5. Ivy
FIVE
IVY
I stared at the man in front of me as if he hung the moon and stars in the sky, when really he was nothing more than food to me—a meal I’d have to chop up and cook soon enough.
Chop him up, I would, but only after I’d had my fun.
“So you’re telling me you’ve never been outside this shithole of a city?” His eyes twinkled slyly as I tittered like the airheaded floozie I was playing tonight. “You stick with me, sweetheart, and I’ll show you places you’ve never dreamed of.”
I knew his type. He thought if he took a girl on one trip and paid for a dinner or three, he’d have her eating out of his palm while his wife at home was none the wiser. Unfortunately for him, the copy of the contract the Guild had accepted on him this week indicated his wife wasn’t as oblivious to his proclivities as he’d like to think.
She even knew what he did to his girls when he got tired of them.
Right about now, he was probably questioning why I hadn’t succumbed to the three roofies he’d slipped in my drinks. Unfortunately for him, not only did I have a high tolerance, but I wasn’t actually drinking the shit he served me. The second he was distracted by my ass or another girl in passing, I dumped the shit into the ice bucket and ordered another one. If this kept up, the fucking bottle of expensive booze he had in the bucket would be floating in another round or two, and then my secret would be out.
I had to get creative. And fast.
My nails raked down his arm enticingly as I smiled like he was the hottest thing since sliced bread, and I couldn't wait to butter him up and eat him. I worked my lips into a pretty pout and made sure to give my voice a little of a slur, for maximum effect.
“Why don’ we go back to my place, baby? I bet a man like you knows his way ‘round a bedroom.”
Gag me with a fucking spoon. The Neon Dogs would pay for the bullshit I had to put up with to get my revenge. Every unwanted touch of a man, every sideways look, every missed opportunity and every sleepless night. I would take it out on them when I finally had them in my grasp.
Roger Wells put his clammy hand atop mine as his smile widened predatorily. “You sure, sweetheart? We could always go back to my place and have some high-class fun.”
I knew why he wanted to take me back to his place, and I wasn’t that stupid. Besides, I had other plans for Roger.
“My place is . . . discreet,” I offered, winking slowly as I brought up one manicured finger to my lips. “And I’ve got toys.”
Men were suckers for a whore. And for some reason, all men thought a woman with a toy or two in her bedside table was utter trash.
But how I felt about men in society wasn’t important here. The way he leaned in and sniffed my hair, the lump in his pants behind the zipper, told me he was past caring where we fucked, as long as he got to whip out his cock and use it.
Oh, he’d use it, alright. His wife had very clear plans for that particular appendage.
It took ten minutes for him to clear his tab, round up his two guards, and toss my coat at his driver, forcing me to totter along behind him in the chilly night air in nothing but a loose satin skirt, a bralette top, and heels that nearly reached the sky. I followed him to his car, taking note of the sunroof and the privacy divider.
I was never happier in my life that I lived in a shitty part of town with plenty of bars. With any luck, we wouldn’t have time from point A to point B for him to try anything funny. I wasn’t really keen on letting a man like this actually put his hands on me any more than he already had tonight.
He ushered me into the backseat and knocked on the divider, then instructed me to give him my address, which I did. Well, okay, so to be fair, it wasn’t really my address. I gave him the address of the building across the street, but he didn’t need to know that. And it was just one more layer of protection for me from retaliation. His hand snaked up my skirt twice, but I managed to teasingly bat his hand away, still maintaining my drunken ruse enough that he didn’t seem suspicious. When we finally rounded the corner and pulled up on the side of the street, I breathed a sigh of relief and giggled girlishly, fighting the urge to slam a knife into his fucking stomach right this minute.
“Why don’t you tell your guys to run along for a few hours while we have some fun? If they sit out here in a no parking zone, the cops will ticket them.” They wouldn’t, but I doubted he knew that. Men like him thought slumming it was a fun little side adventure. They didn’t actually familiarize themselves with the world they were visiting for amusement.
“Sure thing, baby,” he muttered, nodding to his men with a wave of his hands. Once they’d disappeared around the corner, I wrapped my fingers around one of his biceps and smiled up at him, forcing my ankle to wobble suggestively, like maybe I wasn’t so steady on my feet anymore.
“We should go in through the back entrance. I don’t want my neighbor to stop us in the hall. She’s the nosy kind.”
His lips brushed against the shell of my ear as one arm snaked around my waist, already too close to the dip in my hips. “I’ll go in whatever door you want me in, sugar.” The double meaning was not lost on me, unfortunately.
“Right.” I couldn’t hide the biting harshness of my tone, and had to cover it with a well-timed brush of my hand across the front of his pants. Ew.
By the time he was halfway down the alley and I was within reach of my newly-acquired trophy bat, it was too late for poor Roger. And the sap didn’t even see it coming as I bent over, pretending to be sick, my hands wrapping almost lovingly around the worn, smooth wood leaning against the side of the rusted-ass dumpster I threw my trash into every night. He barely registered the sight of it as I threw it over one shoulder like Babe Ruth lining up a homer in the seventh inning of a tied game with the bases loaded.
I don’t even think it really registered to him even as the bat lined up horizontally across his face and connected with a sickening crunch, blood streaming from his broken nose as he fell like a fucking log, his fancy dinner jacket soaking up the dirty rainwater on the cracked concrete where he lay. He writhed in pain, like the bitch he was, blood everywhere now, screaming through his snot and tears as I towered over him, all acts of inebriation dropped.
There was no point in continuing the charade now.
“Who are you?” he whined, his cupped hands giving his voice an almost comical tone to compliment the nasally way air whistled through the broken cartilage. “Why?”
I had a moment of hesitation, a memory from long ago surfacing at the most inopportune moment to remind me why I was here, why I stood above a man in the alley who was known for raping and selling women when he was done with them, a bat in my hand and murder in my heart. Remembered my father’s pleas as the Neon Dogs themselves beat him to a pulp, maybe with this very same bat I now held in my grasp. Stealing his life away.
This man and my father were not alike. This man deserved what was coming to him, and then some. He was nothing like my father. He was the scum of the earth, and I was doing the world a favor getting rid of him. Women everywhere could breathe a little easier. There were a million more of him out there, sure, but one less sleazeball piece of shit was a good thing.
Right?
“Men like you are all the same,” I snarled as I brought the bat down on his kneecap, shattering it with a solid crack as his whining turned to screams. And we couldn’t have people overhearing him, now, could we? So I slipped a handkerchief out of my bra and shoved it down his throat, muffling the annoying wails enough to keep going. “Shut up, you asshole! Ugh! I can’t believe you think you’ve got the right to protest this treatment when you were literally sneaking roofies in my drinks all night.”
His eyes blew wide at my accusation, nostrils flaring–or what little movement they could form, considering his nose was absolutely wrecked. I’d imagine even that little twitch hurt like a sonofabitch, too, if his watering eyes were any indication.
“That’s right, buddy. You didn’t think I’d notice the way my drinks were fizzing? How you always found a reason to be too close, how your arms moved around me instead of over me like any normal guy would? How you always watched me take a drink to make sure I was swallowing the liquid poison in my hands?” The bat swung again, almost like it was an extension of my rage, and I smirked at the satisfying sound of his bones shattering from the force. “Yeah, fucking cry, you bitch. Men like you are no men at all.”
Over and over, I took that bat to him, bringing it down on any part of him I could reach—his stomach, his legs, his chest, his back, as he writhed on the ground and tucked his arms over his head in a feeble attempt to protect what was left of his disgusting face.
If he was pleading for mercy between blows, I couldn’t hear it. Couldn’t make out the words as snot and blood mingled on his face with the constant stream of tears, his teeth no doubt locked down on my handkerchief as the pile of broken bones tried valiantly to remain conscious.
It was a losing effort, though.
He wouldn’t stay awake to see the final blow coming for him. They never did.
Men were such pussies when it came to pain tolerance these days. They say balls are sensitive. Pussies take a pounding and turn around for more. Must be why women had longer lifespans. If men had to have children or menstrual cramps, they’d probably yeet themselves off the nearest bridge.
The bat swung back again, landing on the side of his shoulder, and this time he managed to scream around the cloth in his mouth, crawling to his shattered knees in a feeble plea for his life to be spared.
I wasn’t in the mood to give him what he wanted. I had a job to do, and I didn’t have all night.
With a cackling scream of my own, I wound my arms back and spun around, pivoting my hip as my whole body weight connected with this man’s skull at the edge of his temple. I heard a crack, but it didn’t look like the bat had splintered, so my guess would be his head caved in.
His body crumpled to the ground in a mess of tangled and limp limbs, and I nudged him over with the toe of my heels, rolling him onto his back to reveal that part of his head was now concave, resembling a crater on the moon’s surface.
Sweet fucking justice.
The actual act of killing was far too easy for me. It didn’t do anything to me the first time I killed a man. Or the second. Or the third. Which, in hindsight, should have sent me to therapy, maybe an actual asylum, in a padded cell in some mental hospital somewhere. But instead, all it did was assure me I was the right person for the job of avenging my father.
It drove me to do it more. Embrace the darkness inside myself.
And then, when I realized how cathartic it was to snuff out the life of a human who didn’t deserve to breathe in the same air as the rest of us, I decided there was no going back.
What would I do when I finally achieved what I’d set out to do? When I took the lives of the men who’d become my mortal enemies, the Neon Dogs, the assholes who’d shattered the life of an innocent girl without batting an eyelash. Could I just return to my normal life like I hadn’t let this rage, this determination, turn me into a killer?
The answer wasn’t one I was ready for, so I shoved the thought to the back of my mind and focused instead on the task at hand: moving a dead body.
If anyone ever tells you that moving a dead body is easy, then look them in the face and call them a liar. It is not easy. It is the hardest thing you will ever do, especially while in stiletto heels, a miniskirt, and crop top in fourty degree weather. And now I was adding one more thing to my growing checklist of things I could do to improve my efficiency.
Wear fucking boots, or stash a change of clothes.
Or, conversely, I could just kill these fuckers in the places I needed to leave them to complete the contract. Or wherever I expected the Neon Dogs to find them.
And that was another thing—completing the hits only meant the Dogs were making money off the back of my hard work. Sure, the act of ridding the world of these creeps was like charity work, but I was only willing to donate so much of my time without benefit. I’d have to make a move, and soon, or my patience would run too thin, and then I might make a mistake I couldn’t afford. I might slip up and do something rash and unexpected that meant the end of me.
I wasn’t ready to die. So, keeping my head was important. Very much so.
If I didn’t have much of a tether to sanity when this was all said and done, well, I’d cross that bridge when I got to it. Until then, the only focus was giving the Dogs back what they’d given my father, in spades.
Cracks in the concrete trapped the heel of one of my shoes, and I damn near stumbled face-first into the man whose body I was dragging along the ground, catching myself at the last minute. Thankfully, there was nobody in the alley at this time of night. And I mean, really, but what were the cops gonna do if someone did see me and call them?
Show up too late to do anything? Hell, they’d probably assume that I was with the Guild. And honestly, it wouldn’t be hard to fake it. I had the contract details in a folder in the back of my car. I had the mask, the outfit, even the bat that were synonymous with the Neon Dogs. Hell, all I didn’t have was one of the Guild pins I’d seen all their members wearing.
That was the one thing that told you who they were–that obnoxious skull and crossbones pin that told the public, the normies, that they were dangerous–not to be fucked with. The symbol of their killer status.
I wondered if Bonnie and Clyde could get their hands on one?
Unlikely. Those morons wouldn’t be likely to do more than pilfer physical files from an office without getting caught. And getting caught wasn’t in my plans. So that avenue was out.
I was doubly glad I’d swiped my roommate’s keys off the wall while she was out of town tonight, now that I was faced with dragging this man around all night. Throwing him in the trunk was more of a shit show than originally expected, but I got him in there.
So what if the bumper was bloodied up and smeared with brain matter? It’d wash off.
I just had to get his lifeless body to the beach house where he met up with his business partners and kept his mistress of the month, dump him in the sand, and let the crabs do their thing after I left. The contract was explicitly clear on that—his soon-to-be-widow wanted him left in the same place where he proposed to her after grooming her all those years ago. She wanted to make a good memory in the place where all her nightmares began .
I had to admire a woman like that. She and I both knew what it was to reclaim our freedom, our lives. Only tonight, she was the one being set free. And I still had a long way to go to gain mine.
What was it that old dude said in his poems about winter?
But I’ve got promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.
Yeah. Same, dude. Same.