Page 14 of One Bad Knight

Then I was looking up into the steely eyes of the man from the club, his head protecting my face from the falling drops of ice water. The sheen of a long, ornate sword winked at me from his hand.

Black ichor was splattered across his grim face. Then I felt his hands run up my legs, and I whimpered.

“Am I going to—” Then I stopped because how would he know? And maybe I didn’t want to know. Where was my phone? My hands began to pat the ground around me, searching for my phone.

I fought to stay conscious. I wasn't sure if it was the shock, the pain, or my breathless panting, but darkness began to cloud my vision.

The man grasped my hand. “You are going to be fine.” His eyes shone with hot fervor. As if he would dive into hell itself to grab me by the scruff of my neck and drag me back to Earth if I dared leave him.

I swallowed, confused by the rioting feelings inside me. It was all too much, too intense. I didn’t know him and I may have survived a monster only to fall into the hands of an even bigger predator. “Please don’t hurt me,” I begged just above a whisper.

The shock and sadness that washed over his face sent me spiraling back into time. To the face of a little boy who stood over my father’s prone, bloody body.

My last thought before the darkness swallowed me up was…he came back.

7

Gatsby

She shouldn’t be here, I thought, even as I laid Kat on my couch. I sneered at the sight of her there.

Not because I was repulsed with her. Never.

I was disgusted with myself. To see the princess splayed out on my broken, discarded furniture, hurt… it was wrong. She should lay on sheets of silk far away from this place and men like me.

The yellowed wallpaper of the abandoned apartment peeled down halfway. The floor creaked like a wailing ghost being murdered all over again, and there were holes in the walls that small children could climb through. But this place barely smelled of mildew, and the mattress was the cleanest I’d rested my head on in months.

I lowered myself to her feet and gently spread her legs. My knife slipped through the remaining tatters of her clothes like they were made of butter. My nostrils flared as the copper smell of her blood hit my senses. I went on to cut away her pants. The inner seam of her jeans had a growing dark spot of blood.

They were already ruined from where the She had clawed through Kat’s thigh.

The pieces of fabric dropped at my side. It was a deep gash, but she wasn’t in danger of bleeding out. I went about cleaning it with as much clinical precision as I could. The effort it took not to do anything else, while the girl from my dreams lay before me in only a pair of pink panties with a bow at the top.

The gash was dangerously close to the edge of that sugary pair of underwear, and I stiffened in my pants. For the thousandth time, I recognized the universe was punishing me.

I may not be a hero, but I sure as hell wasn’t the guy who would do anything to a girl while she was unconscious. Pushing aside my carnal impulses, I focused on treating her as if she were any other no-name civilian.

Not that I’d had much experience with that. Usually, my job was to make sure they were untreatable.

With her pants gone, I could discern the depth of the cut. It needed stitches.

“Fuck,” I muttered after examining the coloring on her gash.

“Wh-what are you doing?” Kat asked in a groggy voice.

“I need you to stay calm,” I instructed.

Her head whipped about as she took in the dilapidated surroundings. “Stay calm? Stay calm even though a psychopath with boundary issues kidnapped me and took me back to some abandoned building?”

My heart dropped. Right before she’d lost consciousness, I saw a spark in her eyes, as if she remembered who I was.

Not that it mattered. I was nothing to her. I was nobody to anybody and that’s how I liked it.

Her hair was mussed in the most annoyingly attractive way. Then Kat took in her pant-less state, and how I kneeled between her legs, and she made to jump away from me.

“Oh, hell no, you psycho rapist,” she cried.

When she tried to get up, I laid a hand on her lower stomach and firmly pushed her back down. Kat groaned and her eyes fluttered close. I showed up in time to see the She knock Kat’s head on the pavement with a sickening crack. She’d have a headache for the next couple days, but she’d live.