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Leaving the bar, he almost paused. The second he stepped into the sultry, late-summer heat, he could feel his skin prickling.
He almost grinned. The need to expend the energy raging through him was about to find an outlet. Evidently, someone didn’t like the questions he had been asking over the weeks. Or the people he was talking to. He didn’t tense, he didn’t do anything to overtly prepare his body for what was to come. He knew where it was, as though the pores of his skin were soaking in the danger lying in wait in the parking lot.
Bullet or gang? Gun or knife?
He couldn’t feel a scope on his head, that left other means. And oh, he would feel a scope on his head. He had learned well that feeling under Fuentes’s tutelage. Diego Fuentes had liked to play with his captives. The gun sighted on him, the bullet burying within inches of his head as he was chained to a wall, blindfolded, unable to avoid whatever was coming.
Yeah, Noah knew the feel of gun sights. Just as he knew the scent of violence. And he was moving closer toward it.
He was ready for the dark figure that jumped out at him. The knife barely grazed his bicep as he used his attacker’s momentum to jerk him to the side, break his arm, and pull the knife from his grip.
Noah left him where he was lying and he gripped the knife, steel lying along his wrist as he lifted his arm, and braced himself.
The shadows flowed from the darkness. Black masks, knives instead of guns.
“You want to leave town, Blake,” one of the shadows rasped through the darkness as half a dozen darkened figures began to surround him.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Noah drawled. “I think I like this little town. Lots of excitement. I might stick around a while.”
He let them surround him. He could feel it now, the blood surging through him, cold hard death filling him. He wouldn’t be taken again, never again. And he wouldn’t be defeated. Diego Fuentes hadn’t managed to break him and he would be damned if a few home-grown terrorists were going to get the best of him.
“Sticking around could be bad for your health,” another informed him with a nasally accent.
“Are you boys here to chat or to give me a good time?” He grinned back at them. “The odds are almost even. Let’s play.”
“Six to one,” another said with a laugh. “You’re outnumbered, motherfucker.”
And Noah chuckled. They had no idea, no clue what a killer he could be. But he knew. He knew, because he had been killing for far too many years before this little show-and-tell began.
“Then come get me,” he invited them with a little flicking motion of his hands. “If you can.”
They were good. The shuffle, the life-or-death dance that ensued spiked the adrenaline always ready to pour into him. He used it, felt the power feeding into his muscles as they came at him.
Steel met steel. Noah kicked his attackers’ feet out from under them, jumped aside, and met the next. He didn’t kill them. He didn’t want them dead. He wanted them alive and bleeding. He wanted to know who to follow, who to suspect when it was over, and the bandages, the injuries, couldn’t be hidden.
He wanted to leave witnesses and he wanted the bastards to remember what the hell they were dealing with.
He buried the knife in one attacker’s thigh, stole another, and sliced across another man’s midriff. Cutting them a little here and there, relishing the feel of steel biting into flesh and the sound of grunts, painful cries, and the snap of bones when he could manage it.
They were down from six to two. He stared back at the one facing him and smiled at the smell of blood.
“Do you want to keep this up?” he asked the other man, staring into dark eyes, memorizing the curve of the face beneath the stretchy black mask. “Come on, asshole. I can slice and dice all night long.”
He proved his point. He sliced a forearm, his knife bit through denim and cut a deep furrow across another thigh as he kicked out, brought down the bastard trying to blindside him. Noah stole his blade and buried it in the other man’s shoulder.
“That’s going to hurt,” he said with a chuckle, jumping back and watching as the others limped away.
The last one pulled a gun.
Spinning, Noah jumped, buried his foot in the bastard’s stomach, gripped his wrist and twisted until the gun dropped to the ground.
He took a blow to the kidney and grunted, his elbow slamming into the man’s throat. Bastards. They should have used the gun first.
He followed the elbow to the throat with a fist to the man’s gut, knocked him backward and then watched as he turned tail and ran to join his little buddies. Headlights flashed in front of him as he rolled and lifted the gun from the gravel before jumping to his feet.
Noah stepped back between several other vehicles, ducked, and watched the truck hauling his new buddies squeal out of sight.
He breathed in deeply, flexed his shoulder, and knew his own aches and pains would show up s
