Chapter Twenty-Nine
Lenora
Bernard flicks panicked glances from me to his brother. Answering my question without saying a word.
“Listen, lady, I have no idea who the fuck you are, but you have made a serious mistake.”
They wouldn’t know who I am.
Even when alive, the boys made it a point to keep me away from the Family. The other members of the underground syndicate. Very few were allowed near me. These two would not have been.
I tilt my head to Veyn’s watchful expression.
“Put me down, please.”
No question.
No objection.
The barbs extract and I’m gingerly pulled off him and set down.
The stones beneath my feet are warm, as if touched by fire, as I start downward.
A deep part of me understands that I should be ashamed of my nudity.
Of the fact that I had a man inside me where these two could see.
But as I draw closer, it’s not their thoughts I care about. They’ll be dead soon, anyway.
“Did you kill my boys?” I ask again when I reach the bottom step and level the pair with a steady stare.
Bernard is huffing slightly like an exhausted dog after a run.
The heavy panting has snot and spittle expelling from between his lips.
I think he knows what’s about to happen.
Or his mind is struggling to understand how they’ve come to be here.
How he’s bound to an altar with no restraints.
Why his brother is not helping him. But more importantly, why his brother is holding a knife over him.
“Listen, you crazy bitch—”
The crack is a reverberating force that snaps through the chamber. A violent slap that nearly makes me jump, but I keep steady as I watch horror fill Augustus’s blockish features.
Then blood.
A long, slow trickle down his face from ear to ear, over the bridge of his nose and across his cheekbones. It bubbles from the thin, perfect slice that appears from nowhere.
“Watch your tongue, human. That is my woman you are speaking to.”
Being called Veyn’s woman is a label that will require contemplation, but I set it aside for now to focus on the pair.
On Augustus who is trying to cry out and touch his face, but his hands won’t move.
Won’t release the blade. So, the blood continues to run down his chin and splatters across his naked chest.
“What are you?” he sputters, crimson teeth bared.
“Lenora Usher,” I murmur, moving the final few steps to stand on the opposite side of the same altar where I gave my innocence to a demon. “Did you kill my boys?”
I know it was them.
They had done it in broad daylight on a street full of people who all watched my boys collapse across the filthy ground at their feet and did nothing. Not one person moved to help them.
Save them.
But I don’t blame them. Who would risk their lives when these two were standing over Ames and Eliah’s bodies with their smoking guns? Weapons that they still held when the police did show up to find my boys tortured. Bodies broken and abused.
“Did you kill them?” I hiss through my teeth, tears hot in my eyes.
The fear is comical in Augustus’s eyes. This monster who has no true understanding of horror, who has only inflicted it in others — afraid. I’m almost proud of myself.
“They … they came into our turf,” he sputters. “They knew the rules.”
“They were on the street.”
His throat muscles flex. “Look, shit happens in this business, okay? That’s … that’s the way things are.”
I reach the other side of the dais with Bernard, a whimpering slab fixed between me and his brother.
The sounds are silent, but I can make out the frantic shapes of his mouth forming the other man’s name.
Calling for his brother to save him. The sight makes me wonder if my boys had called out for each other when the gun went off.
Had they rushed to save each other only to meet the same fate?
The hot iron rod of pain twists in my chest. It burns a path up my throat. I can taste blood and I realize I’d been sawing into the inside of my cheek.
“I suppose then you will understand that this, too, is merely a part of the business,” I manage through a whisper choked with emotions that I’m doing my best to keep in check.
Bernard is thrashing.
Leaner, thinner than his brother’s solid bulk, he is a pathetic sight of hysterical sobbing that, thankfully, we can’t hear.
“Don’t do this,” Augustus growls, spittle speckling his bottom lip. Adding to the sticky gloss of blood staining his mouth. “Don’t fucking do this. We were only following orders, okay? We were only doing what we were told.”
That makes me pause.
“What do you mean? Whose orders?”
I’m not surprised when he says, “Julen.” But it raises other questions.
“How did your uncle know Ames and Eliah would be on that street?”
“He didn’t.” He tries to sniffle only to inhale the blood dripping off the tip of his nose. “We … we called him. We…” He breaks off to glance down at his brother. “We saw them and called Julen. He told us to … handle it. Just business,” he repeats like that might make what they did okay.
“You killed them over a building,” I murmur. “They were innocent.”
I reach up and lightly touch the woven cord slung around Bernard’s throat. A thin, silver medallion hangs from the end.
The Archangel Michael.
“Don’t touch him!” Augustus snarls, sounding truly frantic as I smooth the pad of my thumb over the angel’s effigy.
“Do you think he’s going to save you after all the things you’ve both done?” I look straight into Bernard’s wide, wet eyes. “You are an awful person. Awful people don’t get saved by angels or go to Heaven.” I gingerly place the pendant down. “Cut him, please,” I tell Augustus.
“What…? No! No, don’t do this. No! Stop!”
His cries grow into screams as his arms betray him and lift, knife poised over his brother’s chest.
“All the way,” I instruct, ignoring his escalating shrieks. “Here to here.”
Being helpful, I poke a finger from the hollow of Bernard’s throat all the way down to his navel. The muscles of his stomach heave and shudder with his silent wails. His arms and legs flail, catching each time on Veyn’s tendrils and drawing blood that is pooling beneath him.
Augustus fights against himself, jaw fixed tight enough to shatter as he follows my command.
“Don’t. Please! Please. I’ll do anything.”
I watch the fine point of the blade settle with delicate precision against Bernard’s throat.
“You are both so much like your father,” I mumble, resting my elbow on the table next to Bernard’s shoulder and settling my chin in the palm of my hand. “He screamed a lot, too. So irritating. Your mom didn’t make a peep.”
Huffing like a rabid dog, Augustus glowers at me through soaked eyes with a hatred I actually understand.
“You did that? You killed our parents?”
“Not technically,” I admit, straightening. “But I was very amused watching them die horribly.”
“Bitch!” he screams. “You fucking bitch. I’m going to fucking kill you. I’m going to rip your fucking tongue out and clean the floors with it.”
Irritated, I glance back over my shoulder to where Veyn stands midway along the steps, dark eyes fixed on my face.
“Why isn’t he cutting?”
The ghost of a smile brushes his mouth. “I thought you were still talking.”
I turn back with a shake of my head. “No, I’m done.”
Only Augustus’s shrieks rebound off the stone pillars.
Only his howls of beautiful agony spill down my spine as he’s forced to slice down the center of his brother’s heaving chest. Bernard watches the blade sink into the muscles and bones of his chest cavity as if he were made of cake.
The smooth, effortless glide is unrealistic but satisfying to watch as blood wells up and cascades across the plains of his torso.
“Can you break open his ribs? I’m curious to see if either of you have a heart.”
Both men are hysterical.
I can only hear one of them, but the sounds Augustus is making are beginning to irritate me.
“Please stop shouting,” I mutter. “It’s very hard to enjoy this when you’re making all that noise.”
“Fuck you! Fuck you!” he sobs.
Veyn understands my wishes and silences the man. The blissful echo left behind is a blessing and I exhale.
“That’s better. Ribs, please.”
Dripping and stained, the knife is set aside next to Bernard’s shaved head, and he reaches for the fold of flesh he’s created with trembling hands.
He’s openly weeping. Deep, heaving sobs that curl his lip. His eyes are practically closed like he can’t watch his own actions.
Old Lenora would be equally disgusted by the scene.
She never had the stomach for gore. But I watch with a sort of numbness that crawls beneath my skin.
It’s a detachment that rings hollow through my bones.
It’s with the same disinterest as watching paint dry sprinkled with a twisted pleasure no one should feel watching another person suffer.
But these aren’t regular people. For years the younger Duval brothers have tortured and killed so many people simply for their own amusement.
They have stolen and cheated. Since the death of their grandfather, they have run wild, terrorizing an entire city.
Turning it into their own personal playground.
Then, they killed my boys.
They came after my family.
Destroyed the only things that mattered in my life.
Their family is responsible for everything I will do to them. Guilt and forgiveness have no home in my heart.
Not anymore.
Augustus tries to tilt his head away, to squeeze his eyes shut and pretend none of this is happening while his meaty fists close around his brother’s second and third true rib.
They snap with a grating crack that nearly makes me wince. The ivory sticks clatter to the table before he reaches for the next row.
“Do you ever think about the people you hurt?” I ask absently, pushing away from the altar and moving towards a cluster of nearby candles.