“You fucking mutt,” Cole snarled, ducking another slash.
The rogue grinned through bloodstained teeth and suddenly changed his grip.
Dax barked a warning.
Too late.
The hidden blade carved across Cole’s abdomen in a brutal diagonal slice, opening him from hip to ribs.
The sound was wet.
Thick, dark crimson poured through Cole’s shredded shirt, steaming as the wound split wide enough to expose slick muscle beneath. The force of the strike drove him backward into the wall hard enough to crack the concrete behind his spine.
The rogue lunged to finish it.
Cole smiled.
Actually fucking smiled.
“Tut-tut, motherfucker.”
The male froze as Malakai’s dagger erupted through the side of his throat from behind.
Black blood exploded across the corridor.
The rogue staggered, choking, his hands clawing weakly at the blade protruding through his neck—
—and Cole seized him by the face before slamming the rogue headfirst into the edge of a steel pipe.
Bone cracked.
The body crumpled at his boots.
Silence crashed down the corridor except for the distant bass upstairs and the steady drip… drip… drip of blood hitting concrete.
Dax stepped over the corpses first, his eyes dropping immediately to the massive wound across Cole’s abdomen, where blood still sheeted heavily between his fingers.
“That’s bad.”
Cole looked down casually at the torn flesh hanging open across his stomach before spitting blood onto the floor.
“I’ve had worse.”
Panic echoed from the club as the rogues lay in ruined heaps.
Dax looked from the two males Sule had wanted alive to the stranger’s corpse sprawled beneath the broken lights.
“So much for bringing them in,” he muttered.
Malakai crouched beside one of the rogues and inspected the black veins spreading beneath its torn skin.
This wasn’t normal control.
Cole’s jaw tightened.
“No. It was engineered. Whatever answers they had were never meant to leave this corridor.”
Dax stared down at the stranger’s corpse with visible disgust.
