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Everly was none of those things. Not anymore.
And she currently had one of the finest military weapons ever forged at her disposal, aimed and ready to play.
Blue eased himself out of the shadows, leaving his gun behind on the kitchen counter, tucked behind the toaster oven, because he didn’t want a firefight in close quarters. Not when a stray bullet could punch through the thin walls and hit Everly. He moved across the living room floor in the intruder’s wake, making no sound, focused entirely on this piece of garbage who thought he could break in and come after Everly like this.
In the middle of the night. With a gun in his meaty fist.
Hell no.
“You shouldn’t have come alone, douchebag,” Blue said into the stillness of the apartment around them.
He launched himself into the air as he spoke, landing a killer kick on the man’s right forearm even as the asswipe whirled around. And tried to raise his gun the way Blue knew he would.
The intruder yelped at the kick, or maybe the way his weapon spun out of his hand, but he didn’t go down. Instead, he threw himself at Blue.
He was a big guy. A gorilla of a man, huge and snarling. But Blue didn’t have to study his face in the dark to get a handle on who this guy was. He could tell by the way the guy fought—or tried to fight. Big guys like this were used to bullying anyone smaller than them. Reveled in it, probably. Blue figured he might have boxed recreationally, then loomed around playing a bounceroutside clubs and the like, hoping his size and brawn would do the fighting for him. Blue pegged him as a gym rat with lofty aspirations.
But he was about to discover that going to the gym was not the same thing as training in martial arts and combat.
Blue set out to teach him that lesson, as brutally as possible.
He took a punch to the gut and let the goon throw him. He heard the other man’s wheeze of triumph, and hoped he savored it. But it did what Blue wanted it to do. It made his opponent sloppy.
The intruder rushed Blue the way big men with no fighting prowess liked to do, because they thought their bulk could get it done. It often could.
But Blue wasn’t a drunk outside a club or a much smaller female.
He rolled up from the floor in a single swift movement, then executed a combination of strikes with pinpoint accuracy. Groin, throat, back of the head.
The bigger man went down with a thud Blue thought might have rocked the building to its foundations.
Blue found the man’s piece on the floor and kicked it into the farthest corner, then turned to finish the job.
But the gorilla was scrambling across the floor on his hands and knees. He was heading for the door, panting in a loud, anguished way that told Blue how much damage he’d done. He hauled himself onto his feet in the foyer, then threw himself toward the door.
Blue followed him, but the other man was crashing through the door and staggering out into the hall.
And he could have chased the douchebag into thestairwell and further expressed his feelings about stalkers and low-rent thugs all over the other man’s battered, ugly face, but he didn’t. For one thing, Everly’s neighbors were opening their doors and squinting into the hallway.
And for another, Everly was still in the apartment and like hell was Blue leaving her alone to see if thug two, three, or four showed up.
“Go back to sleep,” Blue barked out, using his best military voice to silence everyone in the hallway. “The problem is solved.”
And he waited there, grim and steel-eyed, until one by one, the neighbors each shut and then loudly relocked their doors.
Blue stepped back inside Everly’s apartment and did the same, though he thought it was a wasted effort at this point. If the lock could be picked once—or twice, if he counted the night Rebecca had been killed, or taken, or whatever had happened to her—it could certainly happen again. But he couldn’t worry about that now.
He pulled the table in the foyer over and planted it in front of the door. It wouldn’t stop anyone who really wanted to get in, he knew. What it would do was give him a few extra minutes of reaction time. Because he was fairly certain that when these people came back, they would come in force, and they wouldn’t make the same mistake this first guy had.
They knew Blue was here now. He had to assume they’d come prepared. But he also figured it would take them some time to mobilize, since Blue had been here a week and today was the first time they’d made a move.
He grabbed his gun from the kitchen and the intruder’s from where he’d kicked it, stashing both safelyin his bag. Then he crossed to Everly’s room and knocked twice on the door. “It’s me.”
She threw the lock immediately, indicating she’d been standing right there on the other side of the door. Possibly even pressed against it.
“I barely heard a thing,” she said, craning her head to look past him.
“That’s because I handled it,” Blue told her, too gruffly.