Page 31 of Psycho Shifters

I sliced the butcher knife across his face.

Deep.

Cheek to cheek, the blade split his face. Hot blood flowed over me in a gross waterfall.

A severed tongue fell out of his mouth, and it flopped onto the ground beside my head with a squish.

“You won’t be telling anyone shit,” I whispered. My voice was overpowered by the gagging noises coming from the beta’s mouth. The moonlight cast menacing shadows.

The room spun as I drowned in blood.

My attacker scrambled off me and clutched at his mutilated face.

If I were numb, I would have pushed to my feet and calmly cleaned myself off.

I was the opposite of numb.

Terror, fear, and shock burned through me like fire.

The blood triggered memories, and suddenly, it wasn’t a beta’s blood. It was my own.

Once again, I drowned in the past.

Dick stood above me in the middle of the night. I lay on the floor and tried to pull my one blanket up to protect myself. I begged and cried, pleaded with him to spare me.

“You fuckin’ think you can spill my drinks and backtalk to my patrons? You ungrateful whore. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be dead,” Dick said.

“He groped me first. I just told him not to touch me.” I was only eight. Sally at the bar had told me I was much too young for men to be touching me. She hadn’t had to warn me.

Men were all large and scary. They used their fists and hurt those weaker than them. Dick had shown me that.

“What you did was disrespect me,” Dick growled, and there was a rasp as he pulled off his belt. The heavy hardware clicked menacingly.

The first slam of the belt across my back made me yell in surprise.

By the tenth stroke, I was screaming in agony. Dick used his beta strength to keep me pinned to the floor. His clammy left hand pushed me facedown by the neck. Dick’s right hand was merciless with the belt.

By the fifteenth stroke, the scent of my blood overwhelmed my senses. Blood was everywhere. It wasn’t the first time he’d beaten me.

“Sadie, snap out of it!” Zed screamed and shook my shoulder. His thin face and dark hair filled my vision.

Blinking away awful memories, I remembered with relief that Dick wasn’t beating me.

I was free of him.

Unfortunately, I also remembered I had just slit a man’s tongue from his mouth and his blood was splattered across my face.

I looked around. My beta attacker was gone, but his blood still covered the floor.

Cobra leaned against the wall and stared at me with a frosty expression.

He turned and slipped out of the room.

I stared down at the blood covering my hands and the floor.

Was it possible to have another panic attack during a panic attack? Because I was in the middle of one.

My chest squeezed, and I couldn’t draw air through my lungs.