20. Chapter Twenty
Was I taking my anger out on this poor, defenseless soul? Maybe. I could put him out of his misery and simply eliminate the threat! But what would be the fun in that?
Yuliya twirled a knife in the palm of her hand, casually leaning against a table of instruments. Corbin stared at the metal in her palm, with a smirk on his lips as he undid his tie.
“Glad you called me,” he said to my sister, even as she ignored him. “I’m happy to have helped.”
Yuliya rolled her eyes, stilling the blade in his hand.
“You scared a bunch of staff and police to release him into your custody after you made a phone call.” She finally turned to him with hostility in her eyes. What had happened between them to warrant this? “ Jericho could have done all that himself, pretty boy.”
“But he didn’t, did he?”
He leaned down into her space, despite the two of them being almost the same height.
“What do you want? A fucking cookie?” My sister’s Russian accent always came out when she was feeling aggressive. And it was growing thick now.
I chuckled, and turned my eyes to the reason for my visit in this particular cell of my mansion - the underground basement that was seldom used. There was a drain beneath his feet, which dangled an inch off the ground. He was manacled to the ceiling, the wound on his ribs dripping past the bandage they had placed on him when they saved his life.
It was too bad the hospital staff had wasted their time.
I held a small blade in my hand, as Yuliya and Corbin continued to bicker.
“Come on, why’s it so hard for you to give me a bit of credit, huh?” From my peripheral vision, I saw Corbin tuck a lock of my sister’s hair over her ear. She jerked her head away, avoiding his touch.
“Your ego is inflated enough.” She bared her teeth at him, irritated. “I’m not your mother, or your lover. If you need love, get a hooker.”
“Maybe I will.”
“Or go with one of the many nurses who was fawning over you all the time…”
“Bicker elsewhere,” I barked at them, and the two jumped in surprise.
“Isoveli…” my sister’s voice was low in warning. Warning of what? I wasn’t sure.
“Leave me with the victim,” I ordered, turning my gaze to the two of them before nodding my head at the door. “Leave us. I’ll call when I’m ready to have him… disposed of.”
Strictly speaking, I did not torture for the sake of torture.
I did it to get information, and at times, I would do it to make a point. But I did not do it for simple pleasure. I did not relish taking a human life, even if the notches of my sins were numerous enough to bring down a 100-year-old spruce.
When the bickering pair left the room, the door closing behind them, I looked up at the man who was at the center of my hunt since my engagement. The last of my wife’s tormentors.
I wiped the blade in my hand, as if I was wiping the specks from a pair of old, worn glasses.
Like my sister, a slight Russian accent came out when I allowed the sadism in my blood to come out and play. Sadism made from being born into this life.
“You made a tactical error, when you decided to abuse my wife.”
Brock took in a sharp intake of breath, and shivered. “She wasn’t your wife.”
I smiled. “Oh, but she was, if you believe that these things are fated and ordained by God. If you believe in magic, and witches, as you seem to.”
“She was Alastair’s wife, and he agreed… he said it was okay.”
“If Alastair Green told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?” I asked, using the old words that so many parents lectured their kids over.
I knew the answer, of course. If Alastair Green had told him to slit his own throat, he would have. If he had been ordered to jump off a cliff, he would, and hoped for the best, because the alternative was always death. A death that was visiting him now…
“You bet on the wrong horse,” I said, looking at the finely cleaned blade, shining in the sparse light overhead.
The shadows on Brock’s face were harsh and sinister. He was such a sad little prisoner.
“Now you must contend with me. Aren’t you lucky?”
“I’ll tell you whatever you want to know!” He rattled against the chains, his feet kicking at air as I approached with the tip pointed up towards his nose.
“Shhhh,” I said, soothingly, like I was calming a lamb before I slaughtered it for dinner. “You know what will happen.”
The stitches between his ribs from where my wife had planted a blade began to ooze and puss with the stress of his movements. I peeled off the bandage with careful movements, seeing the straight mark of the gardening knife she had used to defend herself.
I pulled a breath in though my teeth as I remembered our ill-fated meeting in this house. How she had planted a knife in my skin. She had stabbed weakly, her emotions barely letting her control the blade. The knife had been vertical, and didn’t even touch bone.
Her fingers in my hand as I showed her the intercostal spaces to stab… oh, she had remembered her lesson well.
I was proud of her.
She wasn’t the defenseless thing I had placed a ring on. She was something so much more. She was ready to live by herself - to take the world by storm. How tragic that as she became the best version of herself, she would slip from my grasp.
“That fucking song,” Brock said through a small whimpered cry. “I can hear it, even now. Her stupid fucking song. She would hum it to herself all the time. Then she started putting words to it…”
Was he speaking for the sake of speaking? It was something I had witnessed people close to death doing. They would just… confess. Not even relevant to the situation they were in. I had men confess to accidentally killing a cat in their childhood, or stealing a pack of cigarettes from a local gas station when they were teens… the things that haunted people were often ridiculous, and surprising.
I had been around enough death to know that person’s last words were rarely ever profound. More often, it was the last misfires of an overstimulated mind, fighting for it’s grasp on the sad state of living.
I casually placed the blade in my hand against Brock’s skin, letting him feel the cold metal. I wasn’t even sure he could feel anything, but I was curious.
“She’s going to kill us all.” A fat, pathetic tear went down his cheek, dripping off his chin before it fell to the floor, down to the drain where his blood would follow. “She’ll destroy you too…”
I felt the hair on the back of my neck rise in awareness. Those words were a curse.
I looked up at him, keeping a snarl from escaping my lips. But he kept talking.
“She’ll destroy every man she encounters. That’s what witches do.”
As with his tears, his wound also wept.
There was something… religious looking about him. About how he was strung up, tortured, crying and bleeding. Like a sad martyr, with a blade to his skin.
I would be moved, if I did not know what he had done to my wife.
“Alastair Sr.” he sniffed. “He said it was alright. He said they wanted it!”
‘They?” I asked, tilting my head.
Were there more than just my wife? Were there other women who needed him to pay for his crimes?”
“A woman of a certain age who is unfasted is… is…”
I narrowed my eyes, feeling bile rise up my throat.
“They’re fair game! That was Alastair’s choice, and I just followed orders! I never… they never…”
Another sad, martyred tear fell down his cheek, and I felt the bile turn into something else. It turned into laughter.
“My God,” I laughed, feeling the cruelty of my soul come fully to the surface. “You truly think you are the sacrificial lamb? You think that none of your misfortunes are your fault?”
I felt the laughter coming up my throat, as the man’s full delusions came to the surface.
“You think that she is the villain of this tale?”
Brock’s eyes widened, as he looked at me like I was a lunatic.
“You don’t understand!” he pleaded. “She’s a witch! She’ll take you down too, mark my words! She’s… she’s…!”
The man was an idiot. Far from being the great villain and adversary I thought he could be, he was just… a moron. A sinner who did not know he was the sinner. A villain, deluded into thinking he was the hero of the tale.
“Mark my words, Russian,” he said, his face scrunching into something that looked like constipation, which made me laugh even harder. “She will bring you to your knees, and make you beg for mercy.”
I laughed, feeling the madness of my soul coming out, as I twirled the knife in my hand, before planting it in his gut. Blood gushed out, covering my hand, my sleeve and arm, spilling down his stomach, to his naked thigh, before it pooled into many rivulets over hairy legs, before coming together again at his big toe to drip down to the drain.
He didn’t have the energy to scream. What was the point? The human scream was a cry of fear, and a signal to the rest of their kind for help. He knew that none would come.
I pulled the knife out, tugging it downward to open his guts. The scent of intestines filled the air, as half-digested food and fluid fell to the ground between us.
Everything was spilling out of him - all of his life essence falling to the drain. I knew that the contents of his stomach might clog it… but I would make that my sister’s problem.
“She’ll bring you down,” he said, as his head lolled forward, succumbing to the pull of exhaustion and death. “She will break you.”
“I know,” I told him, as he gasped one final time. “And it will be my privilege to allow her to do so.”