Chapter 51
Something doesn’t feel right…
The warehouse was wrong the moment I saw it.
There weren’t any cars around. Zero guards were posted near the compound, and the windows were dark, with no light bleeding through them at all. I staggered toward the dead building squatting at the end of the block and trying to understand what the game was.
My ribs protested every step, and pain bloomed sharp and hot in every fucking muscle. I pushed it all away. I had to. I was in control, and pain was not stopping me now. I slipped through a side door, my knife already in my hand, with my breath shallow and controlled.
The same knife I used to kill his brother.
The monsters could enjoy hell together.
Inside the compound, the air smelled like oil, some kind of metal, and old blood. The sound of my breathing felt too loud in the quiet. I moved slowly, hugging the shadows and dodging the camera’s view.
My eyes swept the corners the way Jerry had taught me years ago from his soldier days, trying to teach me how to keep going back when survival had been a skill instead of a reflex.
I saw him.
Kaito fucking Kayuzi.
He stood near an end table, his jacket off, with his sleeves rolled up and his head bent slightly as he moaned from the girl below him. He was relaxed. Relaxed in this carnal state, and I told myself this was good.
But those fucking sounds…it was pulling me back to a time I didn’t want.
I didn’t speak when I gripped the knife tighter and turned to go behind the couple.
I crossed the distance, silently, walking directly behind Kaito’s head and stopping right behind him, my dagger poised at his jugular.
The woman’s eyes widened as she saw me, and her scream made Kaito free, but I didn’t hesitate, driving the blade deep into the side of his neck, just under the jaw.
The resistance was brief, but his shock wasn’t.
“Ahh!” The woman screamed and took off out the door.
I didn’t come here to kill an innocent.
Her nightmares of this night would be the punishment for involving herself in this war.
Kaito made a choking sound as blood burst hot across my knuckles. I stepped back, leaving the knife embedded deep. His hands flew up instinctively, his fingers slick and useless as he staggered forward trying to grip the slippery weapon.
“You!”
He hit the concrete on one knee, coughing violently, blood bubbling at his mouth.
“That’s right fucker. Me. Jedidiah Franklin. Your fucking brother sends you a parting gift.”
I didn’t watch him fall or fumble with the knife.
I looked around.
“Sayuri!” I called, toppling over mattresses and checking the rooms.
Empty.
All fucking empty.
“Sayuri! I’m here, Baby!”
My stomach dropped when she didn’t answer, and the silence stretched.
“No,” I whispered, walking back to the main room.
Behind me, Kaito wheezed, wet and broken, but I ignored it. I tore through the space fast, thinking I’d missed something.
She was hiding.
She had to be.
“Sayuri! Where are you, Mortifera? I’m here! I’m so sorry, my love, please come back to me!”
I checked corners, scanned every shadow, and tried to sense signs of her.
“Sayuri?” My voice echoed back, thin and desperate in a room off to the side.
Nothing.
“Sayuri!”
I kicked open the last door and saw a stuffed panda on the ground. This must have been Jujiro’s. Pocketing the stuffed animal in my jacket, I kept searching the room.
Not here.
I crashed through another door. Office maybe. The desk overturned with my desperate rage and papers soaked dark with my blood and his.
Still nothing.
My chest tightened.
Kaito coughed again in the other room, worse this time.
Slower.
No, you fucking don’t, asshole.
I crossed the warehouse, my boots slipping slightly in the blood as I checked behind crates, under tarps, inside a half-collapsed room that smelled like mold and even more blood.
Nothing.
Each empty space peeled back my stupid sense of hope.
“Sayuri,” I yelled her name again and again, louder now and sharper. “Mortifera! Please!”
I forced open a bathroom door, scanning the flickering light and a dripping sink. The smear of blood on the tile was the only thing here.
Not her.
I made my way back to the main area, and Kaito tried to laugh.
The bastard was propped onto the wall, and jeers came out as a wet rasp.
I turned back to him.
He was on his side against the wall, one hand pressed to his neck, while blood pulsed through his fingers. His breathing was shallow and frantic—no real rhythm to the beats.
I grabbed him by the collar and hauled him up just long enough to slam him back down onto the floor.
“Where is she?” I demanded. My voice was low now, calm but deadly. “You don’t get to die yet, you fucking monster.”
He coughed hard, blood spraying in my face.
“You still—” Another wet cough. “Looking?”
I dropped his head and listened for the smash on the ground. Each inhale was work for him now, and soon it may be his last.
“Tell me. Where is she?”
His breathing slowed, and so did my hope.
I forced his glassy eyes to look at me.
“Say her name,” I demanded. My hands were shaking. “Say where she is, Kaito! Where did you take her?”
His eyes flicked to mine, and there was no arrogance, but an unsettled, bitter understanding.
“We both—” He rasped. “Lost this round…priest.”
My fist came down, and I felt the bone crack.
“Where is she?” I said again.
Blood ran freely down his throat now, and the gape in his neck was widening. His voice barely held together.
“You brought—”
He swallowed, choking and sagging in my grip .“The knife.”
Another breath. But so much thinner.
“But they—”
A final gurgle left him, and his evil smirk remained.
Cold ice slid through me.
“What did you do?” I whispered. “Who’s ‘they’, Kaito? What did they do?”
He shook his head slightly, barely there. “They…used…it….”
His chest hitched and stuttered.
I stared at him, searching his face for something usable.
Anything to lead me to her.
“You evil fucking bastard.” I cried, watching his chest go still.
I hit him anyway.
Again and again, I let the rage tear out of me in brutal, useless blows even as his lifeless body sank beneath my hands. Blood soaked the floor, my sleeves, and my face.
I ripped the blade free of his neck and stabbed him in the eye, the face, everything I could see. I left my mark.
When I finally stopped, the silence was unbearable, and I cried.
“I brought the knife, but they used it? What the fuck does that mean?”
I looked around one last time.
Still empty.
No Sayuri.
No answers.
I was left with a dead man who had taken her location with him and left me standing in the aftermath, realizing too late that killing him hadn’t freed anyone but locked her deeper in his depths.
You brought the knife…I looked down at the steel still sticking out of his throat.
The Black Onyx.
“I brought the knife, but they used it.”
Kaito knew the knife was theirs.
How?
I staggered to my feet, my hands dripping red, while the truth settled heavy and final in my chest.
Whatever they’d done to her…
Wherever she was…
The knife I used wasn’t just for Kaito tonight.
It was for me.
I wouldn’t find Sayuri.
I was already too late.
When I got back to Jerry’s house, I let myself sag into the couch. No one bothered me. I couldn’t focus on anything but my broken heart.
I couldn’t scare the children anymore.
“I have to go back,” I said, so quietly, but I knew he could hear me.
“Back to where? Jed, there’s no way of knowing where she is or if she’s…”
“Back to the church. It’s all I have of her, Jer.”
The worry lines of my dear friend were from me, and right now, that crease was a permanent indent.
“I understand. I…I’ll come with ya. I mean, you know you have a place when you get back. You got something special from her, Jed. I know you never thought about bein’ a father, but you are now. That little boy only has you left of his mama, and he’s all you got, too.”
The words hurt because they were true.
“I know. I can’t look into his eyes right now. He reminds me too much of her. I failed his mom. I’m the reason she’s probably dead.”
Jerry brushed a tear away from his cheek and handed me the keys.
“You go say your goodbyes, brother. Remember, as hard as it is that she may be gone, but you ain’t.”
I ignored him, snatching the keys and making my way out to the truck.
I didn’t know what I wanted to feel at the church. I just knew I couldn’t feel anything without it.
I opened the doors that had yellow tape on them. My dried blood still coated the asphalt and was a massive testament to how fucked this society was.
When I got inside the church, I felt like I could breathe even a little. The memories of hide-and-seek, her laugh, her smile, and her moans all embraced me like warmth.
The candles were all extinguished, and I couldn’t see.
“We’re back, Mortifera,” I whispered, blindly walking forward in the dark.
The moonlight outside shone through the stained glass, and my eyes were starting to adjust to the dim lighting.
“I don’t know what I—”
My words stalled, and I felt my heart break in two.
Sayuri…
She was laid out on the altar, her body bare, and her skin an ashen gray.
“Sayuri! Oh my god! No!”
I ran to her side and picked up her frail body. She was…alive, but barely breathing, her chest rose and fell.
“Oh, thank god. Oh, thank…”
My words fell away as I looked down at my feet. On the ground below her was writing, and the sticky texture could only be blood. My heart stalled in my chest when I read the words.
False.
Prophet.