RADIOHEAD - BODYSNATCHERS
I should have felt sick to my stomach.
I should have wanted to run screaming for the hills.
But the second I walked into the warehouse and saw the body-shaped bag on the floor, a great welter of calm overtook me.
To reach this point, I’d taken a path I could never have imagined stepping upon when I was younger. A path Jessie would never have wanted me to take. But for all that it was so wrong, it felt right.
I felt calm.
At peace.
It had been so long since I’d experienced this level of serenity that it was almost as if I’d been forsaken.
“You get the top. I’ll deal with the bottom,” Nyx rumbled, breaking into my heavy thoughts.
“How did they get him?” I asked as I studied the heavy-duty liners that shrouded Francis Merriweather’s body.
Three thick lines of duct tape kept everything in place. There were the tiniest of breathing holes that had been popped in the plastic canopy shielding his mouth to grant him some air, but I had to figure that was why he was so still—there wasn’t enough oxygen for a mouse, never mind a man.
“Why do you need to know how they got him?” Nyx asked. “He’s here, ain’t he? S’all that matters.”
“I want to know how much time we have.”
“Good question.”
The booming tone was so chipper that it had me withholding a shudder.
I truly felt as if Mr. O’Donnelly Sr. was the devil himself.
Nyx and I didn’t have the best of relationships.
He tolerated me as he taught me how to clean up a crime scene, Cruz helping out with the chemicals and the deeper explanations as to how things worked.
When I asked questions, he answered to the best of his ability, and throughout the hazing, he, Cruz, and by the end, Rex, had been kind to me.
They didn’t like me though.
I regretted that.
I’d never fitted in, and even in the MC, it appeared as if I wouldn’t.
“You have about three hours before his security detail realizes he’s not in his girlfriend’s bed where he should be.”
“Where’s his girlfriend?”
“Do you really care?” Nyx aimed at me, making it clear he didn’t.
“She’s dead?” I rasped, his tone prompting me to assume the worst.
“Figure she’s bound to be.”
“You’d be right. She’s the patsy.”
Turning to O’Donnelly, I murmured, “Won’t her family be hurt in the fallout?”
“She shouldn’t have shacked up with a married congressman then,” was O’Donnelly’s retort.
Nyx tried to pass me a knife. “Just get on with it. This is what you’ve been waiting for, isn’t it?”
“No one else was supposed to get hurt.”
“You wanted the freedom to do these things,” Nyx retorted. “Freedom is expensive.”
Clenching down on the side of my cheek, I nodded my understanding.
Throughout the weeks of hazing, of Prospecting, of cleaning up their shit—literally—of learning how to dispose of a body in a pinch, of learning how to make a crime scene spotless, this was what I had been waiting for.
And to be honest, it was coming sooner than anticipated.
I’d gone to the Sinners’ clubhouse hoping to get help, wanting to know how the MC navigated these waters.
I’d watched them infiltrate Haune’s home. I’d seen them lynch him. I’d observed cameras on the sides of buildings drift out of shot as they passed through a street.
They were ghosts.
Living ghosts.
I’d wanted that power, and now that it was here, within reach, I didn’t know how I felt. Not when someone had died to make this happen, to give me what I’d craved most.
Agitated, I accepted the knife Nyx handed me.
A weapon, no longer a tool.
Notching the tip into the plastic, I slid it along the black wrapping and through the tape, uncaring if it scored the flesh beneath.
As the sides parted, a man was revealed to me. I’d never even heard of him until I’d searched online for his name, but he was naked apart from a pair of pajama pants.
The same duct tape bound his hands and ankles. His eyes were closed and his mouth slack. His skin was faintly blue from asphyxiation.
“Nyx tells me this is your first kill,” O’Donnelly murmured, making me jolt as I hadn’t realized he’d moved so close to me.
With his hands on his knees, he loomed above Merriweather. The pine tones of his aftershave overpowered the air around me.
“It is,” I confirmed.
“The seminary wasn’t atonement?”
“No.” I scowled at him, insulted by the question. “It was not. I felt a calling.”
I still did. It had just shifted directions now.
O’Donnelly nodded. “It wasn’t strong enough to counter this though, was it?”
“You trying to stop him or help him?” Nyx sniped.
It was then I realized just how insane Nyx was because he wasn’t scared of O’Donnelly.
At. All.
I was terrified.
More of the man who’d crouched awkwardly beside me than of what I was about to do.
O’Donnelly recognized it too. He shot Nyx a smirk, one that said he appreciated my brother’s lack of fear.
Straightening up, he raised his hands and said, “Heaven forbid I distract you.” With a glance around the warehouse, he continued, “This’ll be where your kills are brought.”
“They’ll always be brought to us? I thought you didn’t want to include the Five Points in this business?”
“I don’t, and I never said I used my men to bring him here, did I?
” was O’Donnelly’s cold retort. “How I get them to this warehouse is none of your business. Just know it’s clean and won’t be easy for the authorities to trace.
This is my home away from home. I ain’t about to taint it by giving the cops a reason to sniff around the place.
” He wafted a hand at me. “Make it entertaining.”
The knife slipped in my palm as I stared down at the congressman.
What he enjoyed made my skin crawl, and when I thought about the death certificate in my father’s office, when I’d read about everything Samuel Haune had done to my baby sister, it made it easy to ask, “Do you know what stigmata is?”
I didn’t exactly direct it at Nyx but he was the one who answered, “No.”
“I wasn’t asking you.”
O’Donnelly released a soft laugh. “How very, very perfect for a man of God. I know what it is, son. You want to play with him before he dies, do you?” The laughter turned into a cackle as he called out, “Jonesy, bring out the St. Andrew’s Cross.”
“You have a crucifix on hand?” I sputtered.
O’Donnelly murmured, “I have a great many things on hand.” He slapped his own together. “This is perfect, more perfect than I could have imagined.”
“Will someone tell me what the fuck stigmata is?”
“It’s a phenomenon that befalls the ardent believer. They’re ailed with the plights of Christ as he died on the cross,” I explained to him, the rightness of my words making gooseflesh wave up and down my spine. “A crown of thorns, a stab wound to the side, marks of the nails at the hands and feet.”
Nyx rolled his eyes. “Only a Catholic would come up with this shit. That’s how you want to kill him?”
My hands curled into fists. “That’s how I want to kill him,” I confirmed.
“Fucking weirdo,” Nyx grumbled, “but it’ll stink less than what Giulia likes.”
“What does she like?”
“Fire. You ever smelled burning flesh before?”
I reared back in disgust. “No. How could I?”
O’Donnelly snorted. “Give it time, boy. Your repertoire will grow.”
At that moment, I had the choice to walk away.
Merriweather was unconscious, nothing had happened other than kidnapping which, granted, was a felony, but we could dump his body somewhere…
The man O’Donnelly had called Jonesy and a few others brought out a cross on a kind of trolley—as if it were an everyday occurrence. Something that was only compounded when I heard them talking about the last Lakers’ game of the season.
O’Donnelly was talking to Nyx; their focus wasn’t on me.
My heart started pounding.
I should walk away.
This wasn’t my place.
Jessie wouldn’t want this.
She’d been so proud when I’d been accepted into the seminary—
The man’s eyes popped open.
He stared at me as I stared at him, only his were dazed and bloodshot.
All I could think was that they looked like any other person’s eyes.
There was no malevolence in them; no hint about what he was capable of. No hint about what he’d done or would do in the future if I didn’t stop him.
No sign of his wickedness.
I raised my hand and it was unerringly steady.
I released a breath as I pressed the tip of the blade to his forehead.
His eyes widened as he realized what I was about to do.
He started to roll his head to the side, his struggles weak and limp from what he’d endured just getting here, but Nyx appeared and he helped me out by keeping him still.
His fingers snagged in his hair, pinning him in place.
There was no walking away.
Not because he’d seen me, not because he knew what we looked like, but because those eyes weren’t loaded with the evil that would have warned people of his true nature.
They were just irises and pupils and sclera.
My hand moved of its own volition.
Merriweather released a sob that morphed into a terrorized shout when the tip of my blade dug into the flesh of his forehead, which was when Nyx released a shaky, relief-soaked sigh.
We shared a glance, one loaded with understanding for the first time, a connection drifting into being as we reveled in the spurt of Merriweather’s blood, of his bone and cartilage crunching beneath the force of my hand.
His screams rang in my ears as I made three vertical slices. One at either temple, then a final one in the center.
Those screams nourished something inside of me that had been starving.
A welter of relief flooded me.
It drowned the ache in my soul.
My sister.
Jessie.
So innocent, so pure.
She’d dreamed of becoming a ballet dancer, had loved K-Pop, and was lactose intolerant—a fact she always forgot when she wanted ice cream.
Her laughter had filled a room with joy.
Such a good heart, so kind, and all of that snatched away by a man just like Merriweather.
A man who craved her purity, her innocence. Who lusted after something that was never his to possess.