Page 110 of Marlow

I brought my arm up to block the fist thrown at me, surprisingly with a good amount of force behind the swing. The knife was dislodged a single second later and swiped at my face, a breeze ghosting over my cheek and narrowly missed me for a second time.

Less than twelve fucking steps from the door and this jackass decided to attack us now.

Another tone chimed in my ear, muffled by my heart hammering in my chest, a familiar voice coming over the radio—dispatch? Another unit arriving? I couldn’t tell. Not with my focus pinpointing directly on the man trying to stab me.

I caught him by the shoulder before he could swing back around again, shoving him hard in the opposite direction and toward the wall on the other side of the hallway. His body snapped back the second he hit it, his head slamming hard enough to force a wince out of me. To my surprise, he didn’t crumble to the ground like I was expecting, keeping himself upright with one hand splayed out next to him and the other with the knife still clutched tight between his fingers.

His long hair obscured his features, stringy from sweat and slightly curling at the ends. He swayed slightly on his feet.

I reached for my gun again. “Don’t.”

If this fucker even thought about?—

He lunged forward, slamming his entire body weight into me and taking us both down to the floor. My shoulder connected with the ground first, radiating pain up my entire spine and shooting right to the base of my skull from the force, leaving me with little room to breathe through the pain while his weight shifted on top of me.

Pinned at an awkward angle like this made it fucking impossible to reach for my gun strapped to my right hip. Mere seconds into this fight and I was already losing, getting my ass handed to me by a goddamn junkie.

One of his hands fisted in my hair and held me down while the other rose above us, metal glinting out of the corner of my eye.

Oh, fuck.

The snap decision to ram my fist into his side and knock him sideways was the only thing that saved that knife from connecting directly with my skull at the last second. His pained grunt telling me when to twist and flip us both over, upending things in my favor for once. The moment his head thumped against the floor, I reached for my handcuffs, fisting my free hand against his shirt to pin him down.

“You’re under arrest.”

The one thing I neglected to remember, was securing the weapon above anything else. A training module from my first weeks at the academy flashing in my mind mere milliseconds before I felt the dull sensation of something colliding with my stomach.

There were a million things to remember on this job, ranging from reading off rights to making sure a crime scene was properly taped off in the event of a crisis. So many, in fact, that they often had me waking up in cold sweats at night, the recited words from those practice exams still lingering on my tongue.

How ironic that of all times, this is when I forgot the most important step.

My body froze out of sheer shock, my eyes glancing down to where the man’s fist was pressed up against my stomach, the knife buried deep enough into my body that only the hilt was still visible.

Gruesome and yet impressive. The kind of strength it took to actually force your way through clothingandskin like that was actually a lot harder than many people knew. Our bodies were made to survive the worst conditions, sharp knives included.

“Terran!”

My vision swam the second I registered TJ’s voice.

Blood coated the perp’s hand, thick trickles that grew worse the second he twisted the handle and then forced it out of me, taking my entire lung capacity with him.

There wasn’t much that scared me these days when I was constantly putting myself into dangerous situations for a job. Dealing with people that could suddenly turn on you in an instant was always a risk and one I’d whole-heartedly signed up for the moment I graduated from the academy.

Plenty of times in the past, I’d come face to face with a situation that had the potential to result in death, but somehow with my luck, it’d never seemed to come to pass.

Until now, apparently.

.