Chapter 5 #5
My fingers brush gently on the cold arching lines as I feel the familiar itch. The urge to shoot and hear the point split open the target, it’s such a fucking thrill. It makes my dick hard.
“Sari got it for you,” Michael lets me know as he drops into one of the chairs in the safe area with a sated smile. Raphael quickly pulls him off and onto his lap after sitting his own ass down.
“He researched for hours. It should have less shock, vibration, and noise during the shot,” Michael adds, wrapping his hands around his husband’s neck.
“Since when do you know about bows?” Raphael questions him.
“Since I helped Sari.”
“I helped, too. Chose the color,” Lori states proudly, still alive, skipping toward Hunter and Ramiel for his turn with the empty cans. I suddenly understand why the bow is cherry red.
My brother’s boyfriend keeps trying to get close to me.
He texts me every other day, invites me to their lake house for lunches and dinners, and lets me know when Uriel has a donor session or when they go out for a coffee.
He treats me like a member of the…team. If behind his behavior there’s a rational motivation, he must know that at dangerous times there’s strength in numbers.
If it’s just an emotional response, I don’t really understand it.
Is that part of the evil-having-a-house thing?
I wrap my fingers around the bow grip, which is built into the handle, and lift, enjoying the lightness of the body. I move it up and down to get acquainted with the weight and size as much as I can.
There are five arrows in the box, split limbs, highly preloaded, made of titanium, which reduces the overall weight. I take them all and leave the wooden dock to find soft soil to stick them into—point ends down.
I grab one by my thumb and index finger and place it on the arrow rest, sliding it along until I nock it on the string.
I drive my hand all the way back, stretching the string, my shoulders are relaxed, elbow parallel to the ground.
I take my time until my eyes find the tree with green and brown leaves that remind me of Sully’s eyes.
I release my breath, reach my anchor point, and let go.
I anticipate the excessive vibration of the bow and adjust accordingly. Bullseye. I don’t take a moment to enjoy my work, but rapidly grab another one, and in the next five seconds, I shoot all of the arrows.
“Fucking hell!” Lori exclaims as I eventually relax the arm holding the bow.
“What the fuck was your target, Robin Hood?” Ramiel teases me, squinting his eyes at the forest.
“A tree, around forty yards away,” Raphael responds for me.
“No,” Lori corrects him, looking through a pair of binoculars. Where did he take them from?
“The leaves,” Uriel cuts him off. “He shoots at the falling leaves.”
“Wow. Did he get them?” Michael seems really amazed.
“Every single one,” Lori confirms.
“Not bad for…a bowman.” Gabriel’s voice has an insulting hint.
“Your knives could never reach that distance,” I state. I like knives, but arrows can reach much farther.
“But my rifle bullets can, and go beyond it,” Uriel counters.
I grab a couple of rocks from the ground and throw one toward the wooden crate, knocking down one of the cans.
“Knives never run out of bullets or arrows.” Gabriel twirls the blade between dexterous fingers, making it shine under the sunlight.
“You do run out of knives to toss.” Uriel shrugs. “Pool!” Another clay disk gets fired in the air, making a booming noise that silences everybody for a moment.
“Knives are intimate. Guns are loud and impersonal.” Gabriel proves his point by sliding the sharp blade up the side of Lori’s neck and cutting through the silk scarf.
“That was hot.” Lori bites his lower lip, staring at his fiancé. “But you owe me a scarf.”
“I prefer my fists.” Raguel joins us outside with Oliver.
“Why use physical violence when you can just fuck with people with a press of a finger?” Ramiel decides to be part of the conversation.
“If I may. All weapons have their purposes.” Ferdinand tries to make peace. “The best weapon depends entirely on the context, I’m afraid.”
Don’t tell me everyone is going to just agree with that boring bullshit.
“No, Alfred. That’s not it,” Lori states, and everybody nods or grunts with approval. Ah, didn’t expect that.
The banter starts again, and I’m kind of amused by the loudness and playfulness of it all, until I’m not—psychopaths and our fickleness.
I throw the other rock knocking another can before placing the bow in the container. I’m ready to leave when a shot resounds in the backyard.
“What the fuck, bully boy!” Lori glowers at Raphael. But his cold gaze is on me as he lowers his fuming gun.
“Marlon Finch.” He voices the name of the chemist who created the poison that Nine used to put the doctor in a coma. “You said he was in New York.”
I nod.
“We looked. Went there. No trace of him. The intel, was it solid?” he asks.
All eyes are on me, studying, scheming, waiting for me to make a false move. Being surrounded by cold-blooded killers is a normal occurrence for me since I’m a hitman. I knew they wanted to interrogate me once again when Uriel told me to come. But I don’t have what they want yet.
“Yes, it was. He went underground. You need to look harder.” I glance at Ramiel, who rolls his eyes.
“And Nine is still in the wind,” Uriel snarls.
“I’m doing everything I can without knowing her face. Every time I get closer to one of her men, they disappear.” The hacker sighs.
“How about tracking their fucking phones?” Bezaliel asks.
“Smartphones have an operating system, and I can hack any operating system. But they use proxy services and VPNs. Serena can bypass them, but it takes time, and as I said, as soon as I’m close…poof. Gone,” Ramiel explains.
I can see Raguel gritting his teeth. “We have nothing concrete on her.”
“It has been too quiet,” Oliver hisses.
“The bird turd is plotting something, wallowing in her stinky nest,” Lori agrees with him. I get from context that the bird turd is Nine.
“Fuck!” Raguel curses, squeezing Oliver’s hand.
“She was part of the Blood Assassin project, which means that she showed psychotic traits when she was a little girl,” Michael states.
“Sure, but how does that help us, babe?” Raphael asks.
“I’m just trying to profile her. Like Meg would do.” He shrugs, eyes down.
Silence suddenly descends over them. Even Uriel seems to be affected by what happened to the doctor.
I see anger on his face, a thirst for retaliation.
I understand that. When the people who took me in after I escaped the long imprisonment were killed by a drunk driver, I hunted him down and had my sweet revenge. Because he took away what was mine.
Nine hurt all of them in one way or another, and now they want to get back at her.
“Go on. Give us the psychological profile,” I break the silence. Trying new angles could help find her.
He gives me a little smile, his light blue eyes blink with gratitude. I see the same look on Lori’s and Ramiel’s faces. People are so fucking easy. Uriel won’t be the middleman for much longer because I’m getting to them, little by little.
“From what we have discovered and the small interaction she had with Uriel, Nine is not the average evil. She is a mastermind, incredibly smart, ruthless, meticulous, and power-hungry. She commits murder guilt-free, which means people are irrelevant and interchangeable, a clear sign of psychopathy. She hates us. Her desire for revenge seems to be her sole goal.”
“That night when she tried to kill Uri, how did you know Phoenix was Nine?” Hunter asks me as soon as Michael finishes her profile. “You said you never saw her when you were in the facility. She didn’t tell Uri who she was, and her face was covered by a firefighter’s mask.”
I open my mouth, but Uriel talks before I can say anything. “The truth, Ezra.” He knows the truth, I told him already. But I’m quite satisfied by the fact that he didn’t say it to any of them.
“I’m always for the truth, brother. Even though it makes you choke while trying to swallow it,” I declare. And omitting is not equivalent to lying; it just serves to postpone the choking for a little while.
“When a little more than a year ago, a hit was put on my head by someone named Phoenix, I started looking for the fucker.
It was like searching for a ghost. For a month, I stopped several attempts on my life, until Phoenix decided to take things to another level and put a bomb inside my place.
I was barely able to get out of there before the explosion, but I read the note left behind for me on the refrigerator. It just said:
Goodbye Subject Eight,
Nine.
“Fucking hell!” Raguel cusses.
“A blurry memory from the fire at the facility where I had been imprisoned came back to me. A girl standing among the flames, covered in blood, before running away.” I hear a gasp and some muttering, but I keep going, “I didn’t know who she was, nor did I care.
At that time, I just wanted out of there.
The man who helped me escape was a male nurse working there.
A couple of years later, he confessed to me that there had been another subject who he thought had died in the fire.
He told me that unfortunately, the scientists were successful at turning her into a killer with no emotions. ”
“Nine,” Raphael whispers her subject number.
“I realized that she didn’t die during the fire and was out to get me. So I faked my own death, and followed Nine’s crumbs here to Chicago, and to all of you.”
“The name she chose Phoenix, the mythical bird that burns to resurrect from its ashes…after the fire at the facility. That can’t be a coincidence,” Michael muses.
“She hates us all, for some reason,” Gabriel says.
I nod.
“She said to Uri that her life was ruined because of us,” Ramiel adds.
I nod again.
“Fuck.” Seems to be Raguel’s favorite word lately. At least he stopped looking warily at me.
“It’s like putting together a puzzle with infinite pieces.” Lori trembles, pulling his jacket closer to his body.
“We’ll find all the pieces, till the last one, and get the bitch,” Uriel growls.
That’s for fucking sure. She should have left me out of this. She’ll curse the day she crossed me.
“Right now, Gabe and I need to move downstairs.” Raphael puts an end to the discussion, pushing himself and Michael up.
“Downstairs?” I ask. There’s a downstairs?
Ramiel is the one answering with excitement. “To the new Chateau Donor.”