Ava Gray - Skin Game

They swayed with battle readiness, waiting for the other to make a move. This guy had some patience; he was scop ing out Reyes’s stance, hoping to learn something about the way he fought. But he wasn’t giving anything away himself.

In a lightning-fast move, the killer slashed. He jumped back too late. Reyes felt the hot trickle down his chest, but he didn’t look to see how bad it was. In retaliation he lashed out with a right uppercut, followed by a brutal left hook. The other man grunted, taking the hits like nobody Reyes had ever fought before, and he responded with an attempted stab to his kidney. If that strike had connected, it would’ve been a kill shot.

Reyes launched himself then. He had to take the knife away. They slammed into the wall. Leaning in, he used his weight to dominate, ignoring the shallow wounds all over his body. He slammed a knife hand into his enemy’s throat, and his other hand took control of the man’s left. He applied force to both locations, digging into the soft tissue. The asshole wheezed, but he didn’t let go of the blade. Instead he slashed blindly at Reyes’s forearms, and he felt each cut. His arms grew slippery with blood, making it hard to hold on.

The other guy got an arm between them, smashed an elbow into his chin, and he saw sparks. Reyes let himself yield, as if overbalanced by the hit, and then he flipped as they fell, bouncing against the bed onto the floor. In the drop, the knife clattered away.

There wasn’t much room to maneuver between the bed and chest of drawers. For long, tense moments, they grap pled, each trying to land a chokehold. This son of a bitch was strong, and he knew what he was doing. For the first time, he genuinely feared failure, not because it would mean the end of him, but because it meant the end of her .

Fear gave him strength. He wasn’t just fighting for pay. He was fighting for home and family—well, the closest thing he’d ever known to it, anyway. Reyes slammed the bastard’s head sideways against the metal legs on the bed frame. In the same motion, he jerked a drawer from the dresser and smashed it downward. Wood splintered everywhere, breaking the guy’s face wide open. Blood spattered, but he still wasn’t done.

He twisted, weakly, then the hit man’s leg lashed out and caught Reyes square in the crotch. Pain and nausea surged through his entire body. Every instinct told him to roll onto his side and guard his balls from further harm, but he couldn’t. Reining the urge to puke, he took a right cross to the stab wound. Knuckles ground down, making him feel every searing flash of agony.

Blood loss was making him slow and sloppy. Somehow Reyes found himself on his back, an elbow on his throat. He held the other man away from him with pure brute force. He had to escape this pin.

“Why won’t you die ?” the other man muttered in an unforgettable tenor, tinged with a Southern drawl.

“Van Zant?” he asked, disbelieving.

VZ was one of the good ones, relatively speaking. The weight on his chest lifted a fraction; he used the distraction without shame or hesitation. In a smooth motion, he bucked and brought his knee up, slamming the other man’s head down onto it. The next second he was kneeling on top of his chest, both hands around the other man’s throat.

“Get off me, Reyes.” The Alabama Ace tried to sound defiant.

Fuck, that wasn’t good. He heard a soft inhalation from the other side of the bed. Kyra had noticed that recognition. There would be questions. Right now, though, he had something else to worry about.

“If you give me your word,” Reyes said softly, “I’ll let you walk out of here. But you have to swear you’ll leave us be.”

“Can’t,” he choked out. “I took the job, right? You know my work ethic.”

Unfortunately, he did. If he let VZ go, he’d keep coming until one of them was dead. First, he needed to know something, however. Reyes tightened his hands around the other man’s throat. By now he would be seeing stars, oxygen growing short. Still he struggled. “How’d you find us, V?”

“Monroe gave you up,” Van Zant gasped, clearly enjoying the taunt. In their circles, everybody knew Monroe was the closest thing Reyes had to a friend. “Twenty large, and he sang.”

That son of a bitch. Reyes closed his eyes, putting the blazing betrayal aside for the moment. He couldn’t deal with it right now. With regret, he bore down, feeling the other man’s neck give. His breathing choked out into a death rattle, and then ceased completely, leaving him dead meat on the floor.

Reyes found a lamp and flicked it on to survey the damage. In the physical sense, he had eight slashes that needed tending. In the emotional sense, Kyra was huddled in the corner, regarding him out of shattered eyes. From her look, he might have just raped and butchered her grandmother.

“He knew your name,” she whispered. “ Why did he know you?”

He felt wounded, weary, and sick, in no mood to go into this with her. Reyes hoped his expression didn’t give away the sick fear eating at his insides. She shouldn’t have found out like this. In self-defense, he brought the walls up, though she’d breached them weeks ago.

Even to himself, he sounded cold and remote. “We don’t have time to talk right now. We need to clean this place up, bury the body, and get out of here.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you until you answer me.” Naked and wounded, she matched him for pure ice. Her shock and pain fused into a diamond-hard rage, making her dangerous.

There was something fierce and feral in her tumbled hair and gold-sparked eyes. The gun he’d knocked from Van Zant’s grasp—a Beretta as it turned out—came up in Kyra’s hands. Apparently she hadn’t relied on him to win the fight, and she’d quietly located it during the scuffle. She could’ve shot them both at any time.

It was a little unnerving to realize that while he was fighting for her life, she was making contingency plans. He had no doubt she would have put a bullet between VZ’s eyes if Reyes had lost, and she looked equally capable of doing it to him. No two ways about it—this sure as hell wasn’t the situation in which he’d envisioned making a full confession to her. He hoped he survived it.

“I’m not kidding. Talk.” Kyra cocked the gun to show she meant business.

“Can I put something on first?” He stood before her naked and blood-smeared.

Kyra held the gun steady, refusing to reveal her nausea and heartache. “One article of clothing, and make it quick. I’m not feeling very patient.”

In answer Rey found his jeans and slid them on, going commando. She wished he’d have a mishap with the zipper. No such luck. He sank down on the corner of the bed, keeping his hands where she could see them. He had a number of cuts that needed tending, but if she didn’t like his answers, Kyra didn’t care if he bled out.

“Serrano hired me,” he said baldly, confirming her worst fears. “One of his guys contracted me to find you.”

Anger blazed through her like a star going nova. Goddammit, she should have known better when he turned up for the second time, but he’d talked such a good game about fate bringing them together. At the time, it hadn’t made sense that anybody tracking her would be able to get ahead of her, anticipate her movements. She’d thought it had to be coincidence.

By some miracle, she kept her voice level. Excess emotion would reveal how much he’d gotten to her, how much this hurt . “How’d you find me, asshole?”

“People remember your car. I stayed close on your trail until you hit Louisiana. You spent a few days in town, so I finally caught up with you. First thing, I put a GPS tracker on the bottom of your vehicle and then followed via updates to my phone. You got into town so late that I had a chance to scope out the bars. I picked the one I thought looked most likely and got lucky.”