Page 4 of Breaking His Exile

It caught her across the cheekbone, and the world went white, then red, then tilted hard. Her shoulder hit the stage floor, and the impact jarred through her teeth. She tasted copper. The room spun, a smear of neon and faces and the low, rising growl of a dog.

Rux was on her before she could draw breath. His hand fisted in her shirt, hauled her up like she weighed nothing. He yanked her head back, and a knife flashed steel in the purple light as he pressed it against her throat.

She couldn’t speak.

Couldn’t breathe.

Her pulse hammered against the blade, and every beat felt like it tore open the wound he’d started. Blood trickled down her throat.

“I should cut out your tongue right here,” he said, low, his breath hot in her face, his hand fisted in her hair. “See how pretty you sing then.”

She should’ve figured it would end somewhere like this. A bar off a highway. Nobody who knew her name.

She closed her eyes again and drew a breath and held it as she waited for the pain.

It never came.

One second the blade was there; the next, another body muscled in between her and Rux.

A wet crack of bone.

Rux howled, and the knife dropped from his hand, clattering to the stage floor. His grip on her hair let go. She staggered back into the amp.

It was the man from the end of the bar. He had Rux’s arm bent up behind him at an angle arms didn’t go, and then he drove him down face-first into the stage.

She scrambled back from them and pressed herself flat to the wall.

Rux got a knee under himself and shoved hard, and they went sideways into the mic stand, which fell with a shriek of feedback she felt in her teeth. The two of them hit the floor and rolled. When they came apart, the stranger was on his feet with the knife in his hand.

She had time to think, run.

Rux came at him, and the stranger took a blow to the ribs that folded him. Rux swung again, and the stranger stepped into it instead of away, ducked his head so the fist only grazed him, and drove the knife up and under in one motion.

Rux made a sound like a balloon deflating. A long wet exhale. He stood there with both hands pressed to his middle, looking down at himself, and then up at the stranger with an expression of almost childish surprise, followed by fear.

Then he went sideways. He hit the stage floor and didn’t move again.

The room stopped. All of it. The whole world.

She stood against the wall with both hands flat over the drumming under her sternum, and she couldn’t get a full breath, and she couldn’t stop looking at the man on the floor.

A man was dead.

A man had been alive and grinning and holding a knife to her throat, and now he was dead on the boards of a roadhouse stage, and it had happened in the time it took to drop a guitar.

The dog stood at the edge of the stage, that growl still rumbling, its dark eyes moving between the man by the pool table and Hobbs at the door. Holding them. That the beautiful good dog was the only reason they hadn’t already made a move.

The stranger turned to her. His chest heaved. There was blood on him and a mark rising on his cheekbone. His eyes were flat and steady and should have frightened her more than they did.

He extended a hand. “I can protect you.”

She looked at his outstretched hand. Across the backs of his knuckles, round scars caught the fluorescent light. They gleamed silver, too neat and measured for any accident, arranged in a way she recognized instantly—a pattern she carried, too, hidden inside her own sleeves, put there years ago by a different kind of monster.

Her gaze lifted to his face. Dark hair falling across his forehead. Blood on his hands—some of it his, most of it Rux’s. He didn’t look like a savior. He looked like a man who’d done this before, and would again, and wouldn’t lose a minute of sleep over it.

Her fingers were shaking when she reached out. But she reached out anyway, because some part of her had already decided the moment she recognized those scars. Not that he was safe—he clearly wasn’t—but that he understood something about the inside of her that no one else in this room could.

“Your guitar,” he said.