Revenge: A Bad Boy Romance by Jessica Ashe

noisy.  
    There were no cars outside either. The Barton brothers had a fleet of expensive cars and were rarely seen without them. They never usually worried about subtlety, so they wouldn’t hesitate to park six figures’ worth of motor vehicles outside a factory. You’d have to be stupid to steal a car belonging to the Bartons.  
    This wasn’t right. The Bartons weren’t here. Surprisingly, I felt relieved. I had reconciled myself the thought of killing them as part of my plan to avenge Kara’s death, but I knew I wouldn’t take any pleasure from it. I knew I’d be haunted by their dead faces at night, like I had been with the other two men I’d killed.  
    What kind of person could kill without being emotionally torn apart by it? I knew the answer to that question and he went by the name of Dad. Death was so… permanent. There were few people in this world who truly deserved it, but the Bartons could probably count themselves among that number.  
    The Bartons must have left already, but I couldn’t go back to Dad without having at least checked the place out.
    I pushed open the door which had been left ajar. I did a quick sweep of the ground floor, but no one had been here in awhile. The ground was still coated in dust and there were no footsteps.  
    There was a workbench at the far end, so I grabbed a hammer--light enough to swing hard, but heavy enough to do some damage. I never carried weapons when I was at work, much to Dad’s annoyance, so his last minute call had caught me unprepared.
    I headed up the stairs, moving slowly so as not to make any noise. If they were here, I wanted to maintain the element of surprise.  
    The upper floor used to be used for storage and office space, so there were lots of narrow corridors and places to hide behind. That could work in my favor if I was careful.  
    I kept close to the wall and headed down a corridor towards the front of the building. I stepped so slowly and carefully that I was barely moving, but my footsteps still made far more noise than I would have liked. Each tiny sound echoed around the walls, and to my overly paranoid ears it sounded as loud as a fire alarm.
    Then I heard something. A cough.
    It came from the office straight down the end of the hall. I stopped and listened. This time I heard what sounded like someone fidgeting on a chair. At least one of them was in there.
    I ducked down so that he wouldn’t see me if he looked out of the window, and then hurried towards the office as quickly as I could, clenching the hammer so tightly in my hand that I nearly snapped the wooden handle in two.  
    I was so focused on sneaking up on whoever was in that room, that I didn’t hear the other brother, until he sprung around the corner and lunged at me with a knife. What was it with people trying to stab me this week?
    My hammer was in the wrong hand, but I managed to throw up the empty one and whack him on the wrist. It was enough to send the knife sailing harmlessly past me. It looked ungainly, but it worked.  
    The Barton brothers looked similar, but I recognized the one with the knife as Kevin, the younger of the two by a few years.  
    The other Barton brother, Eli, leapt out of the office and pulled a knife of his own, holding it out in front of him, as if daring me to come at him.
    The Barton brothers were famous for their preference for knives over guns. Chicago almost had as many guns as people, so the Bartons thought they were cool for not needing them. From what I’d heard, they had a massive collection of them and they used them to slowly torture victims before putting them out of their misery.
    Fortunately for me, the Bartons were only used to using their knives in controlled torture situations; they didn’t have much experience using the knives in combat. They stood with the knives held out in front of them, as if they’d learned how to fight solely by watching movies.  
    Movies didn’t do a great job depicting real-life