Adrenaline Rush (Death Chasers MC 4)

Rush just simply stares at him.

Why hasn’t Pop shot me already?

When Rush’s sinister grin starts to spread like he’s winning the staring contest, the gun comes out of my mouth. My entire jaw aches with relief and floods with a sharp bite of pain at the same time.

I’m almost terrified this is a sick plot to give me false hope, as Pop roughly shoves me at Rush.

Rush snags me at the waist with his gun hand, dragging me to him, and I glance back in disbelief at Pop. Gone is the man I used to be so terrified of. In his place, a man I’ve never seen before is clenching his jaw, eyes flat like he’s given up.

How…

It feels so…anticlimactic…

Rush smooths his gun down my back, kissing the top of my head, as Herrin drops his gun, tears wavering in his prideful, furious eyes as he puts his hands on top of his head.

“He never even bothered looking for you,” Rush tells me with a sigh, holding me to him as he kisses the top of my head.

My fingers are tightly wound in his shirt, my body simply frozen. I’ve been normal too long for all this shit to have gotten this fucking crazy. I remember the MC being so much simpler than this.

It was still scary as shit back then too. This is too damn much. All the time. How is Eve not a broken freaking mess if even I’m having problems holding my shit together?

“Maybe it’s because he knew what I’d become capable of and also deduced that I was devoutly in love with you. Surely it wasn’t that hard to see, when I look back on just how indiscreet we were, while convinced we were the most discreet,” Rush tells me, brushing his thumb over my lip.

His lips tug in a grin, and he cups my chin.

“You’re my redemption. You’re what I get for all the hard work I’ve done to get you back, because you now see that the man you fear the most is cowering to me, Kara,” he says with a…legit terrifying smile.

“You’re scaring me,” I say very seriously.

He rolls his eyes. “I’m saying I’m a bad man. I can take care of shit. You don’t get to run in fear anymore, and you have to let me chain you up—”

Herrin moves, gun in hand, but a shot rings out, and Rush never misses more than a beat as Herrin groans, dropping to the ground with a fresh wound in his shoulder.

“—because it’s going to take me a little while to trust that you won’t run. Agreed?” Rush asks, lifting me into his arms when my legs give out.

I stare over his shoulder as he carries me away, and I watch as Drex walks up. His face swollen, lips curved in a smirk, and brass knuckles are getting worked over his fingers as he leisurely limps toward Herrin.

Round two goes to the son.

I see a tear fall from Herrin’s eye, because…now they’re making him look silly. That prideful, cruel, powerful man is now powerless for the very first time, and he has no idea what to do.

When he starts to reach for a gun, his index finger is shot off from one of the phantom snipers, since there are at least two. He cries out, painfully struggling to hold onto his shouts of pain, because he’s too prideful for that.

This is surprisingly hard for me to watch. Especially now that I know he didn’t chase me down with a raging desire to kill me.

“He’d put a bullet in your head at the first opportunity,” Rush assures me when he clearly senses my hesitation. “Trust me when I say he’d have truly let them all have their way with you. He just didn’t care enough to spend his time chasing after his trashy daughter no one would ever believe,” Rush dutifully adds.

I suppose they don’t do sensitivity training here. I get it. I just wish I could sew his mouth shut for a minute.

Instead, I cover it with my hand, and he takes the hint, holding me closer instead of failing miserably at saying the ‘right’ things.

“You weren’t supposed to end up with a gun in your mouth. In hindsight, I gambled too easily, giving you far too much credit,” he says when I finally release his mouth.

I shove my hand against his mouth again, but he jerks it away and instead crushes his lips to mine as he backs me into a wall.

I’m not even sure how this is going to work out. He’s been really in love with me, and I want to run and hide before everyone tells me what a bad thing that is. I can chalk his shortcomings up to amendable quirks…I think. Even if some of them are crazy.

“Can we leave Halo—”