but he maintained his protective stance while observing what I would later pray to be forgiven for.
I kneeled before the woman, watching the tears streaking down her face and her body jerking with the hard chest-racking cries that ripped from her throat and filled up the room.
“I’m going to show you the mercy you weren’t going to give me,” I hissed before I punched her ass dead center in her face. My knuckles ached instantly like I had punched a brick wall, but I didn’t care.
The sight of the blood pouring from her nose and painting her white skin with brilliant red splashes while she crumpled into the pain made me feel better. Was I being petty? Fucking right, I was.
While she held her face and struggled to breathe through a nose that was no longer functioning properly, I swept my legs around the backs of hers, and drove my palms into her chest with all the force I could muster. She went down hard, landing on her tailbone before falling onto her back.
“Please. Please,” she begged. Snot and blood bubbled up from her nose and bloody saliva from her mouth. She reached out, attempting to shove me away, but I had my knee in her chest and the other planted under her neck before she figured out what I was up to.
She twisted her body, scratched and clawed at my exposed legs, but my determination was much stronger than her struggle. I pushed more weight against her wind pipe, feeling her bone starting to cave against the hard pressure of my kneecap. With a broken nose, her efforts to breathe were useless.
My eyes were dead locked on her wide desperate ones, making sure she saw who was taking her life. The utterances that escaped her were a sound I’d never heard before, a cross between a wheeze and a growl. I was weak as hell from the energy I had exerted, but hard-headedness kept my knee against her windpipe.
Images of the second person my keepers had made me strangle with chicken wire flashed across my mind. She too had been a torturer, snatching poor kids off the streets, keeping them alive until she stripped away their internal organs piece by piece and sold them on the black market for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
This woman’s involuntary bucking and sharp body hiccups were eased when her soul packed up and vacated her body. Her eyes began to flutter, but remained on me, the last bit of hope in them dying along with her movement. When her stare became as empty as an unchartered desert, I eased my knee away from her throat and took the hand Tywin reached down to help me up with.