CHAPTER 21
THE DIPLOMAT
I’d forgotten how good pussy felt.
Forgive me Senor Sanchez, for I have sinned.
I know there was a time I couldn’t feel anything.
When Elina died, the world drained of colour.
I became half-man, half-grief, then, you came.
Not with sermons. Not with pity. Just presence.
You found me drunk off rage and sleeplessness.
No judgement, just a quiet hand on my shoulder, and the kind of silence that understood everything without needing words.
‘I know what it costs,’ he said once. ‘To love like that. To lose like that.’
I remember staring at him, fists clenched like love was a crime I’d commit again and again if it brought her back.
‘I can’t go through that again,’ I told him. ‘I won’t.’
He didn’t argue. Just nodded. ‘But, Sal, if you shut the door to love, you shut the door to resurrection. Elina wouldn’t want that.’
His words stuck with me, buried deep under all the guilt. And now, here I am, my hand wrapped around Stella’s throat like a second chance.
We’re hidden barely when one of Charlie’s men appears at the water’s edge.
He scans the embankment, eyes narrowing.
Then, he sees us. But before a word can rise, the air cracks.
An arrow slices the silence and it buries itself deep into the back of his skull.
He drops. No grace. Just knees hitting earth like a puppet with its strings cut.
Three disfigured figures emerge from the trees, their silhouettes twitching unnaturally, limbs bent at angles that defy anatomy.
One drags a rusted blade across the ground, carving a line behind him in the soil, another wears a mask of stitched flesh.
The Trinity.
Dragging the body, they run into the forest, their cackles and laughter anything but human. It’s guttural, inbred, the kind of evil that doesn’t care who you are, only that you run. A raven cronks overhead, startled by the trinity’s madness as they crash through the twisted trees.
‘We have to descend,’ I hiss, pulling Stella from the water.
Her eyes are wide with the kind of fear that doesn’t blink.
‘They stick to high ground,’ I whisper, watching the canopy tremble with their approach.
‘It’s how they control the spread.’ Stella nods.
Below us, the ravine yawns. There’s sharp rocks, and flooded paths.
It’s dangerous, which means they won’t expect us to go there, which means we might have a fighting chance.
The mountain tilts beneath us, a strange slope carved by roots and boulders.
Stella stumbles and I yank her up without breaking stride, and my eyes never leaving the tree line above where The Trinity waits – still, watching, but knowing their arrows would never reach us.
Their black silhouettes bleed into the high canopy.
They don’t chase. They let gravity do the work, waiting for us to fall.
The wind picks up, and Stella’s breath rasps.
I smell it before we see them. The stench slithers into my nostrils like a warning.
It’s metallic, wet, and wrong. The smell of decay, fresh rot, the kind that still twitches.
It bites the back of my throat, sour and coppery like blood left too long in the sun.
Stella retches, hand clamped over her mouth as Paul and Emma swing from a bent pine.
Limp. Stripped of any kindness they may have carried.
The wind toys with them, swaying their bodies like broken marionettes. We stop.
Two bodies hang upside down like butchered game, stripped of skin, their muscles glistening in the remaining light.
I knew them. Even without faces. I knew them.
Both their eyes have been gouged out, sockets stuffed with leaves.
I’ve seen cartel calling cards before – tongues nailed to chests, crude crosses carved into nasal cartilage, the kind of brutality that screams territorial.
But this? This isn’t cartel. And it sure as hell isn’t Charlie.
Paul and Emma were never tied to Charlie’s crew, and while we’re all tangled in this twisted little game, this scene doesn’t bear The Thompson’s signature.
Charlie is all about control, intimidation, threats, not theatre.
Not here anyway. This is something else.
Something feral. Survival instinct gone rabid – The Trinity.
It’s the kind of horror whispered about in towns, the kind that makes locals lock their doors before sundown, the kind of thing inbreeds do when they’ve run out of wild game and started looking at strangers like meat. There’s no message here, just appetite.
‘What the fuck,’ Stella gasps.
‘The Trinity,’ I reply.
‘The who?’
We step closer. Paul’s boots sway in the wind. Emma’s fingers curled unnaturally. Then - a sound that doesn’t belong. High. Thin. Wrong.
A baby.
I freeze. Stella does too - her breath catching like she’s afraid to believe it’s real.
Behind us, tucked in the crook of two trees she sits.
A girl. Barely a teenager. In her arms – cradling a newborn.
She rocks back and forth, back and forth.
The baby wails again. Her rocking slows.
She lifts a hand, inside a severed finger, and with chilling care, she presses it against the newborn’s lips – like a pacifier, a lullaby made of flesh. The child suckles.
‘The fourth sibling,’ I mumble.
‘Sorry?’ Stella asks.
‘Tarran told us she’d seen a girl, up here in the mountains – a young, pregnant girl with her eyes sewn shut.’
‘What do we do?’ Stella’s reply cuts through the tension. I watch the poor girl rock back and forth, the newborn still suckling on the severed finger.
She sits before me, the girl with her eyes cruelly and crudely sewn shut, humming as she rocks the infant in her arms. Tarran had said she’d seen her, but me witnessing this myself - this living elegy – was something else entirely.
‘Well, well, well,’ a voice slithers through the air behind me. Then, the metallic click of a gun, cocked and ready.
Charlie.
‘I thought I heard voices. Looks like your boss held up his end of the bargain,’ he says. ‘What the fuck goes on here then?’
I turn, slowly, hands held like a prayer to god. Charlie’s head turns side-to-side as he nudges the hanging corpse of Paul with the barrel of his gun. It sways gently, like a grotesque pendulum. ‘What kind of sick show are you involved in, Sal?’
I stay silent, lips sealed. I let him talk. Charlie likes the sound of his own voice, so I let him fill the air with bravado instead of bullets. One wrong twitch from me and I’d be nothing but another red smear on the forest floor.
Then I see her.
Stella - emerging from the gnarled tree behind him like something conjured from a nightmare. Her movements are slow, hands raised and fingers curled like she’s creeping up behind him on insect legs, her arms swaying from side-to-side, and a smirk spread across her face.
She’s a freaky bitch, no doubt.
Charlie doesn’t see her, his focus entirely on me.
Her arms stretch wide, as if reaching to embrace him.
But then I see it: a jagged rock cradled in her palm.
Like a cat, she pounces, landing on Charlie’s back, her weight driving him forward.
He stumbles, arms flailing, and the gun goes off sending a bullet screaming into the sky.
I duck, instinct more than thought, heart hammering as Charlie hits the ground hard with a grunt tearing from his throat.
Stella clings to him like a parasite, rolling him onto his back.
I’m too stunned to move, everything happening so fast. Her fingers find the edge of his mask, and rip it free.
It mimics the angular features of a predator – sharp and menacing, but stripped of it, he’s exposed, and suddenly, he looks more like prey.
Her other arm arches high as she straddles him, then it falls fast, plummeting onto Charlie’s mouth with a crunch that splits the air, his scream swallowed before it’s born, and choked by the ruin of shattered teeth and blood.
The sound that escapes him is wet, animal, a gargle that makes my stomach twist.
She draws a breath, ragged from exertion, her chest heaving as she starts to steady herself. ‘I call this one
“An Ode to the Painted Mouth”
My bats didn’t wait for me to speak,
They smelt his rot, and soul so weak.
They drained him slow, and drained his pride,
‘til nothing living stayed inside.
We watched him bleed, and slowly die,
beneath the moonlight that split the sky.
He looked at me, no strength, no guile,
That’s when I removed his smile.
Then I took the bats with silent grace,
as your flames danced across his face.
Now Ritchie’s gone, soon you too,
because the Thompson’s rot in all they do.
Charlie writhes beneath her pinned between her thighs, clawing at anything that might save him, but she’s already raising her arm again.
A beat pauses. Then she leans forward, her skirt hitched slightly over her arse.
Charlie groans beneath her, his mouth a ruin, his body twitching with the last vestiges of fight.
She doesn’t flinch. I step forward and plant my feet either side of Charlie’s legs, staring down at his body twitching in the aftermath of Stella’s wrath.
I lean down, fingers threading through her hair, winding it tight around my fist. Her head tilts back, exposing the curve of her throat.
I hover behind her, my heart pounding – caught between awe and something far more primal.
It tastes like control. I lower myself, knees sinking into the earth, framing Charlie’s legs, and I line my cock up against the entrance to her pussy.