Chapter 8 Malice #2
I need something more visceral than that. More up close and personal. So I hit him, hard, over and over again. My fist collides with his side, and I don’t let up until I hear the crunching of his ribs. I hit him in the face, breaking his nose, leaving his mouth and chin a bloody mess.
Troy doesn’t take it well.
There’s no more of that smug bullshit, that pompous attitude where he thinks he’s calling the shots. Within a few minutes, he’s reduced to a sniveling mess, crying and screaming and shaking where he’s held against the wall.
Behind us, Willow just watches it happen. Ransom has a hand on her shoulder, but neither of them move as Vic and I keep torturing Troy.
It doesn’t take long before he breaks.
Finally, the fucker manages to spit out his own dick, letting the bloody, limp thing flop to the floor with a wet sound. His voice is wrecked, halfway between a sob and a scream as he cries out, “Okay! I’ll do it! I’ll do whatever you want, just please… fucking stop!”
A savage, dark part of me wants to keep going. Wants to take him all the way to his limit and then past it. I want to get in his face and tell him he probably didn’t stop when Willow begged him to, that he probably just got off on it even harder.
But there was a purpose to this beyond just making him hurt, so I nod and force myself to step back.
I yank the other knife out of his hand, and Vic and I haul him away from the wall.
He can barely stand, his legs shaking from how much pain he’s in and his pants still bunched up around his ankles.
He leaves a trail of blood as we drag him between us, following Willow down the hall to a small office.
“This is where I got married,” she says, her voice a little hoarse. “Seems right that this is where I should get my due.”
“Fuck yeah, it does,” Ransom tells her, still staying close by her side.
I have no fucking clue what needs to happen next, but luckily, Vic does. He steps smoothly into control of the situation.
“Sit him at the desk,” he tells me, and the two of us drag him over that way.
Troy basically collapses onto the chair as soon as we set him on it, his head lolling forward.
The stump of his dick has stopped bleeding so much, but his thighs are coated with red.
I don’t think he’s in any danger of bleeding out, but we need to get this done quickly anyway.
“Stay awake, asshole,” I grunt, gripping his hair and forcing him to lift his head. “Vic, what does he need to do?”
“He’ll need to sign papers transferring ownership of all of his assets to Willow. Give me a sec.”
Vic opens Troy’s laptop and presses Troy’s finger to the small fingerprint reader on one side of the laptop’s keyboard, unlocking it.
He spins the laptop on the desk and leans over it, clicking and typing away.
A few more times, he demands a password or a piece of information from Troy, who seems to be so broken down by this point that he offers up no resistance, spitting out whatever Vic wants to know.
Once he’s done handling the actual transfer of money and assets, Vic prints out a document and slaps it down on the desk in front of Troy, who’s struggling to keep his eyes open.
“We’ll need to get it in writing,” Vic says coolly. “Confirming that you want Willow to have everything.”
Troy rouses a little at that, glaring up at Vic balefully. I spin the office chair a little and rest my foot on his crotch, pressing the toe of my boot against his balls right below the bloody stump of his dick.
“Sign it,” I bite out. “Or I’ll cut these off too.”
He whimpers, squirming in his seat, but when Vic hands him a pen, he does it, scrawling a shaky signature at the bottom of the page.
“There. I did what you said,” he rasps, dropping the pen to the desk with a clatter. “Now you have to let me go.”
I chuckle, the beast inside me rising up once again.
“There’s just one problem with that,” I tell him. “You took something that didn’t belong to you. And the moment you touched Willow, you signed your own fucking death warrant. We were never going to let you live after that.”
And Troy, the stupid fucker, actually looks shocked. There’s a look on his face like this is the last thing he expected to happen, and I would laugh if I wasn’t so deadly serious about this shit.
“You—you can’t,” he splutters. He surges up from the chair but then immediately stumbles as his body reminds him that we just beat the shit out of him half an hour ago. “You can’t.”
Ransom snorts, his arms folded. His eyebrow ring glints in the light as he tilts his head. “Come on, Troy. You had to know how this was going to end for you. And after all, how often has someone telling you ‘you can’t’ stopped you from doing something?”
His eyes are hard, and Troy glances away from him, trying to appeal to Vic next.
“Listen,” he says quickly. “You want money? I’ve got money. I can give you as much money as you want. Whatever it takes to make this go away.”
Vic lifts an eyebrow. “But all of your money is Willow’s now. So what do we need you for?”
That seems to hit Troy like a slap in the face, and his expression twists from wide-eyed and pleading to something ugly.
“You don’t know who you’re dealing with,” he snarls. “You don’t know who the fuck I am. I am Troy Copeland! My family is one of the most prestigious and powerful in this whole damned city. You’re a bunch of lowlife fucking criminals. You can’t order me around.”
“We already did,” Ransom says. “We ordered you around, killed all your guards, and beat the shit out of you. Give it up. You’ve got nothing.”
“No!” he screams. “No! It’s not over! I won’t—you can’t—”
I ignore his outburst, looking to Willow instead.
Waiting for her command. She’s the only one who could stop this, and honestly, I’m not even sure she could get me to walk away now if she asked.
The monster inside me is crying out for blood, and it won’t be satisfied until Troy is dead on the floor.
Willow meets my eyes, and I can tell she understands. That she’s ready.
She gives me a small nod.
I look back to Troy, crossing the distance between us. He’s backed himself into a corner in his rage and fear, and I close in on him, my gaze intent on his bloody, bruised face.
His chest heaves, and I can tell each breath is causing him pain. Good.
I get right in his face and lower my voice, even though I know he can still hear me.
“Ty obidel zhenshhinu, kotoruju ja ljublju. Esli by ja mog ubit' tebja sto raz, ja by ubil,” I tell him in a low voice.
His eyes flash, and it doesn’t matter if he understands the words or not. The intent is clear.
I grab the knife out of its sheath at my side, already stained with his blood. With a quick jab, I shove it upward between Troy’s ribs, and he gurgles out a cry of pain.
His body jerks as the knife pierces his heart, and then he crumples to the floor, his eyes wide and unseeing.