Revenge Will Be Sweet [half-fixed/ignusandsolus]
They had told her that Macadem Gresham had gone off the grid; that he was taken down by a feral monster that they had hunted down and killed.
She didn’t believe them. It was something about the way they held themselves; the way their teeth glinted behind their lips, like they were trying hard not to bare them in threatening displays.
She told them as much, that she knew they were lying and had something to do with his death. They called her silly, grief-stricken. And something made her inclined to believe them for a time.
And then the first assassin burst through a window. Got her in the shoulder. Nearly left her for dead if it weren’t for masked brothers living with her and leaping to her defense. They’ve been running, the three of them together, ever since.
But while scavenging for supplies, they had gotten separated. The hunters had never been far behind, and the brothers were almost never apart. She wasn’t worried about them, but it left her on her own a lot. Like now.
Cal Gresham had managed to lose the burly man chasing her for a time, but she could still hear him tromping through the forest, searching for her. It would only be a matter of time before he found her, and her inability to ditch the long trench coat draped across her shoulders would only hurt her escape attempt. It’d rustle too many leaves, disturb too much to pass as an animal traveling carefully through the brush.
For now, she’d just have to remain still in the tiny hollow under a tree where she’d hidden and hope he passed her by.
But her luck ran out when he leaned over the crest of the hollow, leering down at her with a feral grin. With a startled noise, she sprinted from cover, but he had anticipated her to run, and jumped down on her from above. She struggled desperately to be free, but there was little she could do against a man who could lift her with her feet six inches above the ground. She thought she saw a flash of blue behind them, but she was more focused on trying to fight the hunter getting ready to drop her in the nearby river…twenty feet down the steep hill.
