Page 77 of Ruined By a Devil

I’m tempted to walk out and go look for him, but a heavy crash breaks the silence. I watch a wooden chair fly through the cheap glass window of Room Twelve, raining shards onto the concrete walk, followed by a gunshot.

“Fuck this!” I can’t stay in the car. I unlock the door, push it open, and step out into the suffocating heat. I keep the gun raised exactly how Malachi showed me, my boots crunching softly on the broken glass as I move toward the open doorway.

The first thing I notice is the inside of the room is a complete wreck. The moldy mattress is flipped, the TV is smashed on the floor and both chairs are missing.

Malachi has a man pinned against the cheap wood-paneled wall. His left forearm is pressed hard against the guy’s windpipe. Ezekiel is standing near the bathroom door, wiping a thin line of blood off his cheek, covering Malachi.

“Where is Nolan moving the shipments?” Malachi demands, his voice an icy threat. When he doesn’t get an answer, he presses his arm harder, crushing the cartilage in the man’s throat.

The man chokes, his hands batting uselessly at Malachi’s arm. But as his vision clears and he looks straight into Malachi’s face, the struggling stops and he smiles, blood dripping from his teeth. Either he’s gone entirely mad or he has zero instincts for his self-preservation.

“Well, look at this,” he says, spitting blood onto Malachi’s clothes. “I know you, don’t I?”

This can’t be good.

When Malachi doesn’t answer, the man continues. “You’re wearing a nice suit now... but I remember that dead look in your eyes and how much you stank, Mutt.”

Oh, no.

“Do you still cry when the lights go out?” The man laughs, a sick, completely twisted sound confirming my doubt from earlier. He is entirely out of his mind.

Malachi’s forearm tightens without warning and the man’s laughter cuts off into a strangled gasp as Malachi drives him harder into the wall, the cheap wood behind his head cracking from the force.

“Say it again,” Malachi says in a low voice. A little too low.

For one second, I think he’s going to kill him. There is no doubt that the man just made the biggest mistake of his life.

But then Malachi’s grip falters and I watch him freeze in place. His back is turned to me so I can’t see the expression on his face, but from the back it looks like the lethal, untouchable man I married just vanished, his entire body going rigid.

His hand is still clenched around the man’s shirt, but his fingers slowly begin to loosen one by one, like his body is no longer listening to him.

My own heart hurts as his forearm drops, losing all its crushing pressure against the man’s throat. It’s an absolutely terrifying scene to look at.

He is trapped in the same place they kept him in two years ago.

As Malachi’s grip on the man lightens, he doesn’t waste a second. He shoves Malachi’s frozen weight aside and pulls a switchblade from his pocket with a sharp click. Just as he’s about to attack Malachi, he spots me standing in the open doorway, and lunges straight at me.

Everything happens so fast, neither Levi nor Ezekiel have enough time to react. I raise my gun, my finger sliding to the trigger but I don’t even get to pull it before Malachi snaps back to reality and the violence that follows is a pure explosion of terror and blood.

He grabs the back of the man’s collar before the guy can take a single proper step toward me, hauling him backward with so much force the man’s boots leave the cheap carpet. He slams him face-first onto the wooden edge of the broken dresser.

“Wait, we need him—” Ezekiel yells but Malachi doesn’t hear him.

He draws the heavy combat knife from his belt, grabs a handful of the man’s hair to yank his head back, and drives the blade straight into the side of his neck, wrenching the blade violently sideways.

Terror washes over me as the thick, dark blood sprays across the peeling wallpaper and the man drops to the floor like dead weight, his hands twitching against the ugly green carpet as a dark pool spreads fast beneath him.

The room goes dead silent, save for the hum of the broken neon sign outside, for what could be a few seconds or an entire hour.

I remain frozen in place, my mind struggling to process everything that has just happened and that I almost got killed. Again. Ezekiel stares at his brother in total shock, knowing how much we needed the driver alive. We needed him to tell us everything he knew about Nolan and he clearly knew a lot.

Malachi avoids looking at me as he stands over the body, his chest falling and raising rapidly as he stares down at the dead man, the bloody knife gripped so tight in his fist that his knuckles are bone-white.

I lower my gun. As I take a closer look at Malachi’s face, at the unfiltered terror in his eyes, I am certain.

That man had been directly involved in Malachi’s captivity.

“I’ll call Elijah to take care of this,” Levi speaks from the outside, but the world remains a blur and all I can think about is how much pain Malachi is carrying in his heart. A part of me wishes it had been me who got to kill the man that had Malachi’s blood on his hands.