Chapter 1 - The Awakening of the Beast
The air inside the private medical suite was thick with the copper stench of spilled blood, burned plastic, and the acrid smoke of discharged gunpowder.
Tessa lay crumpled against the baseboard, her chest heaving as she coughed, tasting blood on her tongue. The blow against the plaster wall had stunned her nervous system, leaving her limbs trembling and weak. Her breath came in shallow, agonized gasps, her vision blurring as tears of shock mixed with the sweat running down her temples.
The hitman, bleeding profusely from his torn ear where Tessa’s teeth had bitten clean through the cartilage, let out a guttural roar of sheer fury. His face was twisted into a mask of feral rage. He kicked the shattered defibrillator unit away from his crushed shins, his heavy tactical boots squeaking on the slick tile floor.
He didn't look at the bed. He didn't care about Vincent Costa anymore. His bruised ego demanded the immediate, brutal execution of the girl who had dared to strike him with an IV pole.
"You're dead, you little rat," the assassin snarled, his voice thick with a thick Eastern European rasp. He took a heavy, deliberate step toward Tessa, raising his suppressed tactical pistol, centering the barrel right between her wide, terrified brown eyes.
Tessa didn't close her eyes. She raised one bruised, trembling forearm in a pathetic attempt to shield her face, whispering a fragmented childhood prayer she hadn't uttered in ten years.
She waited for the crack of the bullet.
It never came.
Instead, the sound that shattered the room was the violent tearing of medical adhesive, followed by the heavy, rhythmic thud of bare feet striking hardwood with terrifying force.
The hitman didn't even have time to turn his head.
Vincent Costa struck him like a runaway freight train.
Three days of localized muscle relaxants and enforced stillness had left Vincent’s joints burning with lactic acid, but twenty years of ruthless street combat, underground bare-knuckle fighting, and survival instincts took over completely. His large, scarred hand closed around the assassin’s wrist like a hydraulic clamp, twisting it violently outward.
A sharp, sickening snap echoed off the high ceiling as the assassin’s radius bone shattered under the pressure.
The suppressed pistol clattered harmlessly to the rug.
The hitman opened his mouth to scream, but Vincent’s other hand shot out, catching him squarely by the throat, crushing his windpipe, cutting off all sound into a wet, wheezing choke.
Vincent slammed the man’s head backward into the oak doorframe once.
Twice.
On the third impact, the hitman’s knees gave out. Vincent dropped him like a sack of spoiled flour, standing over the twitching body, his chest rising and falling in deep, measured breaths. The paper hospital gown hung loose around Vincent's broad, heavily tattooed shoulders. The IV needles, ripped ruthlessly from the veins in the back of his hands, dripped dark red droplets onto the clean floor.
The room fell into a dead, suffocating silence.
Vincent turned slowly. His storm-gray eyes, sharp, predatory, and burning with a dark, terrifying flame, locked onto the girl shivering against the wall.
Tessa stared at him in paralyzed horror.
The "vegetable." The comatose billionaire boss she had spent the last three nights lecturing while washing his arms. The ruthless tyrant whose cold, lifeless skin she had wiped down with warm lavender water while playing John Coltrane records in the dark.
He was standing six feet tall, completely awake, covered in another man's blood, looking down at her like an avenging angel dragged straight out of hell.
"You..." Tessa choked out, her voice barely a rasp as she pressed her back harder against the wall, wishing she could dissolve into the woodwork. "You were awake."
Vincent didn't answer immediately. He looked at the heavy cast-iron IV stand dented from the impact against the hitman's ribs. He looked at the bloody towels on the floor. Then he looked down at Tessa’s swollen jaw, where a deep purple bruise was already blooming beneath her pale skin, and the split lip dripping crimson onto her cheap blue maid uniform.
A woman who hated him. A woman whose brother’s business he had crushed without a second thought. A girl who was paid fifteen dollars an hour to scrub toilets, who had just traded her life for his without hesitation.
Vincent knelt down in front of her.
The sudden gentleness in his movement was more terrifying than the violence he had displayed seconds earlier. He reached out with a rough, calloused thumb—the same hand that had just crushed a man's larynx—and wiped a bead of blood from the corner of her swollen mouth.
"You should have run, Tessa," Vincent murmured, his voice surprisingly deep, resonant, and entirely steady.
May you like
Tessa blinked, tears finally spilling over her bruised cheeks. "You... you know my name?"
"I know everything," Vincent said softly. He reached behind his neck, unhooking the panic button monitor from the bed rail, and clicked the concealed transmitter three times. "And starting tonight, the people who hurt you—and the people who put this man in my room—are going to learn what happens when you try to bury Vincent Costa before he's dead."
