Merciless Hunter (Dark Syndicate 4)

2

Aiden

Warm blood covers my hands.

Crimson, thick, sticky. Metallic.

The scent, a prelude to death.

Death is seconds away from the bastard I’m staring at with my knife plunged into his heart.My fingers linger in the pool of gurgling blood and press into the wound harder.

It will make him go quicker. Make him take that last breath faster, make him escape into the place I have to try my best not to go to yet.

I’m needed here in this world for a little longer.

I have a new purpose, and this asshole just pushed me further away from it.

As the light leaves his steely gray eyes and the color drains from his already pale skin, I hope he knows why I issued his end.

That hope isn’t so I can take comfort in knowing he understood why I had to do what I had to do.

I don’t give a flying fuck about that.I don’t want, nor need, anybody's understanding of my actions.

What I hope is he knew I was the master of him in the end, and I gave him what he deserved.

More blood covers my hands as it pours out of the wound, andlike a savage, I turn the knife in his heart bringing forth more and more.

The sight does something to my rage, reminding me of the thousand deaths I’ve seen.

I'm losing my mind again, going crazy, and losing control.

This time it’s worse because blood is what I got tonight.

Nothing more.

This fucking dog had the information I wanted and chose not to give it to me.

He knew even as I buried my knife deep into his heart that my son, Aleksei, didn’t die in the fire that night nine years ago.

The fire that killed Gabriella.

This asshole knew exactly how I could find my boy and chose to withhold that information from me.

His mocking grin was enough to tell me he knew the truth and would rather die than tell me anything at all.

So death was my answer for him, and I did not make it quick.

“Let’s go Aiden,” Dominic says.

His voice sounds far away.

I look in the direction I heard him, and I’m momentarily thrown when I see he’s right next to me.

With his face stern, he looks from me to the man I just killed, and I see it in his eyes.It’s a flicker of something that might be fear, but it’s not.It’s something akin to it, because this man has walked a similar path to me, and I know few things scare him.

What I see in his eyes is the worry of what I might become if I fail.

I look away from him when Massimo, his eldest brother and leader of the Syndicate, approaches.There’s blood on his hands too.Not as much as mine, but it’s there.