Chapter 282

[ 1,040 words ]

Katia’s POV

The violation was the exact breaking point.

My hand swung through the air before my brain could even process the movement. The sharp, stinging slap of my palm connected directly with his swollen cheek, the force of the blow snapping his head to the side, right over his broken nose.

Jude gasped, his grip on my arm tightening to a bone-crushing pressure as his face turned a dark, violent red.

He didn’t yell. He didn’t warn me again.

Jude raised his right hand and slapped me back.

Crack!

The sound of his hand hitting my cheek was deafening. It was a brutal, full-weight strike that carried the entire force of his hundred-and-ninety-pound frame. The physical impact was so massive, so incredibly direct, that my head snapped violently to the side, my ears instantly exploding into a high-pitched, deafening ring.

My legs went entirely weak under the momentum. I lost my balance completely, my heels slipping on the polished wood as my body fell hard against the corner of my guest chair before I collapsed onto the floor.

I hit the hardwood hard, my palms scraping against the floor, my grey wool jacket bunched around my shoulders. My cheek was burning, a raw, blistering heat blooming across my skin, the taste of copper filling my mouth as my bottom lip split against my teeth.

Jude stood over me, his chest heaving under his three-piece suit, his breathing a ragged, whistling gasp of pure, uncontested cruelty. He looked down at me on the floor with a slow, victorious smile touching the corners of his mouth.

“I told you not to anger me, little wife,” Jude said, his voice dropping to a low, satisfied murmur as he prepared to turn back toward the door.

But as his shoulder began to rotate, he didn’t clear the exit.

Sam was already in the room.

She didn’t hesitate. She didn’t call security, and she didn’t issue a warning. Sam crossed the space in a dead sprint, her face a mask of absolute, murderous fury.

In her hands, she held the heavy, red steel canister of the office fire extinguisher. She had ripped it from the wall bracket in the corridor, and she carried it like a weapon.

Sam swung.

She didn’t go for his shoulder, and she didn’t go for his chest. She swung the heavy metal cylinder with both of her hands, channeling every ounce of her operational, protective rage into a single, horizontal arc.

CLANG.

The sound of the solid steel canister connecting with the back of Jude’s skull was sickeningly loud—a hollow, vibrating impact of metal on bone that echoed like a gunshot through the room.

Jude’s head snapped forward, his good eye rolling back into his head as his knees instantly buckled. The towering British aristocrat didn’t stumble; he collapsed like a felled tree, his heavy frame hitting the polished hardwood floor with a loud, vibrating thud that shook my desk.

He lay there, completely unconscious, his cheek pressed against the same wood where I had just been sitting, a thin, dark line of blood beginning to seep from the back of his hair onto the clean floor.

“Bastard!” Sam screamed, her voice cracking with a raw, breathless fury that filled the high-ceilinged room.

She was shaking. Her fingers were white where they gripped the handles of the fire extinguisher, her chest rising and falling in rapid, hysterical breaths as she stared down at the broken man on the floor.

She didn’t drop the canister. She kept it raised, her eyes wild, ready to swing again if his fingers so much as twitched.

Slowly, her head turned to look at me, where I lay on the floor.

“Katia,” she choked out, her voice dropping its anger, turning into a frantic, terrified whisper as she saw the red marks and the blood on my cheek. “Katia, are you okay p>

I couldn’t answer immediately. My ear was still ringing, my mind trying to steady the room as the floor slowly stopped tilting. I raised my hand, my fingers cold as I touched the split skin of my bottom lip, staring at the dark red blood on my fingertips.

Before I could stand, Sam slammed the fire extinguisher down onto the floor, reached into her blazer pocket, and pulled out her phone. Her fingers were trembling violently as she swiped the screen and pressed it to her ear.

“NYPD,” Sam barked into the receiver, her voice rising to a high, raw register of absolute finality. “I need an emergency unit at the IG Technologies executive suite in Manhattan. Right now. We have an active assault on the CEO p>

She hung up, her breathing shallow and fast, her eyes locked onto the front doors where Tessa Sterling had long since vanished.

The silence of the office returned, but it was a wet, heavy quiet, broken only by the low, rattling sound of Jude’s shallow breathing on the floor. The corporate files were scattered, the desk was smudged, and as I looked at the broken man lying in his own blood, I realized with absolute, terrifying certainty that the storm wasn’t over.

It had just turned lethal.

Detective Reeves arrived in eleven minutes.

I had not moved from the floor. Sam had helped me to the guest chair and pressed a folded linen napkin against my lip, her hands still trembling as she held it there. Jude was conscious by the time the NYPD unit came through the doors — conscious, seated against the wall near the window with a Windsor security guard standing over him, his head tilted back, a cloth pressed against the cut at the base of his skull.

He had not spoken since he woke up.

He had looked at me once.

That was all it took.

Reeves walked in ahead of two uniformed officers, his coat open, his expression carrying the professional assessment of a man who had seen the inside of too many offices that looked like this one. He took in the scattered files, the blood on the floor, the fire extinguisher lying on its side near the desk. He took in Jude against the wall and me in the chair with the napkin pressed to my face.

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