Page 138 of Fuckboy Psychos (Scarlett Force 1)
I don’t wait for that, throwing a hard punch at his throat à la Scarlett Force. It serves two purposes: it keeps him relatively quiet and keeps his blood from touching me.
On the outside, I’m calm. On the inside, I’m screaming. This man is touching me all over, sweating on me, and his breath … it smells stale and dirty, and I find myself gagging even as I manage to get the upper hand, ending our roll with me on top.
My hands find his throat, squeezing hard as he scrambles to free himself. Seeing as he doesn’t execute a single proper move to get me off of him or stop the chokehold I have on his neck, I determine that he’s just cheap muscle.
Damn.
I wasted my thimble’s poison on a fool such as this?
He starts choking and thrashing, and I release him, standing up and replacing the cap on the thimble. I’m shuddering and shivering with disgust even as the man on the ground begins to twitch and seize.
The batrachotoxin—a substance obtained from golden poison frogs in South America—is deadly and has no known cure or antidote. It does its job as I take off through the woods, desperately pushing back at the thoughts screaming in the back of my head.
Dirty, filthy, he touched you all over; you’re contaminated; his sweat is on you; it’s sick; you’re polluted, tainted, befouled.
I ignore those thoughts by, oddly enough, remembering Scarlett Force and the soft brush of her lips. Just that minute amount of touch set me on fire. Certainly I was disturbed by the very idea of another person’s mouth making contact with mine, but it awoke a need inside of me that I wasn’t even certain that I would ever have.
The need for touch.
Thoughts of Scarlett Force work their magic, giving me enough strength to get around the back of the guesthouse and into the garage. I snatch the keys for the Miura from the wall and turn around only to find another man entering the building from the side door.
Fuck. I shove the keys into my pocket, wrenching my needles out. I place a fresh one in the cork beneath the sharp thimble nail, and duck down between the cars to avoid being shot.
Weaving between the vehicles, I find the man before he can find me, lunging forward and shoving the needle into his thigh until it’s fully buried in his muscle. He lets out a howl of pain as I rise to my feet, swinging my hand into his throat to cut off the sound. He stumbles back into the black Lamborghini, trying to raise his weapon up so that he can take a shot at me.
I grab his arm, twisting it sharply until I feel a satisfying crack, and the gun clatters to the ground. I kick it away, sending it spinning across the cement floor beneath another of the dozen vehicles in the garage.
The next thing I do is throw the man forward so that he stumbles and falls hard into the side of the Lambo, and then I wrap my arm around him to put him in a chokehold, cutting off his air and keeping him as quiet as I can. Hopefully, his initial scream of pain hasn’t called any of the other goons over to us.
He bucks around, trying to throw me off, but once again, he’s all meat and muscle with poor training. When he starts to stumble and then sags to the floor, I let him go, taking the knife from the sheath inside my jacket and sliding it across his throat from behind.
Even though I hate, hate, hate blood, I’m not leaving one of the men who killed my father alive. Not a chance. Red sprays out as the man chokes and, already deprived of oxygen from the chokehold, falls forward, oozing crimson across the garage floor.
I ignore him—him and my almost overwhelming disgust—and then I unlock the door to the Miura, hit the button for the garage door, and take off with a squeal of tires. Keeping quiet right now is pointless; the garage door is loud enough.
Several of the remaining men scramble for their own vehicles, intending on chasing me down, but while I might’ve lost to Scarlett Force, I certainly won’t have any trouble outdriving these morons.
I hit the gas, rocketing down the driveway, the slight bump near the end of the road causing me to catch air before I crash back down on the street. I yank the wheel to the side, squealing and sliding across the pavement before I gun it and take off down McKenzie View Drive in the direction of Springfield’s sister city, Eugene.
I easily outpace my father’s murderers, slowing down only when I’ve blended into city traffic. The first thing I do is find a safe place to pull over, breathing hard and staring down at the bright red on my white gloves. I strip them off and toss them to the floor on the passenger side of the car, digging my fingers into my hair and fighting back a wave of grief and panic.
