Fury's Valentine

by Helen Scott

  Once she seemed to be settled back upstairs, the man began chain smoking as he paced in front of the apartment. At some point, she had noticed him and closed the curtains, which only provoked his rage even further. Ben wished she would have waited to throw the flowers out. She could have offered them to her neighbors, or donated them to an old folks’ home, anything other than throwing them away, because now Tommy was well and truly pissed. He could feel the rage coming off the man in waves, like a kettle about to boil.

  Sure enough, after he had riled himself up enough, Tommy set out toward the apartment building. Since Ben knew where the man was going, he jumped to the balcony attached to the woman’s apartment. That way he could watch without getting in the way, and make the final call on whether the jackass needed to go see his mom, Tisiphone, the fury who dealt with people who committed murder, or his aunt, Megaera, who dealt with the consequences of jealousy and rage. Ben hadn’t grown up with either of them, and for that, he would be forever thankful. His adoptive parents had been amazing, and he couldn’t imagine growing up in the Underworld, being completely cut off from everything, like his cousins.

  The woman was going through some static self-defense moves in her living room, clearly on edge by what had happened. The leggings and the sports bra hugged her generous curves in a way that made his throat run dry. Ben assumed there was a knock at the door when she jumped, flinching as though something had exploded close by.

  Chapter 4

  When the soft knock sounded at the door, Fiona’s heart tried to break out of her chest. She quietly approached the peephole and looked through, only to find no one in sight. A breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding released, and she wrote the noise off as kids or someone’s bag hitting the door as they went by. It wasn’t completely unusual for something like that to happen.

  Just as she was about to take up her stance to begin running through her moves, the noise sounded again, but this time, it was stronger, louder. She went back over, ready to tell the kids that they needed to treat their neighbors’ doors with respect and not go around knocking on them, but the sense of foreboding that overcame her made her stop in her tracks. Before going any further toward the front door of her apartment, she rummaged through her purse and grabbed the miniature taser she kept hidden within.

  Now she felt ready. Even if Tommy was on the other side of the door, she’d be able to handle him. As she looked out of the peephole again, all she could see was an empty hallway. The sound of something scraping along the wall had her opening the door so she could yell at the kids. It wasn’t kids, though.

  Tommy stood there, tall and wiry as he always had been, and the next few seconds happened faster than she could process. She’d raised the taser, only to have it pushed out of her hand as if it was nothing more than a paper airplane. Her whole body was shoved back into the apartment so forcefully that she stumbled and fell, smacking her head on the coffee table as she went down. Everything spun around her; the world seemed to be topsy-turvy.

  The door slammed behind Tommy, and she was still trying to figure out which way was up when his voice growled above her. “Should’ve known you wouldn’t’ve liked your present. I wanted to make nice, to remind you how good it was, but you just threw it all away like the bitch you are.”

  “Tommy . . .” she started, but his hand was around her throat before she could speak any further.

  “I loved you; hell, I still love you, but you’re just out here whoring about, showing your titties in the window for any man to see. Do you know how many plans I’d made for us? How much effort I’d put into training you already? I put my heart and soul into you. You were my greatest project, and we would have made the perfect team. No one would even mention Bonnie and Clyde when they had us to think about instead, but you threw it all away.”

  His rage seemed to abate momentarily as she clawed at his hands, terror making her forget most of what she’d learned. She knew she’d drawn blood. She could feel his skin getting slick with it, smell the metallic scent of it in the air mingling with the pervasive odor of his cigarillo. As a breath squeezed past the constriction of his hands, her brain kicked back into gear, and her hands stopped clawing and punched out instead, striking him directly in the solar plexus.

  Tommy collapsed immediately, and she shoved him to one side, springing to her feet and making a break for the door. His hand snaked out and grabbed her by the ankle, yanking her back down to the ground. As she kicked and struggled to get free, he pulled her closer and closer to him as though she weighed nothing. When he reached for her other leg, she kicked out, but missed.

  He released her foot and pushed himself to his feet faster than she could. It was exactly the advantage he had been looking for as he positioned himself between the front door, the only exit, and Fiona. She wanted to scream and rage, but she knew if she did that, he would only beat her even more, at least until the cops showed up, but she honestly wasn’t sure if she would survive his rage.

  “Come back to me. It’ll be good again, and then we won’t be stuck in this cycle. I have the perfect victim picked out back home, exactly what you need to understand what I’m talking about.”

  “Tommy,” she croaked, “I’m never going to kill someone with you. If I had thought you were serious earlier in the relationship, then I would have left you sooner.”

  He snarled at her. “Who else would want you, you fat cow? Huh? I’m all you’ve got, all you’ll ever get.”

  She started backing up as he spoke, hoping there was a way she could lock herself out on the balcony of her tiny apartment and separate herself from his crazy somehow.

  “You think most men want something like that?” He gestured to her body. “Please, most men wouldn’t even want to look at you right now, let alone touch you. I’m the best and only man you’ll ever have, and all I’m asking is that you come home and be my partner.”

  “You’re a fucking psychopath,” she whispered.

  “I’m what now?” He laughed, and she knew she’d just signed her own death warrant. “If I’m crazy, it’s only because you make me this way. If you hadn’t’ve left, then none of this nonsense woulda happened. I’d given you my favorite knife. Don’t you know what that meant to me?”

  The memory flashed over her mind’s eye. She’d thought it was a necklace or a bracelet in the long black box. The red bow that held it shut looked exactly like the one they used in those jewelry commercials she saw on TV. When she’d opened it to find the silver of a knife winking at her in the light from the candles on her birthday cake, she’d thought it was a joke. When he’d explained that this was the knife he’d grown up using, the knife that he’d trained with and experimented with day after day, she knew everything she’d been trying to brush off as his quirks and peculiar interests was just the warning signs for the crazy that he’d hidden from her in the beginning. She had left him the next day without a word. Fiona had called the police, tried to convince them of what he had told her, but they just laughed her off. After all, Tommy was a certified member of the good ol’ boys club, and was friends with a lot of the cops in the town they lived in. One of them had promised to go over to his place, take a look around, but when she never got a call back, she knew they hadn’t found anything. Looking back on it now, it probably hadn’t been the best way to end things, but what else was she going to do with a man who gave her a knife as a present, one that he had definitely used to kill animals and most likely people, too.

  Cool air tickled her back, chilling the sweat that ran down her spine. She was close to the back door now. They both knew there was no way for her to get down from there, so he wouldn’t expect her to go through. Having seen the anger in him, though, she knew that it would only be a matter of minutes before he smashed the glass door and had her cornered. Her mind raced frantically, trying to come up with options.

  The whole reason she’d been forcing herself to go to the gym was so she could have the muscles needed to get out of this very situation, the
one that had haunted her nightmares from city to city as she’d tried to escape him. Tommy took a step toward her, the menace radiating off him in waves. Her hand scrambled against the door behind her.

  “There’s nowhere to go, little lamb.” He crooned his favorite nickname for her, sending another wave of revulsion down her spine.

  Her fingers snaked around the handle, trying to flip the latch as quietly as she could, while her heart hammered in her chest. How was she going to prevent him from following her? The thought raced around in her head like a child on a sugar high. Finally, the door was unlocked. All she had to do was get through it and she’d have an exit, one way or another.

  Fiona yanked it open behind her and stepped backward before slamming it closed. She wasn’t quite fast enough, though, and Tommy’s hand caught it, but not before the full force of the door hit it, trapping it momentarily between the door and the frame. A blue streak left his mouth as he protectively pulled his hand toward his body. The angry red marks and strange shapes of his fingers let her know that the door had done more damage than she had initially thought. There wasn’t time to waste, though. An injury like that would only make him angrier and wouldn’t slow him down for more than a moment.

  The railing of the balcony poked into her back, and she realized that the whole time she’d been watching him, her body had been trying to get away. Now she was faced with a choice—find some way to jam the door, or climb over the railing and, hopefully, jump to the balcony below.

  His eyes lifted from his hand to her, and she knew that the choice was an illusion. She needed to get off the balcony any way she could. Before he’d made a move, she swung her legs over so that she was balancing on the very edge with her toes under the railings as her hands tightly gripped the top.

  This was it. Her moment of succeed or fail and possibly, no, probably, die. She switched her grip from the top to the spindles of the railings that connected to the bottom, and moved into a squatting position. The door in front of her opened, and Tommy came out.

  “Really think that’ll help?”

  “If it gets me away from you . . .” she breathed as she extended one leg down.

  He kicked her fingers, smashing them between his steel-toed boot and the metal bar of the railing. “There, now we match.”

  She shrieked in pain and withdrew the hand when he let up on the pressure. “I could just kick the other one and let you fall. You’d probably knock yourself out, and then I could just put you in my truck and take you home.”

  The thought terrified her, and she knew that he would do exactly that if she didn’t move. She swung her other leg down and tried to move her feet toward the balcony below, but they struggled to find purchase. When his boot landed on the hand that was still wrapped around the railing, she screamed bloody murder. Lights flicked on in rooms around her, but she knew by the time anyone did anything, it would be too late.

  He kept her trapped by her fingers for a moment, making the trajectory of her swing useless, before her weight became too much. Fiona’s body pulled her hand free, even though Tommy was fighting against it. The delicate bones in her fingers cracked, and as she tried to angle herself to land on the balcony below, she knew she was just going to fall. When her foot slipped against something, hope bloomed in her heart, and she thought she might have fallen on the right side of the railing below, but she was wrong. The planter of flowers that her neighbor had hooked over the railing gave way as she connected with it, and they both fell to the ground.

  Chapter 5

  Ben had jumped from the balcony as soon as he’d seen the woman’s hand going for the lock on the sliding glass door. When she’d climbed over the balcony railing, his heart had been in his throat, and when Tommy’s boot had come down on her hand, he’d wanted to scream in frustration. Did Hades really expect him to just watch this woman die?

  Without thinking about it any further, he positioned himself directly underneath her. That way if she did fall, then at least he could soften the blow so she didn’t seriously injure herself.

  When her scream rang out like a bell through the night air, a chill went down his spine. It was like he watched everything in slow motion. Her body jerking before the cracking of bones sounded, followed by her foot almost catching on the balcony below, only to find that the foothold wasn’t stable. She and the planter her foot had landed in began to fall toward him, leaving him prepping for the impact.

  The emotions running through him, plus the adrenaline from everything that had just happened, brought his fury form as far to the surface as it could go, at least until he died and Hades kicked his soul out of hell. The extra strength and agility that he had naturally only increased as his fury strained against the limits of his mortality. When the woman landed in his arms, she seemed to roll out of them, not knowing he was there, and into the bushes that surrounded him. Before he could question what had happened, he realized he was still glamored. No one could see him.

  Quickly, he teleported to the parking area a few feet away and removed the glamor so anyone and everyone could see him. Ben took off at a full sprint toward the woman, arriving before she’d even really opened her eyes.

  “Are you okay?” His voice was tight with worry.

  Eyes that were a swirl of brown and green peeked out from heavy eyelids. “Help me,” she whispered.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll get you to a hospital. Just rest.”

  Her eyes snapped open at that. “No hospital.”

  Ben frowned at her. “You need medical attention. You just fell from a third-floor apartment.”

  “He’ll find me,” she said as her eyes traveled up to the balcony she’d been hanging from moments earlier.

  He looked up and found Tommy watching them with a white-knuckle grip on the metal frame of the balcony. Ben knew that the other man wouldn’t stop until he killed this woman, and if he didn’t want her death on his conscience, then that left him with only one choice.

  “I can take you somewhere safe, if you want?” he asked softly.

  She nodded and hissed in pain at something as she tried to move.

  “Allow me,” he said as he scooped his hands under her and picked her up. He walked them over to the parking lot where he had left his car, having followed Tommy to the apartment complex earlier in the day. Getting the door open was going to be a challenge, but not impossible. He really wished he had one of those cars that he could just unlock with a press of a button, but he liked to think of his car as vintage, so there were no buttons to get in, just the one key that he had in his pocket.

  He decided to take a risk and use the speed gifted to him by the fury within and let go of her legs with one hand so he could grab the keys from his pocket. Before her legs had even started to slide down his body, his arm was already coming back into place. He unlocked the car and was able to open the door using a similar trick. It would deplete his energy reserves faster since he wasn’t a full fury yet, but it was worth it.

  The woman grunted as he laid her down on the back seat.

  “Hold tight, this is going to be a helluva ride,” he said as he tried to buckle some of the seatbelt around her.

  By the time he was in the driver’s seat, he could see Tommy running toward them at full tilt. His engine revved to life, and he squealed out of the parking lot, probably leaving rubber behind as they made a swift exit. He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Tommy running after them for a while, before he slowed to a halt, fists waving in the air and probably cursing up a storm.

  This might not have been the decision his fury family would have made had they been in the same situation, but for him and his half-sister, Cin, humans weren’t disposable. As soon as his sister entered his mind, he knew he would need to text her. She could at least get him in touch with the siren brother who was gifted at healing, Hal. She was part of their family, and though he was making progress in getting them to trust him, it was slow. No one there loved him like family other than Cin, and to an extent, her adoptive sist
er, Aster.

  Ben shoved the thoughts from his mind as the car skidded on the tarmac as he rounded a corner. His place wasn’t too far from where they were, which probably had something to do with why Hades had assigned him the case. The old deep-purple sedan swung this way and that as he wound his way through the city, eventually coming to the apartment he rented. He parked the car close, but as discretely as possible, before reaching in and picking up the woman from the back seat. She was falling in and out of consciousness, which worried him. Without a moment of debate, he wrapped the shadows around them and teleported them to his living room. It would be easier to explain it away to her than to try to explain to strangers why he was carrying an unconscious woman around.

  He gently set her down on his couch, pulling the throw that was bunched up at the end over her, before he turned and texted Cin.

  Within moments, she responded, and a few seconds later, both she and Hal were there in his living room as well.

  “She fell from the third floor of an apartment building. I don’t think she hit her head, but she’s not staying conscious. When she was conscious, she refused to go to the hospital, which is how we ended up here.” He took a breath when he finished speaking, and it seemed like not that much had happened when he summarized it, but it felt like the world had started to cave in on itself when he saw her falling. The sensation was strange and got under his skin in a way that made him uncomfortable.

  Hal simply nodded and grabbed a glass of water from his kitchen area. Ben didn’t know how exactly the other man was gifted with healing abilities, and when Hal seemed to pull the water from the glass and turn it into a floating orb, he had to take a seat. The siren worked the water over the skin on the woman’s head so it almost looked like a helmet, before spreading it out and allowing it to travel the length of her body and then returning it to the glass.