Page 66 of Mob Princess

20

Israel

“Get off of her. Now.”

Seeing that man on top of Bonnie filled me with a rage I’d only experienced one other time in my life. And while I didn’t have time to stop and process those emotions, I knew to use them to my advantage. I saw that knife piercing her skin. I saw the blood tainting her clothes. I saw that this man already hurt what was mine.

And nobody—I mean, nobody—touched what was mine.

Hearing Bonnie whimper pierced straight through my heart. Watching her struggle made me grind my teeth together. I charged the man in the back of the butcher’s shop and tackled him to the ground, but I certainly wasn’t finished with him.

I heard Bonnie take a long, deep breath, and that told me the knife hadn’t penetrated too far into her skin. That wouldn’t help this man, though. It was dying today, whether he planned on dying or not. I took the brutish man to the ground and wrestled with him, getting him onto his stomach. And when I reached for his knife, slipping it from his weakening grip, I held it to the back of his neck.

“Are you ready to die?” I felt a bombastic urge to murder this man. “Hmm? Because I’m ready to kill you.”

I heard the man gurgling beneath me as I clamped down on the back of his neck even harder. He could bleed out or suffocate. I didn’t give a shit what happened at this point. Ten minutes. That’s what she’d told me. Ten minutes was all she needed. And it was all this man needed to rip her away from me. I didn’t know how long this man had had her in his claws, but she hadn’t even been gone five minutes before a shiver had worked its way up my spine out there in the expanse of that grocery store. I’d been feeling up tomatoes and trying to find the best bag of red grapes they had when I’d seen a man out of the corner of my eye—a suspicious man—wearing a black long-sleeved shirt and jean shorts with sunglasses. I mean, who the fuck wears jean shorts nowadays?

Fuckers. That’s who.

The second I saw him I knew something was wrong. We were being tracked and it wasn’t until I’d heard Bonnie’s muffled screams behind the wall of the butcher shop that I finally found my way to where she was.

With this asshole laying on top of her.

“Israel, look out!”

Bonnie’s voice ripped me from my trance and I found myself on my back. The searing pain that ripped through my nose came on the heels of the warmth trickling down my lips. I wiped at my nose and found my fingertips covered in blood. Damn it, that asshole probably broke my nose. When he tried to pin me down, I quickly slid away.

Before standing up and kicking him straight in his abdomen.

“Fuck,” he groaned.

He fell to his back, and I gazed into the face of a man I recognized. I stomped my heel into his groin, watching him curl up into himself to get away from the pain. I knew this man. He was one of Pava’s hired men. “Nice to see Pava reuses men who can’t get the job done.”

“What?” Bonnie asked softly.

I kicked the man one more time for good measure before I walked over to her. “Are you all right?”

She clung to me. “Do you know that man?”

I held her to my side. “I do, yes. Don’t you not remember him?”

Her eyes widened. “Holy shit.”

I nodded. “That’s the man who dragged you out of bed and down the hallway the night we were attacked.”

Her eyes danced across my face. “You’re bleeding. We have to get you home.”

I scooped her into my arms. “My thoughts exactly.”

“I guess we should stick to grocery delivery for a while then.”

I walked us out of the back exit. “That might be wise, at least for now.”

What she didn’t know is that I had every intention of leaving that night. After I knew she was asleep, I had every intention of dressing up, taking my two best men, and tracking this asshole down.

Just so I could show him what happened when he attacked my woman twice.

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