I glared at the door, set within the nigh perfect, well-maintained facade of the brownstone before me. My eyes slid over to the house number, confirming my location one last time. Not out of concern for damaging an unintended home but because I didn’t want to give up the game, risk her getting away through a back door while I reoriented myself.

I turned the focus of my thoughts to him—to the bastard who stole my Mia away—and felt my power flood through me. On some level I knew it should have felt uncomfortable, the sensation of coals set alight beneath my skin, but everything about this superpowers shit was nonsense anyway. What mattered was that my hatred, the desire to crush that bastard’s skull into dust—

I stepped forward and sent the door flying into the home in a shower of splinters with a jab that partially caught the brownstone facade, reducing a chunk of it to nearly powderized shards.

—gave me the strength to do the previously unimaginable.

I heard a set of startled cries from up the stairs, and it made my lip curl to hear how dickless the spineless thief who had stolen my Mia sounded. I surged up the stairs, the hardwood floor beneath my feet cracking from the force of my footfalls, and I rounded the corner at the top, my eyes easily finding the right room by the thin beam of light under the door. I threw it open, and instinctively flinched at the sound of the gun and the sensation of the bullet hitting me. The look in the bastard’s eyes when the crumpled bullet fell to the ground was priceless, made all the better by the mounting terror in his eyes as each successive round met the same fate.

The clip was spent in moments, and only then did I step forward, grip the barrel, and crush it in my grasp. He screamed like the pussy he was and tried to turn and flee towards the window, apparently having decided he’d prefer his chances that direction, but he fell with a scream, smashing his head into the floor when I hurled the crumpled gun into the back of his shin with enough force the shattered bone burst forward out of his flesh and through the fucking pajamas the pansy was wearing.

Satisfied he wasn’t going anywhere now that he was weeping on the floor like the little bitch he was, I turned to my terrified Mia, who had remained frozen in bed with the sheets clutched up and over her naked body. I tugged the balaclava off of my face, savoring the recognition in her eyes as she realized who had come for her. “You.”

“Me,” I breathed out. The heat within me began to recede as my focus shifted, and I quickly clamped forced my thoughts back to the reason I was here, the smoldering embers catching fire once more—making me strong once more. “You belong with me, Mia.”

“Are you fucking serious?!” she screamed, familiarity briefly stealing her fear before it came back with a vengeance after her eyes flicked briefly to the sobbing pansy on the floor. “Please… Please don’t do this… Please leave us alone!”

Leave us alone. The fever in me grew sweltering. “What was it? What was it that made you abandon me for him?”

“Please… Please don’t—”

Too much. It was too much. The fire in me was so hot. My skin ought to have burnt away, set aflame and reduced to ashes in the wake of the inferno trapped within me. I stepped forward. “Tell me.”

“Please! I don’t— I don’t know! Please, just—!”

I lashed out at the wall, obliterating the drywall, pipes, and electric lines and leaving a gaping hole into the next room. “TELL ME NOW, OR I SWEAR I’LL—”

“His smile!” Mia wailed, caving in the face of my fury. “He was so nice and had such a nice smile,” she confessed, her voice cracking as sobs wracked her body.

It took me a moment to process that, a single beat of absolute bewilderment, before I stalked over to the sobbing wreck on the floor. I grabbed him by the back of his goddamn pajamas and threw him onto the bed. The bone protruding from his leg caught on the bed frame, drawing a ragged scream out of him, and I immediately gripped his open jaw with one hand and reached in with the other. Mia ripped her gaze away and wretched when I tore the first tooth from his mouth, coating the bed next to her in vomit.

“Look at me,” I growled over the pained moaning of the fucker help captive in my iron grip. When she didn’t, I roared, “Look at me or you’ll be next!”

Her eyes snapped to mine, her hand clamped over her own mouth. Hyperventilating, she watched in horror while I tore each and every remaining tooth from his mouth, one by one. It was a strange sensation, restraining myself enough to not crush the teeth while simultaneously basking in enough hatred to have the strength to extract them. The worm was a quivering wreck by the time I was finished, the blood gushing from his mouth staining the bedsheets and fucking quilt. I tossed him aside, letting him fall to the floor with a dull thump as I climbed onto the bed to claim what was mine.

To claim my Mia.

“Freeze! Put your hands up right now!”

I glared over my shoulder at the officers aiming their weapons at me and pushed my loathing into them. They both jerked in alarmed pain, the one’s gun clattering to the floor as he clutched at his heart with both hands while the other tried desperately to shoot me while also pressing a hand into his chest, failing just as miserably as the toothless shit I had discarded on the floor. I pushed and pushed and pushed—

I shook my head, disoriented, only distantly hearing the groan of the window opening as I stood over the corpses of the policemen. A moment later I realized what was happening and raced to the window with a snarl, just in time to see the tail end of her landing, which while more of a tumble than a roll nevertheless diffused her momentum. She was already climbing into the still running police cruiser by the time I jumped through the opening after her, and with a squeal of tires, the car was tearing down the street before I could reach it.

Gone. My Mia was gone. The reason I had come here, the reason I had…

I turned to glare at the backlit window above me. They’d sent regular policemen first, but now it was only a matter of time before people with powers that might actually threaten me arrived. I needed to leave, but I couldn’t yet.

My power grew within me, a deepening pit of fury with each step I climbed until I was in the bedroom once more. I stepped past the dead pigs and claimed my consolation prize.

“Pweassh,” he weakly groaned as I lifted him by his throat, fresh blood burbling out onto my hand from his mouth, caked in dried, rusty red. “Pweassh dohn—!”

I took his teeth with me when I left.