Shane (Mallick Brothers 1)

That was how I felt as I started swinging into the bastard beneath me’s face.

It wasn’t that I didn’t see it each time my fist landed, didn’t see and smell the blood as it poured from his lips and his nose, as one of his eyes filled with it. It wasn’t that I didn’t hear his grunts become curses, then become something else entirely. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel my own knuckles, so hard from all the years using them, actually bust open and bleed. It wasn’t that I didn’t know there came a point where I had cracked all the bones in his face and was punching into the soft flesh underneath. It wasn’t that I didn’t know the point when he went slack and unconscious.

I just didn’t give a fucking shit about those things.

All I cared about was the rage, the vengeance, making him hurt for all the times he made her hurt, made her feel weak and helpless, made her feel trapped and less than the fucking amazing woman she was.

His head rolled to the side slightly, his chest doing one weird, raspy choke and blood dripped out of his mouth.

But it was different than a busted lip, a torn tongue, a knocked-out tooth.

It was blood from somewhere in his chest, like it had filled up his lungs until it rose up his throat and trickled out.

It was that moment that the more conscious part of me slipped back into the driver’s seat. I heard my own breath first, harsher, more uneven than I had ever heard it before. The sweat was literally dripping into my eyes, making my tee stick to my back, slick down my arms. My hands hurt when I pulled back and tried to curl them. Hurt. My hands never hurt after a fight. Not since I was a kid. The blood got me next. I thought I knew about blood before. And I sure as fuck knew more than the next guy, but this was different. This was what they meant when they said bloodbath. I was covered. The fronts of my jeans were saturated with it, my hands, arms, shirt. When I swiped the sweat off my face with my shoulder, I saw a huge smear of it there too.

Beneath me, her asshole ex was still.

And it wasn’t the kind of still that happened when someone passed out from a beating.

It was the kind of still that came from being beaten to death.

I beat him to death.

I must have busted a rib.

That was the only explanation really.

I must have busted a rib and it pressed in and punctured his lung. That explained why so much blood came from his mouth.

I pressed back and up, surprised when my legs were immediately assaulted with pins and needles, making me painfully aware that I must have been pounding into his flesh for longer than it felt like. It felt like minutes at most. But it had to have been the better part of half an hour to do that to my legs.

I turned away from his body, looking at the other wall, trying to get my breathing to slow, trying to ignore the odd, shaky feeling of my insides.

See, I knew what I was doing when I drove across the country and dragged the man into the shed.

The thing was, the idea of doing it and the reality of it were two completely different fucking things.

There was no going back.

I was a killer.

I’d killed someone.

And not in the impersonal way that it happened with a gun.

I had beat a fucking human being to death.

Granted, every time that mother fucker held down an unwilling woman and forced his way inside her, he earned every single God damn blow he had gotten.

But it changed things.

Me, mostly.

It changed me.

There was no denying that. There was no denying there would be repercussions for my actions. Nightmares. Or maybe that rage thing might happen again. I didn’t know.

But that didn’t change the overall feeling I had as I forced myself to look back at his body.

I felt vindicated.

Justified.

I had taken Lea’s demons and fucking slayed them.

They could never touch her, not in a tangible way again.

Sure, I had taken on a few of my own in the process, but that seemed like a fair fate to me.

“Shane!” I heard yelled from one of my brothers outside, too loud and freaked-sounding for me to be able to place which one.

My heart flew up into my throat at it, knowing very little freaked them out.

I reached for the crowbar, dislodging it, then pulled at the door.

Right about fucking then, I heard a gunshot ring out, loud, almost deafening in the quiet of that secluded location.

I flew out the door at about the same time as half a dozen bikers, guns in hands, looking around.