Page 82 of Black Heart
Kaden advances on Dawson. “Your first mistake was thinking I wouldn’t come for her.”
Dawson scrambles to tuck himself away.
“You’re too late,” he sneers. “The AI is already?—”
Kaden ignores him. “Your last was laying a finger on what’s mine.”
Dawson barely has time to raise his fists before Kaden’s on him, a flurry of precise, brutal strikes raining down.
Dawson staggers back, blood spraying from his nose andmouth. He spits out a tooth, lips curling into a feral snarl. “You think you can stop this? It’s already done! That AI is going to make me a god!”
He fumbles for the gun holstered beneath his suit jacket, but Kaden is faster. In a blur of black, he disarms Dawson and slams him against the server racks with bone-crushing force. Components shatter and spark.
Kaden catches Dawson’s arm, wrenching it behind his back until the joint pops with a sickening crack. Dawson howls, crumpling to his knees. Kaden twists his arm farther, forcing his face to the ground.
“Look at her,” the Scythe commands. “Look at what you did to her.”
Through tears of pain and humiliation, I lock eyes with Dawson’s bulging, bloodshot ones. His face is a ruin, his nose crushed and lips split, yet still he leers at my exposed body like a rabid dog eyeing a fresh steak.
“Should’ve heard the way she moaned for me,” Dawson slurs through a mouthful of blood. “The slut loved every second of it.”
Kaden’s fist connects with Dawson’s jaw in a brutal uppercut, snapping his head back. Teeth and blood splatter across the floor.
“You don’t get to speak to her,” Kaden snarls, punctuating each word with a vicious blow. Dawson’s head lolls, barely conscious, yet still he grins through his broken mouth.
“Too late,” he gurgles. “Already had my fingers in her sweet cunt.”
Kaden’s entire body goes rigid, a chilling stillness settling over him like the calm before devastating lightning strikes.
His grip on Dawson’s mangled arm tightens, leather gloves creaking.
“Say that again.” Kaden’s tone is a low, deadly purr.
Dawson, even through the haze of agony, has the audacity to chuckle wetly. “You heard me. Fingered her till she was dripping all over my knuckles. Would you like to smell them?”
Kaden moves, blurring until he’s not Kaden anymore. He’s the black harbinger of death.
His hands clamp around Dawson’s head, one gripping his hair, the other digging into Dawson’s mouth and hooking his bottom teeth. With a roar of pure, unbridled rage, Kaden pulls Dawson’s jaw out of its socket.
Dawson’s scream cuts off abruptly as Kaden rips his jaw completely free with a grisly tearing of flesh, sinew, and bone. Blood spurts from the gaping wound, spraying across the Scythe’s mask and chest.
He tosses the mangled jaw aside. It hits the floor with a wet slap, the remaining teeth scattering like gory dice.
Dawson gurgles and chokes, drowning in his own blood as it pours down his mutilated neck. His eyes roll wildly, bulging from their sockets as he claws at his ruined face with his one good hand.
But the Scythe isn’t done.
He seizes Dawson by the hair, wrenching his head back at an impossible angle until vertebrae pop and crunch. With his other hand, he plunges armored fingers into the gushing ruin of Dawson’s lower face, hooking them under the tongue and ripping it out by the root with a brutal yank.
Dawson convulses, a high, thin wail escaping through his windpipe as the Scythe slams Dawson’s head against the unforgiving metal of the server rack again and again, until the sickening crack of his skull splits the air. Bits of bone and brain matter splatter across the humming machinery, gore mingling with sparking wires and crushed circuitry.
Dawson’s body spasms, limbs jerking in a macabre death-dance as Kaden releases his ruined head. It lolls at an unnatural angle, eyes bulging and glassy, jowls hanging by threads of torn flesh. The Scythe steps back, chest heaving, fists clenching and unclenching at his sides. His tactical suit is drenched in blood, droplets sliding down the black mask like ruby tears.
For a long, tense moment, he stands over Dawson’s mutilated corpse, a dark avenging angel painted in viscera. Then slowly, so slowly, he turns to face me.
Pinned beneath that ferocious gaze, I feel stripped bare in a way that has nothing to do with my physical nakedness. It’s as if he can see straight into my battered, quivering soul.
His heavy combat boots crunch through the grotesque debris. I quail instinctively, my abused body trying to curl in on itself despite the biting restraints.