Chapter 74
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR
CASPER
“Is she dead?”
“I dunno. Does she look dead to you, asshole?” Franks grunted, his eye fixed on the machine with a dozen or so buttons and the green line that went from squiggly to straight as an arrow a few seconds ago.
I dropped the paddles onto the cart and tucked my hands into my pockets. It seemed too easy. Not much different from plucking a fly out of the air and squashing it between your fingers.
Then again, I didn’t know what I was expecting.
It wasn’t like shooting someone in the head.
There was no blood and guts spilling out on the floor.
No turned-over furniture or mixing of DNA.
No real cleanup required. Just a body lying there as though it was gonna wake up at any moment and start talking. Or, knowing Bellatrix, cursing me out.
“She looks like she’s sleeping,” I said mostly to myself. But Franks threw his two cents in anyway.
“Yeah, permanently,” he grumbled before he went back to putting his tools into his fancy doctor bag. A mix of various needles and glass bottles, metal instruments and some alcohol wipes.
Didn’t know what he needed it all for, but then again, fixing people up wasn’t my specialty. Killing them was. Which was why I told her this was the way it was always going to end. I didn’t know what to do with something once it was broken. Once it couldn’t do what I was used to it doing anymore.
I knew how to press it to its limits. Watch it bounce back or shatter.
I knew how to force square pegs into round holes—no pun intended—but I didn’t know what to do with it once the edges were gone.
When a square was no longer squaring and it wasn’t a circle either.
Because squares didn’t become circles just ?cause you changed them a little.
I didn’t know how to put things back together so I just didn’t try. It was why killing myself was the easiest solution after my legs stopped working. But I couldn’t even get that right. So I guess I wasn’t that good at killing either.
Although I knew a shit-ton of people who might argue otherwise.
Bellatrix was perfectly still now. Her lips and forehead relaxed, when they were usually curled up and scrunchy.
Flat when she was thinking about something important and creased when she was really focused on it.
Raised when she was surprised or when I caught her off guard and she was trying to hide it, and pulled down when she was on the verge of orgasm and didn’t want me to know, claiming I’d purposely mess with her rhythm.
Sometimes I did so she had to keep fucking me, and sometimes I pretended not to see it so she’d fuck me harder.
“It might not work, you know,” the Bossman said from where he was leaning against the doorframe. I didn’t know how long he’d been standing there. But my guess was that he’d been there long enough to stop me while clearly choosing not to.
He thought he was God like that. Observing and not intervening, but you bet your ass he was judging you the whole time.
He was cruel like God too, but not the kind of cruel that stared you in the face.
It was more subtle. It was a quiet cruelness that had you begging for his approval while knowing you’d never get it.
Maybe that was why I called him Big Daddy.
“What might not work?” I asked him. For no other reason than the silence was getting to me. The only time Bellatrix was silent was when I shoved my cock into her mouth. And even then, she made little noises. Gags and pleas and whimpers and moans.
“Trying to bring her back.” Bossman jutted his chin behind me. “You’ve put a lot of strain on her heart. She might not come back from it.”
“What makes you think I’d try to bring her back?”
“The fact you removed her pump before shocking her, so you wouldn’t accidentally shoot her full of insulin.
” He shrugged. “The fact you still have her wired up and the defibrillator on standby. The fact I can see the wheels turning in your head like they do every time you know you did something stupid and you’re trying to think of a way to undo it before anyone finds out.
” He took a step forward, peering over at the clock on the wall and stopping up next to me.
“The fact you have less than three minutes to start compressions before there’s permanent brain damage. ”
“I broke her,” I admitted aloud. “Made her cry. It was weird. She never cried before.”
My mother never cried either, until one day she wouldn’t stop. It was why I never asked her to come visit me. Why I didn’t argue when she dropped me off at that first hospital and never looked back. She couldn’t afford all the medical bills, and I couldn’t stomach seeing how broken she was.
Like I said, some shit was just easier to toss out and forget about. My parents were one of them. Bellatrix was another.
“Then fix her.” Bossman shrugged again, already slapping on a pair of gloves and nudging me forward with a knee to my ass. He used to do that when I was a kid and took too long to get on the exam table. Except I was much taller now, and he was old and didn’t have the same balance.
“I don’t know how.”
“Maybe if you’d shut up long enough to listen to me, I could show you.”
“Showing me comes with strings,” I reminded him. Everything we did came with strings.
“No, doing it for you comes with strings,” he countered. “Showing you comes with a price tag. Though my guess is that you can afford it after that job you took behind my back.”
“Which one?” I grinned, and the fucker slapped me upside the head.
I was pretty sure he didn’t know about all of them or else he would have found a way to take a cut before now.