Page 12

The explosions were beautiful. The fire they created turned the entire outpost into a scene of death, dotted with the orange streaks and ash. One of my favorite of Acacia’s disasters so far.

Their plan was poorly executed. I’ve never used bombs. They’re messy and impractical. It’s very effective at telling people that you’re killing things—even the people who probably shouldn’t know you’re blowing things up—but Bane seems to use them as a solution to the majority of his problems. His subtlety is about as well controlled as his urge to hire contractors to kill themselves just to piss us off.

Which is why we are alive and they’re not.

Replanting the charges from Helena’s cell was easy enough work, and seeing them burn from their own stupidity was satisfying enough to excuse the few stragglers who escaped.

They sprint through the forest, stumbling aimlessly and making enough noise to attract the bears nearby, who unfortunately aren’t hungry enough to eat them.

I adjust the scope of my rifle, the night vision painting everything in a green hue and making their movements painfully obvious. Just as I lock onto one limping towards the tree I’m resting high above, another cracks a branch, turning four bodies towards the sound.

Helena.

I lower my rifle. Her head darts around frantically, listening to each sound while the four men creep closer, weapons drawn. She takes another step, moving thicker into the trees and wandering closer to the men circling like wolves, unaware like an innocent little lamb walking to her own slaughter.

I sit back and watch her. A slight urge to shoot them crosses my mind, but it’s gone just as quickly.

Another branch cracks and Helena freezes, her head whipping around in the direction of the sound, blinded by the darkness. She can’t see them, even as they’re only a few feet in front of her, and she knows that too. The forest is a death sentence without any vision. Predators lurk everywhere, even when you can’t see them. That just makes them more dangerous.

When she doesn’t move, I groan, raising my rifle to the direction of the closest contractor, and Helena does something strange. She crouches low to the ground, poised on her heels as she places a hand to the ground. And she waits.

Her hand wraps around the knife in her boot and in an instant, she becomes stiff like the trees—a statue unmoving, waiting, listening for the sounds of the forest under their feet that would inevitably give them away.

A twig snaps and Helena throws a knife lodged in her boot, landing square in the man’s face. She’s moving blindly, but she swings around the trees using them as guides as she attacks each of the contractors, who helplessly scramble for cover.

A smile tugs at the corner of my lips as she retrieves the knife from the man’s body just to blindly leap on another and plunging the blade into his throat.

“Look at you,” I mutter, setting my rifle against the tree. “Vicious little thing, aren’t you?”

She staggers back, heaving breaths and blowing back the strands of hair dusting in front of her face. They stick to her face, the ends dipped red and fuck, does she look beautiful covered in their blood.

Then she lowers back down, hand planted against the earth as she listens to the whir of the contractor’s night vision switching on.

“What are you waiting for, doll?” I mutter.

Helena cranes her neck to each sound and even from here, I can see the way her chest rises and falls unevenly, the same way she did when she was terrified and angry while I ground my cock against her thigh.

I groan, lifting my hips to relieve the pressure on my zipper. She hasn’t begun to see the things I can do to her.

Her hand wraps around her boot as the last men struggle to advance on her, and when I catch a glimpse of the small ring of a grenade jutting out, my eyes widen.

“Smart girl.” I praise.

I lift my hips up, adjusting my quickly stiffening cock. I rarely have sex anymore and never without a reason. While I enjoy splitting a woman’s pussy open and feeling them come apart on my cock, it’s more fun to watch—-seeing the strongest beg, watching them crumble before I even touch them. Their desires are desperate. Mine is controlled. Every aspect of my life is done with purpose and control. I never miss a shot and I never make a move until I’m sure I can control the outcome.

But Helena? Fuck, she is the opposite of control. She operates on instinct, acting on every primal desire when she kills and moves towards her targets with nothing but the sounds of snapping twigs and the vibrations of the forest floor to direct her. Her intelligence is enough to make me cum in my pants right now, if I wasn’t so desperate to watch her kill the rest first.

The disheveled men creep closer, cocky with their night vision and completely oblivious to her own weapons. They’ve trained with her for years, studied her, and they still think she’s given up when she’s watching them from her knees, letting them approach right up to her like a helpless lamb leading her wolves to the slaughterhouse.

“Come on, baby. Show them how you play,” I palm the stiff bulge in my pants, groaning in anticipation as she lays still.

Then, she ducks and pulls the pin.

The forest erupts in white light, and their screams pierce the air as they’re blinded by the flashbang. Helena attacks so quickly, I don’t even see the first two men she kills before she moves onto the third, leaping on his back and slashing the knife across his throat.

“Fuck…” She kills like a feral animal. Each man she takes down makes my heart beat harder until I rip down my zipper and wrap my hands around my cock.

I shudder when she slashes a jagged line down another’s throat. I’m going to come if I don’t slow myself down. So I grip my shaft tight, forcing slow agonizing strokes while I watch her turn the forest bloody.

The last two men attack her at once, knocking her blade from her hands. I imagine myself behind her, watching her from the ground as my helpless little doll shows her teeth. She doesn’t need a weapon. She’ll tear them to shreds before they can even scream. And when she stands over their dead bodies and drenched in their blood, I’ll rip her clothes off myself and suck her clit into my mouth until she’s begging me to cum inside her.

She slashes at one of them as they try to pin her down, drawing blood as her nails raking across his cheek. She squirmed so beautifully under me. She fought and cursed and screamed while her face flushed bright red and ground into my cock.

I toss my head back, only allowing myself a single moan before I move my hand faster, stroking my cock while I wrestle with my own self control. I’d rip their heads off their bodies with a single twist and then slam my cock into her while she cries my name again, but I want to see her kill them. I want her to show me the perfect wicked thing hidden underneath her meek porcelain skin.

The more desperate her attack becomes, the less control I start to have. Pre-cum leaks from the tip, and I smear it with my thumb across the head.

“Come on, baby,” I groan. “Kill them for me. Show your teeth.”

She smashes the man’s head against the tree and with a single motion, finds her knife in his pocket and stabs it into the other’s skull.

Fuck, I’m going to break you apart, doll. I’ll break you the same way you broke these men and you’re going to beg me for it. You’ll beg me to fuck you, to make you come until you’re begging and sobbing and the only word that falls from your pretty little mouth is my name.

I toss my head and moan, imagining her pussy clenching around me as cum spills into my hand and onto the ground below.

She yanks the blade free, her chest heaving, sweat glistening on her skin, before she turns and runs deeper into the woods, out of my sight.

“That’s my girl.” I wipe my hand clean, tucking myself back into my pants. The carnage she left behind is brutal in a way even Baron would admire. She wasn’t helpless, not even when she was locked inside her little cell. She clawed her way out of every pit Acacia threw her into and she came back with a vengeance this time. She needs something to blame, someone to stoke that violence inside her and that’s exactly what I’ll do.

I’m going to break her apart, piece by piece, until the perfect little doll Bane molded is nothing but shattered fragments at my feet. I don’t care what’s left of her afterwards. I don’t care if that fractured shell has nothing underneath it. I don’t care if she loses all will to live. I will have her. I will shatter her, every last part of her, and I will parade it to her beloved commander before I shove a grenade down his throat.

I press the receiver on my earpiece, connecting to Baron long enough to hear the screeching sounds of metal against metal.

“We’re all finished here,” I call out.

“It’s about damn time.” Another loud screech makes me wince before Baron speaks again. “How many heads?”

“Not sure yet. I counted three but there may be more. How’s your side looking?”

Baron doesn’t answer. Instead, the screeching of metal is replaced by the loud groaning of the radio tower visible just barely above the treeline. It sways for a second or two before it crashes to the ground. Electricity sparks throughout the forest, striking the surrounding trees in a blue hue before the trees dissolve into a mass of wood and smoke. Beautiful.

I press on the receiver. “Baron, what’s your ETA?”

“Depends on how long you want me staring at your ass.”

I glance down to find Baron standing directly under me, arms crossed and a smirk plastered to his face. His clothes are singed at the edges from the electricity, but he doesn’t seem to notice, pulling his hood back hard enough that the strands of his overgrown hair fall in front of his face. He doesn’t bother moving them.

“Are you going to stay up there all night?” He chides.

I roll my eyes. “I thought I’d give you a moment to take a few pictures.”

He smirks. “Why stop at pictures?”

Baron doesn’t step back as I jump down, instead taking a step forward as I land harshly to the ground, inches from him.

“Are you done playing stalker?” He asks with a raised brow. It’s tinged with jealousy, his eye giving the slightest twitch that gives it away as he nods towards Helena’s path.

I pat him on the shoulder instead. “I think you might have some competition, buddy. She’s brutal with knives.”

He scoffs, knocking shoulders with me as I stomps through the forest to the dismantled outpost.

The place stinks of decay. Every inch of it is covered with blood and bone, utterly destroyed by Bane’s own bombs. I feel a tingle of pride at that fact. A man’s greatest weakness is his own pride, and that man reeks of it.

“Take the north side. I’ll cover the rest.” Baron stalks off moments later and I’m left to the dismantled concrete building.

The base was poorly maintained. Cracks in the walls and the small separations between the tile made it far too easy to hide the charges inside the building, and the lack of wired security or alarms made detection impossible. Bane’s paranoia forces him to live in the stone age. Sentries are a decent tool, but your security is useless when it relies on someone staying alive long enough to warn anyone of intruders.

I turn over another shattered piece of concrete wall, shutting my eyes to stave off the agitation budding in my chest. Where is he? I rip away stones, tossing away broken glass and needles and tables, but Bane’s body isn’t there. Not a head or an arm or leg. Not even a lock of his disgustingly neat hair.

“Tell me you have him, Baron,” I grit into the speaker.

“He’s not with you?”

I practically rip out my earpiece. I clench the small disk in my hand, throwing my fist to the ground several times. “Dammit!!!”

It’s not fucking possible! We surrounded the entire base. No one should’ve survived.

I glance at a man lying dead in front of me. He’s young, his eyes plastered open, wide with eternal fear. Dried blood stains his mouth, his entire torso crushed by the fallen building. Fear isn’t enough. Not even death is enough to kill these people. They multiply like roaches, doubling every time you think you’ve killed the last of them.

My fists clench, cut and reddened from my own effort to restrain myself. I drive it straight into the dead man’s face and his nose caves in like a rotted watermelon. I throw my fist back again and his skull shatters, again and again until his body matches the remains of the entire clearing—empty, ruined and useless.

The sound of boots has my mind naively hoping it’s Bane coming back to finish the job, but Baron’s black tactical pants come into view and I wish I’d just fucking killed the guy with my own hands instead of trying to be subtle.

“This place is a cesspool,” I huff. “We surrounded the perimeter. No one should’ve gotten out.”

Baron crouches by the man’s caved body, inspecting it with a raised brow before his eyes turn to me. “Did you space the charges correctly?”

I nod.

“Did you miss one of the marks?”

My eyes narrow.

“I don’t miss.”

I stand abruptly, scanning over every body as if I don’t know what a waste of space looks like. They’re all the same—young, cocky guys with a six pack and a god-complex. There’s a difference between arrogance and rightfully earned confidence. They act like gods but they’ve never faced one.

What happens when you piss off a god?

I glance around at the bodies, checking the remains of the men lying dead on the outskirts.

The god sends a message.

“He has to be here,” I growl.

Baron appears next to me, placing a hesitant hand on my shoulder.

“Castor…”

“No!” I shove him off. “They couldn’t have survived that! No one could have fucking survived that. They’re not immortal. Even Acacia doesn’t have the technology for that, so don’t tell me they’re alive!”

“Would you shut the fuck up?” Baron hisses. “They might hear you.”

I force my mouth shut, clamping my jaw down until the force makes my teeth grind. Baron’s right. Aggravating as it is, if they’re alive, there’s no point in giving them more opportunities to hide by letting them know we’re here.

Baron nods towards the woods where we came in.

“Take a walk.”

My lip curls at the order, but when I glance at my hands I notice they’re trembling. Baron created that years ago, something to keep me off the edge. Very rarely do I allow myself to lose composure. He only saw once what happened when I did, and I’ve gone to great lengths to remove the memory.

I shove my clenched fists into my pockets, stalking off towards the treeline.

I don’t miss. I never miss. There were consequences for that too, ones I paid for in blood every time I missed. My blood. Training comes at a cost and any mistake can mean your life or someone else’s, just like Bane’s mistake to not add some fucking security to his hideout.

I graze the trees, angrily counting the fried stumps before I freeze. Hidden among the trees, shrouded in darkness, is a set of tire tracks, a line from a Jeep, the one Helena came in.

The one Bane drove.

“Baron!”

He appears a second later and his eyes instantly follow to the tracks in a path amongst the trees.

“We have a lead.”