“You!” Sean scowled, anger flitting across his face; then his mouth pulled tight in a snarling grin. “Just the bastard I wanted to meet.”
“You’re not very smart, are you?” Ken asked, taking a step to his right to see if Sean would follow. “Did you think I wouldn’t protect her?”
Sean circled Ken, eyes restlessly searching the area around them, measuring the distance separating them. “I saw you on the mountain, climbing,” he said conversationally. “How the hell could you be up here?”
“My brother, Jack,” Ken replied without emotion. All rage had disappeared, and he felt the inevitable ice flowing in his veins, slowing down time, tunneling so that all he saw was a man with targets painted on his body.
“You can’t have her. I know you took her from me.”
“She was never yours. She’s her own person, Sean. You can’t treat her like a possession. She has her own mind and her own will.” Even as Ken said the words aloud, his heart sank. He was as bad as Sean, trying to hold her to him when he knew she needed to fly free. He couldn’t change his nature any more than Sean could undo whatever he had allowed Whitney to do to him.
Sean palmed his knife. “It’s going to be a pleasure to kill you.”
“Do you really think it’s going to be that easy? You sold out, ass**le, and you didn’t even do it gracefully. You must have loved her once, loved her enough to decide you could just take her—own her.”
“Like you? I saw what you did to her.”
Ken backed away from the spring, luring Sean toward open ground where Jack could get a clear shot at him. “You loved her so much you let those bastards strip her na**d and photograph her. You let the doctor stick his fingers inside her, touch her when you knew how much she hated it. You don’t deserve her.”
Sean tossed the knife back and forth between his hands, all the while circling, forcing Ken to continue to give ground. His smile never wavered, a small, evil grin, his gaze hard as he compelled Ken to back a few more feet. Ken was aware that he was close to the crumbling edge of the bluff. He shifted on the balls of his feet—waiting.
Sean feigned an attack. Ken didn’t respond. The smirk faded just a little. “She was always meant for me. Whitney promised her to me.”
“In return for betrayal? Did you report the women’s conversations? Their plans for escape? You were the one who told him Mari was going to try to talk to the senator about Whitney’s disgusting baby factory. He was really angry over that one, wasn’t he? He gave you the heavier dose of Zenith, and you injected it in her like the good little toad you are.”
Sean hissed a breath out, feigning another attack, moving forward with incredible speed and striking with a flowing roundhouse punch. Ken just managed to jerk his head out of the way and pull in his belly enough to avoid the slice of the knife.
“I had no idea it would kill her. He said if she got hurt it would heal her. I wouldn’t ever let him harm Mari.”
“No, you’d just let a perverted doctor touch her and take pictures to plaster all over his wall so he could jack off at night.” Ken glided forward, a blurring figure, his wrist flicking several times, as he moved on past Sean. He was now only a few feet from the edge of the bluff. “You’d just beat her bloody and rape her. You sick, twisted f**k.”
Sean stared down at the blood dripping from his arm, belly, and chest. Thin lines stretched across his skin. He swore and lunged again, this time, blade up, going for the softer parts of the body. At the last second Ken pivoted, allowing Sean’s forward momentum to carry him past, the wrist flicking again. This time Sean’s left cheek, neck, hip, and thigh sported long wicked-looking cuts.
Sean screamed, fury burning in his eyes. He danced in, a big man, light on his feet, snapping a quick thrust and following it with a hard forward snap kick to Ken’s thigh. The second kick took Ken in exactly the same spot, deadening his leg. Before Sean could retract the leg, Ken drove the point of his knife deep into the man’s calf, twisted, and jumped back, precariously near the edge of the cliff.
It was a particularly brutal injury. Blood sprayed in wide arcs, and Sean yelled obscenities, desperation creeping into his eyes. “You f**king freak. You really think Mari could want a man like you? Maybe if you wear a mask to cover the horror of your face.” He spat at Ken, reached down as if to pull the knife from his calf, but snapped upright, throwing his own knife at Ken’s chest.
Ken moved with blurring speed, tucking his shoulder and rolling to the side to avoid the weapon. It burned across his right bicep, shaving skin. Sean followed the knife, rushing Ken, certain his heavier body would send Ken over the edge. Ken gripped Sean with two hands, one at his throat, the other on his upper arm, superhuman strength, a vise steadily closing, crushing. Sheer terror swept through Sean. He had been counting on his own enhanced strength and his hatred of this man, but he never expected the enormous strength in Ken’s body.
Sean fought like a wild animal, desperately attempting to knock the legs out from under Ken, twice more finding the spot on the thigh he’d kicked. Ken seemed inhuman, a monster! Nothing affected him, that grip relentlessly tightening. Choking, coughing, Sean flung himself backward with all his weight, his feet scraping for a purchase as the earth crumbled and gave way beneath him.
The weight of Sean’s body suddenly was a deadweight on the end of Ken’s arm. His grip on Sean’s throat was the only thing preventing the man from falling. They stared at each other, Ken on his knees, trying to find a way to dig his toes into the soft dirt for a purchase, to prevent himself from going over the edge with his enemy. Sean gripped Ken’s arm, determined that if he went crashing to the rocks below, he would take Ken with him. Blood made his grip slippery, but desperation gave him added strength. He dug his fingers into Ken’s skin. The edge crumbled more, sent dirt skittering down the cliff face. Ken opened his hand to allow Sean to fall, but the man clamped on his wrist with both hands.
“I go, you go,” he snarled. “Pull me up, damn you.”
“Not in this lifetime, you son of bitch. You’re out of her life forever.”
“So are you then.” Sean’s teeth clenched, his grip tightening like a vise.
The edge was giving way, more dirt and rock tumbling down, Ken sliding with the weight of Sean’s body pulling him. He had no leverage to fight, nothing to hang onto, and the earth around him was shifting and sliding.