The Woman with the Scar (Costa Family)

But, apparently, that was just when it came to protecting myself. When it came to those I loved? I could rip your eyes out of your skull.

Which seemed to be my intention as my hands grabbed his face, and my thumbs pressed into his eye sockets the way I remember seeing someone say on a show or something once.

If it weren’t for the muffled shriek, I was pretty sure I would have been willing to literally shove the man’s eyes back into his brain.

But that sound?

That was my sister.

Crying out behind her gag.

My hands fell from the pawnshop guy’s eyes as I whipped around.

Coming face-to-face with the architect of all the horrors of the past day. And longer, really.

Deniz.

With his hand full of my sisters long, silky hair, yanking it back at an unnatural angle.

While he held a knife to her throat.

The scene was so eerily familiar that I swear I could feel the prick of that knife against my throat just as clearly as I had a year and a half ago.

I just barely resisted the urge to reach up and touch my scar.

I could see a tiny trickle of blood on Alara’s neck.

“Don’t. Let her go. She has nothing to do with this.”

“Maybe you should have thought of that before you went and got the motherfucking mafia involved in our business,” Deniz said, face going red in anger.

It was such a familiar look, one I’d seen on the face of Eren a thousand times.

Brio was right.

Their entire bloodline had to end.

But hopefully not after he took out my bloodline.

“I’ll go with you,” I said, holding up my hands as Alara let out some sort of objection against her tape, her head shaking, despite the knife pressed to her skin.

“Stop moving, okay?” I asked, begging for her to realize how dangerous this was, how close his knife was to catastrophic damage, how deranged and careless he was being right then.

“Take me with you. Do whatever you want to me. Leave my sister out of this. She’s just a kid.”

“Doesn’t feel like a kid,” Deniz said as his hand released her hair and started to glide toward her chest.

I can’t tell you where it came from, because the sister I had left a year and a half before had been sweet and almost a little timid.

But this hellion in her place?

She clamped her chin down on Deniz’s hand holding the knife, making it difficult for him to move it and cause any damage.

Then, clasping the hands of her bound wrists, she yanked her arms up toward one shoulder, then slammed her elbow back into Deniz’s midsection.

Wheezing, Deniz folded forward, which gave Alara an opening to slip away, moving back toward me since Deniz was still blocking the doorway to the hall.

There was a window behind the bed, but on the other side. And all the windows in the apartment were notoriously stubborn fire hazards that didn’t open thanks to years of the stupid landlord painting them before we even moved in.

“If you get a chance, you run, do you hear me?” I asked, voice low, tone begging her to listen. “Then you find someone in the Costa Family and tell them what happened,” I added, chancing a glance over to see if she was taking me seriously.

She gave me a tight nod to that.

“Grab them, you fucking idiot,” Deniz hissed to the pawnshop owner who was still wailing about his eyes.

All I seemed to feel in response to that was a sort of sick pleasure.

Perhaps for the first time, I genuinely understood Brio’s joy in pain. And his desire to cause more of it.

Mind on that, I took a page out of my little sister’s book and jammed my elbow into him, landing not in the squishy bit of his belly, but to the side near his ribs, making him let out a string of choked curses.

Any satisfaction I felt about that was short-lived, though.

Because Deniz was charging toward me with the knife this time, a wild look in his eyes that had me raising both my arms up to protect my face.

I was vaguely aware of Alara following my heartfelt demand that, if she had a chance, she save herself.

She rolled across the bed, and landed on the other side, ready to make a run for it.

My gaze had to leave her, though, as I felt the knife slice across my raised forearm, the cut a searing, yet not unfamiliar sensation.

It was surprising enough to have my arm flying away, spraying blood across the room as he sliced again at my other arm.

My gaze moved past him, seeing Alara escaping. Hopefully she came across someone quickly who could help her get the gag and binds off, get her to safety, and send cops or the entire force of the New York City mafia in my direction.