41. Briggs
Chapter 41
Briggs
"The victor is not victorious if the vanquished does not consider himself so." ― Quintus Ennius
T he air was crisp and cold along my neck, a smile gracing my features from the otherwise blood-curdling cries in the near distance. It gave me an odd type of satisfaction—one Rose wouldn’t ever understand. I’d never want her to. My hold stiffened around the black fabric and I debated its necessity for mere seconds before tossing it over my shoulder, letting it crumple to the floor.
The steel-tipped end of my boot clinked as I nudged the swinging door open. I couldn’t hide my joy at seeing the man—the rat—before me in the chair. My guy did well in collecting him quickly. Judging by the way he was only in his boxers, he had either stripped him bare or he’d stolen him while he was still asleep. Didn’t really matter to me, so long as he was here.
“Oh, fuck,” August murmured as I rolled up my sleeves, the quake in his voice forcing that smile of mine to spread. A lot. I was almost giddy with the sight, and as fucked up as I knew that was—to want someone to hurt so bad it makes you happy—I knew it was all for her.
“Hello, rat.” He squirmed against his bindings, where a red rash was forming. His eyes flared, mapping out the room like he hadn’t been sitting in it for at least an hour before I was able to get away.
“W-why…what is this p-place?” His teeth began to chatter, and I didn’t think it was from the cold.
“You don’t get to ask the questions here.” I circled the chair, stopping inches from his back to where he wouldn’t be able to see me anymore. His teeth chattered louder. “How about we start with the why from you ?” I finished my circle, watching the color drain from his face as I came back into view. “Was it always about the money?”
He hung his head. “Please, just let me go, man. I swear, I won’t touch her—”
The knife in my pocket came out so fast I barely processed it moving to his throat. He whimpered. “You already did touch her. If I hadn’t shown up”—my jaw ticked at the thought—“we both know how far you would have taken it.” I dragged the tip of my knife down to the top edge of his boxers. “You were going to stick your filthy fucking dick in my girl, weren’t you?”
“No!”
“Don’t. Fucking.” I slid the blade beneath the elastic around his waist. “Lie.”
“Please!” August’s cries echoed off the walls. “I swear…I swear, man. I wasn’t—”
“You were going to rape her. Ruin her. Destroy everything she worked to rebuild in her beautiful fucking head and tear it down, piece by piece, until she was left with nothing all over again!” My fingers whitened around the hilt as I reared my elbow back, cocking my head. “I know what it’s like to be corrupted—to be made to do things I don’t want to fucking do. But you”—I chuckled, slipping the knife from his boxers and moving it along the top of his thigh, breaking the skin—“had a choice.”
August wailed, staring down at the blood that dripped from his leg. He shook his head, a mass of shitty golden hair sticking to his forehead, damp with sweat. “Rose wouldn’t want you to do this, man! Let me go. I won’t tell anyone, I promise. It can stay between—ah, fuck!” I drew another line in his skin, ignoring every word he spewed except the one that should’ve never left his mouth.
“Don’t say her fucking name. You don’t even deserve that much of her, you worthless piece of shit.” I carved another line as August tilted his head up to the ceiling, screaming in pain, begging for help that wasn’t coming. He had no clue where he was, but the man waiting for my signal above us had zero interest in keeping him alive. No one but me could be this man’s savior. A few more articulately placed lines later and I stepped back, cocking my head down, evaluating my work.
The tears in his red-rimmed eyes must’ve cleared enough for him to see what I’d done. “What the fuck?!” he shouted, the anger rippling from him heavy and deplorable. I silently thanked everything in existence that Rose never had to see the darkest side of him because I believed I’d finally exposed the core of it.
Seeking justice had never felt so…justified before. I grinned as I circled him again, eyeing the new label he donned on his skin. One that would stick with him forever. As much as I’d promised to kill him if he hurt her again, I knew it would hurt Rose more if she ever found out the truth of what I’d done to him, and not for his life, either. She’d worry for mine, the knowledge of that alone warming the beast inside me.
If I couldn’t kill him, this was the next best thing.
“Liar?” He spit on the floor as he read the word scrawled on his thigh. Fuck, this was going to be fun. I could almost feel the stress of the past few years of his involvement melting from my shoulders. Perhaps a few more labels would completely vanish them, for good.
Coming back around to his front, I raised a brow at him. “You think you aren’t?” I scrubbed my hand down the length of my face, the permanent stubble there a reminder of the woman waiting for me back at our home. She preferred the tickle and burn it gave her between her thighs, and it was kind of growing on me—both the marks it left on her and the stubble itself. “Let’s start with your biggest lie—Rose.” I pointed my bloodied knife at him, his eyes flaring at the motion. “You never gave a shit about her. You only stayed close to her because you were paid to do it. Correct?”
“I—” I held up the blade, waving it back and forth, reminding him what would happen if he continued to lie. Carving into him was going to happen again regardless, but he didn’t seem to think so. He exhaled. “Yes. Yes, okay. At first, I thought she was kind of cute and interesting. I met her in fucking middle school, dude. Puberty, you know.”
I smirked. “You wanted to fuck her because you had raging hormones.” When he nodded with relief at my apparent understanding, I crouched down and went to work on another piece. His shouts were ravenous, his body jerking in the chair. Blood began to dribble down his other leg, where a new mark was taking shape. “Wrong answer, you fucking moron.”
“Shit! Stop! Please!”
“Disrespect her one more time in this room, and I won’t stop until every inch of your skin is marked with what you truly are on the inside. Are we clear?”
His tears warmed me up all over again. “Fucking crystal, just stop!”
“Good.” I wiped the blade on his boxers, right above where the word coward was etched in. “Tell me, when did he come to you and offer you payment?” His mouth popped open. “And before you ask who , I’d take a long look at your legs and wonder what word will be next and where I’ll decide to put it.”
He hung his head, his narrow shoulders shaking as he sobbed. “Sometime during her first year in college. Please. Please just let me go. If you know who did it—”
“Tell me, rat—after he paid you and told you to stay close to her, did he tell you to try to rape her? Or was it your eyes that were supposed to be on her?”
“You…you don’t know what he wanted me to do?”
I stood and circled him again, concealing my face in the process. The truth was, I had no idea. But at the risk of sounding or looking like I didn’t, I pressed the blade to his neck. He tensed. “Why don’t you tell me in your own words.”
“He wanted me to find out what she knew. He said”—he loosed a shuddering breath—“he said that if she ever talked about the fire or started snooping around, I was supposed t-to—”
I gripped his hair and tugged his head back, exposing his neck as I pressed the blade in enough to knick his skin. “Tell me!”
“Defile her! I was given money to make her undesirable, so you wouldn’t want her once she found out about your shared past. He said since I ruined your arranged marriage, it was my job to make sure you wouldn’t go after the girl you were chasing. You weren’t supposed to want her if I got to her first—if I made her love me and only want me and not you. He said if I didn’t do it, he’d come after me and my family next.”
I rubbed the bridge of my nose. Why wouldn’t he just want her killed? All this time, I thought he believed she was dead. I had kept my purchases around town as random as possible to keep it discreet, although most of the buildings were all within a certain distance from her house—all places she went to or passed by often. Yet, he knew. For some reason, he wanted her alive. For some reason, my father meticulously worked around every safeguard I thought I’d put into place and hadn’t set out to kill her like he tried to before.
For a minor blip of a second, I understood why August did what he did because here I was, doing the same thing. The irony wasn’t lost on me that we were both protecting the people we loved. The problem was he picked the wrong fucking girl to do it to. Irony be damned—August deserved this.
“The party,” I started, circling back around to face him. Crouching to the floor, I held the blade between two fingers. “The Christmas one. You knew he’d be there, didn’t you? You knew he was coming for her, and you had every opportunity to tell someone. Instead, you let her life hang in the balance.” His whimper was all the confirmation I needed. I stood and kicked the chair back, his head banging against the floor, causing his eyes to roll back into his head. “You lied to her.” I pointed at his leg with the word liar carved into his skin. “You hid behind the mask of money, mistaking it for power.” My jaw flexed as I pointed at the other leg, his pupils flaring with the concussion he no doubt just got when I slammed his head into the concrete floor. “And because you decided that trying to fuck my woman when I told you to stay the hell away from her—not only once, by the way—you’ll have a third word carved into your skin. Can you guess the word? ”
His head lolled to the side as he tried to blink what I imagined were tiny dots blurring his vision. Concussions were brutal. “I’ll give you a hint—it’s going right above your tiny little dick, and I’ll even draw a pretty arrow pointing down to it. Care to guess now?”
His mumbled words made no sense. It was a shame he wouldn’t be fully coherent while I etched the next word into his flesh. “You’re a liar, a coward, and so many other things. But, most of all, you’re a rapist. I saw the look on your face the day you almost got your way with her, and no amount of money can coax out the desire you had to fulfill the sick games you and my father tried to play. You might not have completed what you set out to do, but that doesn’t change what you are deep inside.”
I knelt beside him and got to work on the word while the pain forced him to come to. By the time I was done, I stood and looked down at the mess of blood around him, then positioned the chair upright again. A swift knock sounded at the door minutes after I finished wiping my blade clean, and when I called for him to enter, August didn’t even have the drive to raise his head.
“Let him sit here for another hour, then cut him free.”
Jim cocked his head down at August, clearly confused. “Sure you don’t want him dead?”
“Oh, I do.” I slid my knife back into my pocket right as August’s beady little eyes found mine. Blueberries. That’s why she refused to eat them. His eyes were like two little blueberries, and my little viper almost gauged them out with her key. God, I fucking missed her.
“Got something on your blonde.” Jim held out his phone in front of me. “Recognize her? ”
My gut clenched as I shook my head. “No. Local or federal?”
“Looks to be fed.” He pocketed his phone and cracked his knuckles. “She won’t find a trace of her informant, by the way.”
“As expected,” I replied, checking the time on my watch.
“Need me to handle her, too?”
My phone vibrated with a message, and my eyes widened in delight. It was great when the universe just aligned in your favor for fucking once. “Fed—you’re sure?” He nodded, crossing his arms over his chest. “Get me her name and number. A ghost just appeared. I’ve got somewhere I need to be.”
“You start smoking?” Jim asked, his eyes falling to my shoulder.
I glanced at the speck of ash and flicked it off. “No. That part isn’t your concern.”
“Let me know when it is, then.” Jim clucked his tongue, our attention falling back to the sobbing rat in the chair. “I was kind of looking forward to never seeing this one’s face again. Always tearing up my parking spots with his glass and shit.” He spit near August’s foot. “His fucking friends, too. They all need a rude awakening.”
My eyes slid over to Jim. “Maybe put the comics down for a change and run the store like you’re supposed to.”
Jim shrugged with one shoulder. “I get bored.” He jerked his chin toward August. “I understood the others, but why’re you keeping him alive? I could just—” Jim drew a line across his throat. “You know, like some of the others.”
August whimpered like a lost puppy as his blueberry eyes darted between Jim and me .
“I refuse to lie to Rose, and if I kill him, I’ll have to tell her.” I turned and started for the door. “She doesn’t deserve to have his death weighing on her mind for the rest of our happy lives.” August’s body lost its jerky vigor as he took in the words I was saying. I wasn’t going to kill him, and I knew that I wasn’t going to when I stepped foot in this room. The marks he now had on his body, however, were going to haunt him for the rest of his life. I glared at August. “I’m not going to bother threatening you to stay away from her because I believe you finally might get it now. Here’s your plan—move. Get as far away from the state of New York as you fucking can and never return. And every night before you go to sleep, I want you to thank my future wife, Rose, for your life. Every. Single. Day. You will go on about your miserable existence, knowing that she alone is the reason you still breathe. She alone is the reason you will never cover those cuts along your skin. She alone is the reason you get more chances than you should have ever had.”
Just as I pulled the handle, August’s ragged breathing paused long enough for him to ask, “I didn’t believe it, but you really love her, don’t you?”
I didn’t bother answering and let the door swing shut behind me. Actions always spoke louder than words, and my next action was going to end it all.