Page 26 of My Unhinged Alphas
I move fast, boots pounding against the concrete, rounding the stack of crates and cutting into the narrow passage the target ran down. It smells damp back here. Mold and old wood. The lights are weaker. One bulb flickers overhead.
I hear them before I see them. Grunting. Impact. Something heavy hitting drywall.
I turn the corner.
Havoc has the target by the collar, driving him backward into a half-finished office space. The drywall caves inward when they hit it, dust exploding into the air.
“Alive!” I shout.
The target swings wildly, catching Havoc across the cheek with the butt of a pistol he must have grabbed on the way down the hall. Blood splatters the side of Havoc’s face.
Havoc laughs. Actually laughs.
“You should’ve stayed still,” he says, and drives his knee into the man’s abdomen hard enough to lift him off his feet.
The target gasps, folding forward. Havoc grabs him by the back of the neck and slams his head into the metal frame of a desk.
“Alive!” I bark again, closer now.
The man is bleeding heavily from a split scalp, but he’s still conscious. Still fighting. He claws at Havoc’s arms, desperate and animal.
“Please—” the target chokes.
Havoc freezes for one second.
Then something changes in his expression. It isn’t anger. It’s decision.
The target reaches again for the pistol trapped between their bodies.
I see it. “Havoc, don’t?—”
The shot is deafening in the confined space. For a split second, I think the target fired.
Then I see the hole in the center of his chest.
Havoc lowers his gun slowly as the man’s body slackens and slides down the front of him, leaving a smear of blood across his shirt.
The room goes quiet except for the ringing in my ears, and the target collapses fully to the floor. Dead.
Very dead.
I step forward, fury rising fast and sharp. “What did I say?” I demand.
Havoc doesn’t look at me right away. He stares down at the body like he’s assessing something. “He was reaching,” he says evenly.
“We needed him breathing.”
“He was going to shoot.”
“We could have disarmed him.”
Havoc finally looks at me. His cheek is split open. Blood runs in a thin line along his jaw. His chest rises and falls hard. “He made his choice,” he says.
“That wasn’t your call.”
“The gun was.”
For a moment, the space between us tightens. Vale appears in the doorway behind me, silent, eyes flicking from the corpse to Havoc to me.
