Page 98 of Creeping Lily

“Stay down!” His growl rattles my bones.

I crawl back, wedging myself between two shelves stacked with power tools. My breath comes fast, shallow.

Chaos explodes in the aisle. Titan is a blur—dark hoodie, glinting mask, the sharp crash of shelves giving way. The thud of fists on flesh. The dull crack of bone. Someone screams. Someone else gurgles a curse.

Through the narrow gaps in the shelves, I catch flashes—Titan slamming a man’s head into the floor, his gloved fist smashing into a jaw so hard teeth scatter across the linoleum.He moves like a machine built for killing, his precision terrifying.

The leader lunges. Titan sidesteps, a box cutter flashing in his grip. One smooth slice across the thigh sends the man collapsing, blood blooming fast.

I squeeze my eyes shut until I see stars. The sounds are worse than anything I could imagine—the muffled grunt of a man losing air, the sharp snap of cartilage breaking, the heavy, wet thud of a body collapsing to the floor.

I press my palms to my ears, trying to block it out, but the noise still seeps through. The clang of metal hitting metal. A strangled cry that turns into a gurgle. The shatter of something breaking, maybe a shelf, maybe bone—I don’t want to know. My stomach twists, hot and sour, and I tuck my knees closer to my chest.

The chaos goes on and on, each sound a fresh bruise on my nerves.

Then—silence.

It’s so sudden it makes my pulse skip.

When I finally force my eyes open, the aisle looks like a war zone. Shelves have toppled like dominos, spilling their contents into heaps. Tools lie scattered across the linoleum like shrapnel from some mechanical explosion. And everywhere—on the floor, on the walls, on the jagged edges of torn cardboard—there’s blood. Thick, dark, and wet, painting the scene in violence.

Titan stands at the center of it, over one of the bodies. His shoulders are squared, his stance wide, his whole frame still coiled with threat like he hasn’t quite finished. Blood freckles his hoodie, splashes his gloves, streaks across the sharp angles of his mask. Even the eyeholes look darker somehow, shadowed in a way that makes my breath catch.

He turns toward me, slow and deliberate, each step ameasured thud. The sound of his boots sticking to the bloodied floor is sharp in the silence, and for a moment, it’s the only sound in the world.

When he stops in front of me, he holds out a gloved hand.

I can’t take it. My muscles are locked, my fingers curled into fists against my knees. My voice is gone, swallowed by the lump in my throat. All I can do is stare past him, past the mask, to the wreckage he’s left behind.

This isn’t the shadowy, watchful Titan I’ve known up until now. The beast inside him is out in the open, unrestrained, unapologetic. And as I sit frozen on the blood-slick floor, one thought circles in my mind like a slow, cold tide?—

I don’t think it will ever go back into its cage.

51

TITAN

My heart hammers hard enough to shake my ribs. Four men advance in a slow, tightening arc, their boots eating up the aisle’s distance with deliberate steps. They’re not looking at me. They’re looking past me. At her.

Lily.

Her safety is the only thing that matters. Every muscle in my body knows this, tensing with a promise I’ve made a thousand times in my head: if one of them so much as breathes in her direction, I’ll open his throat and let him drown in it. If they all try, I’ll kill every last one of them with my bare hands.

The gun one of them flashes is just theater. If they meant to shoot me, they would have done it already. No—they want me breathing. Because I have something they want. That makes them stupid. And stupidity gets you killed.

I let my gaze drift from them, just for a second, scanning the shelves around me. Steel glints under the sick buzz of the fluorescent lights. I reach for a heavy wrench, its weight settling into my palm like an old friend, and step forward.

The first man barely registers the movement before I swing.The wrench connects with his jaw—bone shattering, teeth snapping like brittle glass. The sound is perfect. He drops, clutching at his face, his scream muffled by his own broken mouth.

One down. Three to go.

The second man lunges. I meet him halfway, flipping open a box cutter in a single motion. The blade kisses across his chest, tearing through fabric and skin. Blood wells bright and fast, blooming across his shirt. He stumbles back with a howl. I drive my boot into his knee—feel it give, hear the wet pop—and he crumples, clutching his leg.

I roll my fingers at the next two. “Who’s next?” My voice is steady, but the challenge is a whip crack in the air.

One hesitates. The other glances at the top shelf, maybe looking for a weapon. My eyes follow—and that’s when I see it.

Sitting up high, half-hidden behind dusty paint cans, is a battery-operated chainsaw display model. No box. No lock. Just waiting for someone to wake it up.