15. Chapter fifteen #2
I can only stare, frozen, as Max drives a dagger—my dagger—deeper under the fingernail of the guy on the stool. The tiny scrape, the way the skin peels back… It’s petty and precise, like carving a message.
A message to start talking, or it’s going to get way worse.
The screaming guy on the chair that Max wanted to “interrogate” is one of Goatee’s sidekicks. The one who was at his side every fucking time, a Touched one. Big, fat, but with a non-remarkable face, smirking at me with those rotten teeth whenever his leader tried to antagonize me.
He’s shoved on a vacant stool in the abandoned cellar, hands and legs lashed to the chair with rope. The place smells like old sweat and spilled alcohol and something sour I can’t name.
Something I don’t even want to name.
My man was quick. Efficient. He barged in like he owned the place, the room folding around him, as it always does. He found the fucker in an instant, lounging in one of the filthy booths, a girl on his lap.
Max hauled her off, rammed him straight in the nose, and before the guy even knew what was happening, ushered him out back and into the stairwell.
This cellar might be awful, but the Den was horrible. Dark as a coffin. Boarded windows, low red bulbs throwing everything the color of dried blood. Some ominous, lazy beat humming through busted speakers, more menace than music.
It used to be a club. The cages where people used to dance are still there… with Walkers inside, gnashing at the bars for whatever scrap of life they can’t have.
As fucking entertainment for the Touched ones.
The people who work there are pale and hollow or wired to the point of grins that don’t reach their eyes. They sell drinks, information, or their own bodies and move like they’ve given up on being people.
My stomach twisted… because the sight of all that? Those caged Walkers, the cruelty? It’s how I could end up if this goes sour, if our plans fail. If Max fails.
My helper side, the idiot who still wants to patch things up and make it right, itches. I can feel the urge to step forward, to shove Max away and bandage the man, to forget strategy for a heartbeat and do something human.
To bring back some of the humanity I lost when I killed his friend.
But I don’t give in to that feeling. I don’t stop him. I might not like it, but I do see the necessity. Not only to stop Joyeus, to expose her. But also to regain freedom. Not only for me, but for all those people out there. This isn’t just about us, about me, anymore.
It’s also for them. For the people back in that dark, ominous room. The people who I just know were smuggled here to earn for her in the most degrading ways, lured here under the guise of freedom on Ibitha.
Those employees are not from here. No one would do that willingly. Not like that. To be used and abused, to be bought and sold, torn down and rebuilt into something that serves someone else. Serves the filthy scum like the blabbering fool stuck on Max’s stool.
Max’s in his element, preening in the room, goading the guy until he breaks. He leans in now, voice low and patient, the kind of soft that makes whatever comes next worse.
“You tell me how you got in, and what Joyeus is doing with that tag machine,” he says, “or you’re gonna find both your hands don’t work no more.”
The guy on the stool laughs, a small, wet sound, blood at the corner of his mouth. “Joyeus is going to kill you for this.”
“Good that you mentioned it. Your tongue is next then, right after I make sure those fingers can’t write either.
” Max snaps back, and the knife slips under the next nail, precise and cold.
The scream that tears out of him is raw and animalistic, high and wet, a sound that proves the man is breaking.
There’s something beautiful about Max like this. Not beautiful in any soft way… an ugly, brutal kind of beautiful.
The way his eyes go flat and clean, the way his hands move like violence has raised them. The little, patient tilt of his head when he listens to him beg. That small pull of his mouth, like he’s actually enjoying this.
Which I know he does. At least that dark, unhinged part of him.
It makes something in my chest twist and burn because I see exactly who he becomes when he lets the monster out, and I like it and I hate it all at once.
It’s his, and he’s mine. All of him. Every jagged, dangerous part of him, however cruel.
“Spill, or I keep this up until you do.”
The guy gurgles something useless. He spits blood, tries to laugh. “You think I’ll—”
Max cuts him off with a fist to his mouth, hard and rattling, and the man spits teeth and blood into his palm. He gurgles, face purple, something wet running down his chin.
Max sighs up at the ceiling like the room owes him an answer. “Why do they always have to be so fucking loyal to the wrong person?”
And then, because mercy is a currency he doesn’t trade in, he stabs the dagger straight into the man’s leg. The blade slides home with an awful wet hush; the guy’s scream rips out raw and immediate.
I flinch, take a step back as the cry breaks into something like sobbing.
“What. Does. She. Do. With. The. Machine.” Max says it slowly, each word a measured blow.
“I don’t know!” he finally screams, voice gone ragged. “She makes tags for us. For people who don’t come through the docks, we arrived up north—”
“Up north?” Max presses, voice low and dangerous.
“The… the research facility. I don’t know what she’s doing up there, but she needs people. They need people,” he stammers, blinking tears into the blood on his lips.
“They?” Max’s eyes narrow, slow and cold.
“No, don’t—I don’t, I don’t know who—” the man babbles, panic and pain tangling together, words spilling over each other until they’re nothing but wet noise.
Max pushes the handle deeper. An ungodly scream tears out of him, higher now, raw and animal, slashing the air.
It’s one thing to kill a man in your defense; it’s something else to torture one on purpose.
But I can’t look away.
My stomach flips and every decent bone in me wants to step in, but some stupid, darker part of me leans closer, intrigued by this.
“I don’t know!” he screams now, voice shredding. “I don’t—I swear I don’t—get it out, get it out!”
“As you wish.” Max pulls the dagger free with slow, deliberate patience. The man hunches forward, gasping, blood bright on his lips.
For one breath, Max takes his handiwork in, and then finally looks up at me.
His eyes find mine and there’s a thing in them I know too well: that quiet satisfaction of someone who’s practiced his cruelty until it’s clean and precise. He doesn’t ask me to condone it; he just lets me see him, all of him, lets me see how right it feels to him.
And fuck how depraved I must be, because it doesn’t scare me, it doesn’t chase me away.
If anything, it only makes me fall harder.
“Guess we have a little field trip ahead of us,” he says, low and casual, like he’s ordering a drink at the bar.
Then he slices his throat.
The motion is quick and terrible. A neat, final cut. The sound is worse than the scream, a ragged hush that turns into a gurgle and then nothing. The man’s hands twitch once, twice. His eyes go wide and stupid and then they slack.
I don’t move. Watch how Max wipes the blade on the man’s sleeve with a single, practiced swipe and comes over to me, tucks the knife back to my hip as if he’s just finished tying his boot. Watch how, as he finds my eyes again and swallows, his nerves chase the demons away.
As if he fears how I’ll react.
And in that wet, perfect silence, I realize the monster has stepped out of Max. He’s back in his own skin after showing me every jagged piece, every ugly scar, every shadow and urge he keeps tucked away.
But I don’t fear him. I fucking don’t. I think I only love him more.