Guay's Adam's apple bobbed once, hard, and a thick swallow scraped down his throat like gravel. His heart hammered so violently against his ribs that he could feel the pulse in his temples, in his fingertips, in the hollow of his neck. It was the kind of heartbeat that belonged to a man watching his own death walk toward him in no particular hurry.
In the span of a few breaths, more than a dozen of the men he had brought lay crumpled on the ground, groaning or motionless. Some clutched shattered wrists. Others curled around midsections that had caved under a single strike. And the man responsible stood in the middle of it all without so much as a crease in his shirt, rolling his shoulders as if loosening up after a light stretch.
Those few breaths were all it had taken to dismantle every
