Page 145 of Executing Malice

Neither of us see it coming until the resounding crack of metal crushing bone echoes through the silence. The light in Everett’s fist goes sailing, spinning in the air before falling into a pile of nearby leaves. The gun follows with a clatter that is muffled by the second blow.

Then the third.

My brother is face down in the dirt, body twitching with every plunge of Leila’s arms driving our flashlight into the back of his crushed skull. Blood and chunks of scalp fling off with every arc, spraying Leila. Splattering across the ground. Brainmatter oozes from the hollow cavity of where Everett’s head used to be.

Then she stops.

Silence rings as loud as the crunch and crack of her victory. It hammers in the air, coiling with the frantic beating of my heart.

Beautiful face speckled, hair matted, Leila drops the weapon with a resounding clang next to the body. It rolls away from her, smeared in matter and chunks of dark hair. Next to it, her chest rises and falls as rapidly as my stomach while my brain tries to process what just happened.

The scuffle of her feet as she turns to face me, green eyes too bright in the residual filter of light, pounds too loud between my ears.

“Dante?” she whispers.

I stare at her, too numb for proper words.

She rubs her hands on her skirt, leaving streaks of my brother across the fabric.

“I had to,” she starts. She nibbles anxiously on her bottom lip. “He was going to shoot you. I...”

“Leila.”

Her name.

It’s the only sound in my head. The only word I know. It pulses in my skull, courses through my veins.

“I love you,” she murmurs.

That breaks the invisible chains keeping me rooted. I stalk towards her. Barely three feet and she’s sprinting to me. We meet somewhere in the middle where I scoop her up and she locks her legs around my hips. Our lips meet in an angry collision. Her arms crush my windpipe as she holds me prisoner.

“I’m sorry,” she pants in between assaults. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Fucking you,” I growl, dragging her to the ground right there, right next to my brother’s leaking corpse. “Need you.”

She doesn’t stop me. Doesn’t pull away. She lets me drive home inside her. Lets me assure myself she’s still there. Still mine. She holds me, kisses me. Tells me again and again she loves me.

“I’m sorry,” she says again while I lay slumped over her, face buried between her blood-smeared breasts. “I had to get closer to him. I had to make him believe ... I’m sorry.”

I raise my head and take her mouth. I ignore the tremble in them, the tears in her eyes, as I push my cock deeper and kiss her like I hate her.

“You’re not leaving me.” It’s not a question.

It’s a fucking warning.

A threat.

“Never.”

I fuck her harder, cock full of righteous indignation and a limitless supply of cum I’m going to drown her in.

“You’re mine.”

She nods even as her eyes roll back in her skull. “Yours ... yours ... Dante, please...”

I pump faster. Harder. I crush her in my arms, bruise her mouth as I swallow her orgasm because even that is fucking mine.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers for the hundredth time while we lie in a sweaty, sticky mess of tangled limbs under a canopy of stars.