men. She wasn’t even going to try and fight anyone else off. This was personal and she wanted to make sure she ended that motherfucker, even if it cost her her life in the process.
Hernandez was bucking and thrashing beneath her, but the lack of strength to his movements told me she’d already done enough damage to seal his fate.
I stepped forward, catching her around the waist and yanking her back into my arms.
She shrieked like a banshee, whirling on me with a shard of bloody glass in her raised hand, her eyes widening a moment before it crashed into my bicep, cutting into the flesh with a twist of pain that somehow felt like a kiss instead.
“Nicoli?” she gasped in surprise which quickly flickered to relief and then horror as she realised she’d stabbed me. “Oh, fuck,” she hissed, yanking the glass back out of my arm and trying to apologise as she dropped it to the floor. She started shaking, staring at me in utter shock as she traced her fingers over my face in disbelief, like she couldn’t believe I was really here. I guessed she’d seen the head we’d left on the deck and my gut twisted at causing her so much pain.
“A scar from you is like a gift from a goddess, baby doll,” I promised her, placing her on her feet at my side as I turned my attention to the dying man who lay on the bed watching us with venom in his gaze. He’d scrambled backwards and was rifling through the drawer beside him like he hoped to find something that he could use to save his miserable life with, but there was nothing there.
“You bought your death with this act, Romero,” Ramon hissed, pressing at the worst wound on his stomach as he saw his death reflected in my eyes. “The Dominguez Cartel will destroy you and every single member of your family for it. They’ll kill you all slowly, agonisingly, make you watch as they take your whore and every other woman any of you love and do everything and anything they want with them right before your eyes before killing them too. You’ve started a war. By the time they’re done with you, the name Romero will be nothing more than a whispered memory and a warning against anyone who crosses us.”
“And you know what you’ll be when all of that is happening?” I replied darkly as I moved to stand over him where he lay on the bed, handing my pistol to Winter so that my hands were left free. “Nothing.”
I lunged at him and he cried out half a second before my hands closed around his throat and I pressed him down into the luxurious bed with all the strength I possessed.
He kicked and thrashed, his fingernails gouging marks into the backs of my hands as he tried to fight me off. But I held the fury of a man whose girl had been battered, bruised and tortured and there wasn’t even the slightest bit of mercy in me for him or anyone else who had hurt her. Because she was hurt and damaged and scarred by everything that had happened to her. But she wasn’t broken. She had the spirit of a warrior and the strength of a thousand men. My savage girl was small and fragile and wounded. But she would never break.
My grip tightened as his attempts to fight me off weakened and soft fingers slipped into my hair as Winter came to stand beside me. Ramon’s gaze found hers as he looked over my shoulder, his fingers twitching and his limbs falling still as he fell into death and I was glad she was the last thing he saw. My savage girl, sending him into death and delivering him to hell for the devil to torture forevermore.
Everything had changed in no time at all. I was staring at my mountain man, back from the dead. Or at least, that was how it seemed to me.
I didn't care to look at Ramon any longer, my gaze focused on the blood soaking into Nicoli sweater, the scratches lining his neck and cheeks, but most of the blood wasn’t his. The cut I'd left on him was one of the worst wounds he had, but a few stitches would fix him up. He’d come for me despite the odds, torn into Hades like Orpheus coming for his wife Eurydice, refusing to give up on me even