I dodged his first swing, but the second one struck against the other side of my face, dislodging my earpiece so that it completely disappeared somewhere on the floor.I didn’t get the opportunity to see where it landed since Jason’s uppercut to my chin sent me back against the wall where his hands quickly wrapped around my throat.Blood burst into my mouth, and even as Jason squeezed my neck with the strength of a damn gorilla, I still managed to curl my lips to reveal a bloody-toothed smile.
“You’re going to die, you rapist piece of shit,” he growled, venom altering his voice into something dark and menacing.
I flattened my palms together in front of my torso and forced them up in between Jason’s arms to break his two-handed choke.I then struck the side of his face with my elbow, knocking him off balance and allowing enough room for me to raise my knee and kick him right in the ribs.
“We’re all going to die, motherfucker,” I said as I charged after him, grabbing his vest and wrenching him up to my face.“And I plan on making sure you live long enough to beg me for death.”
Jason’s hands gripped mine as they curled around his vest.“How ambitious,” he muttered, then spat the blood in his mouth right into my face.He used the opportunity to thrust his forehead hard against my nose, breaking my grip so he could slam his foot right into my chest and knock the wind from my lungs.
Just as Jason broke away from my grip, a good chunk of the ceiling suddenly collapsed, the debris separating us as it piled up in the middle of the room.Dust and dirt bursting into the air, my visibility of Jason temporarily lost for a moment until the air cleared.The sound of footsteps slowly made their way from around the pile, Jason’s voice low and taunting.
“You know, Jaden fantasizes about the same thing for you, begging her for death,” he commented, his approach slow until the dust settled, and he finally came back into view.
I rolled my eyes and cracked my neck at his taunt, wondering to myself why the fuck I was even entertaining the mouth of this asshole.Yet I couldn’t quite help my intrigue for his foolish antics.I wanted to know what else Jaden might have gotten up to without my knowledge, assuming any of this was even remotely true.
“Wow.I had absolutely no idea,” I retorted sarcastically.“Why don’t you tell me something else I don’t know?”
The corner of his mouth curved.“Okay, how about this?She was the genius who gave me the keys to crumbling your little criminal empire and setting her free.”
I cocked a brow.“Is that so?”
“Blowing up your server farms?That was her brilliant idea,” Jason continued, an arrogant smirk on his bruised face.
I rolled my stiffening shoulders, shaking my head in denial.Jaden wasn’t even aware of the existence of the server farms, let alone their significance, so there was no way what Jason was saying could ever possibly be true.He was just hoping to rile me up so that I’d fight with my emotions instead of my lethality.His mistake.
“Sure, it was,” I replied sarcastically, then launched myself forward for a Superman punch that he ducked but still took it in the shoulder.“If you think destroying some data is going to suddenly free her from me,” I continued, forcing him to defend several more strikes until my kick landed square in his chest and knocked him to the ground, “you’re even more delusional than I thought.I fuckingownher, Jason.She’s not going anywhere,” I shot back.
Jason sneered at me, revealing several blood-coated teeth I wanted nothing more than to rip from his skull with a pair of rusty pliers.
“Oh, we didn’t just destroy the data,” he said as he stood back up, sweat, dirt, and blood dripping from his brow.“We copied it and sent it off to about a dozen major news stations across the country this morning.So whatever rats you have hiding in your wallet won’t be able to disrupt the investigation into every goddamn soul connected to you and your shit organization,” he replied, the conviction in his tone grating on my ears.“Your entire world is about to crumble, asshole.And it’s all because you fucked with the wrong redhead.”
The heat growing in my chest with every word he spoke suddenly burst into such an inferno that I actually had trouble controlling.
He’s lying.Don’t let him get to you.Just fucking finish him already.
Relaxing my jaw, I cracked my neck and stretched my spine, ready to end our little meet and greet so we could get to the real fun part later.
“While I can see I’ve clearly underestimated your ability to be a huge pain in my ass, you’re kidding yourself if you think any of that is going to allow Jaden to be free of me,” I said, returning his sneer with my own.“Not while she’s carrying my child.My DNA will live on inside her until the day she dies.”
Another swing and my fist blasted through the drywall behind Jason’s head as he ducked and threw a right hook into my side.He then managed to swing his arm around mine to lock it in place just as he shoved his shoulder into my back, knocking the side of my face into the busted wall.
“I really wish Jaden could be the one to tell you this, but unfortunately, that isn’t part of the plan,” he said from behind me, a mocking tone in his voice as he laughed, “So before you die here, I want you to know she isn’t carrying shit, you psychotic bastard.She never was.Your boy Sid was one hell of a deceitful genius.He told us all how he faked her pregnancy so well, even she had no idea she was never pregnant.”
Denial was so immediate, I barely gave his bullshit words a millisecond of honest consideration.Sid faking Jaden’s pregnancy?Absolute bullshit.And then extending that betrayal by conspiring with the enemy?I laughed instead at what a joke that was.
Rearing my head back, I slammed the back of my skull into Jason’s nose, stunning him for only a second to allow myself the room to lift my knee and kick off the wall, sending us both crashing to the floor with a loud thud.Neither of us stayed down for very long as we both rolled to our sides and stood, our chests heaving as more dust filtered into the air.
“You honestly expect me to believe that horseshit?Come on.”
Jason shook his head.“It doesn’t matter if you believe it or not.Regardless, she’ll still be free of you a lot faster than you think, especially since she’s currently being extracted from your estate at this very moment.”
My brows shot together at his little revelation.Another fucking lie.This guy was fucking full of them today.
“You’re lying.If someone had breached my security system, I would have been alerted by now.”
He shrugged, his posture relaxing as he continued.“Well, that might be trueifwe hadn’t already sent an EMP to your property twenty minutes ago with a voltage range of an entire square mile.From what’s already been reported to me, your security and communications systems are all down,” he answered smugly.“Among other things.”
The second the word EMP left his mouth, alarm bells went off in my head.If that were true, an EMP would devastate my entire security system.Even with the countermeasures I’d already had in place, none of them were strong enough to really withstand the immeasurable damage an EMP could inflict on an electrical system.Shit wouldn’t just be down, it would be irrevocably destroyed.