CHAPTER 23
THE RIPPER
GRIMM
The deadliest of poisons come in the smallest of bottles, and I knew better than to underestimate someone with her reputation.
I had already underestimated a certain blonde, and she practically put me on my ass that one time we had a fight.
She stopped next to my father and smiled at him, whereupon he pulled her into a fatherly hug and kissed her forehead, an action that made me frown and wonder if he spawned another child that Klaus and I had no idea about, but she bore no resemblance to any of us.
“Your secret weapon is a woman, Nikolai?” Damiano stepped closer and watched her from above. “What’s she going to do, kill us with her heels?”
I narrowed my eyes.
~ What an idiot.
~ Right? How is he not dead already?
~ Cockroaches survive the longest.
He didn’t see it coming, no one saw it, not even me.
In the next second, he was hauled over the tiny woman’s shoulder and laid on his back, Midnight’s pointy heel pressing down on his windpipe.
“Yes,” she said, giggling like a child as he gasped for air.
She took her foot off him and straddled him, sitting on his stomach and leaning down towards his face, a sadistic grin, that even I couldn’t master, playing on her otherwise innocent-looking face.
“Want me to demonstrate, pretty boy?” she asked as she pulled a knife out of her shoe and hovered the blade over his chest.
“Okay, I got it,” he tried to raise his arms, but her knees were firmly pressed on his forearms.
I watched with morbid fascination as she lightly stroked his skin with the tip of the knife, not enough to kill him, but enough to draw blood and leave a small scar, then she held the knife to her mouth and fucking licked the blood off the blade.
“You taste like fear,” she whispered over his face, allowing the blood on her lips to smear over his cheek.
Damiano’s eyes widened when she stood up, wiped the rest of the blood on his pants, then put the knife back in her boot.
Klaus burst out laughing, Hannibal watched her with sparkling hearts in his eyes, and I looked at her with nothing but respect.
Midnight held her hand out to help him stand up, but the arrogant asshole didn’t take it and stood up on his own, then threw himself in a chair. The woman bent over the edge of the table, looking him dead in the eyes as she licked her lips like a feline ready to cause trouble.
“Cat got your tongue, pretty boy?” she purred.
Damiano looked at her as if he wanted to gouge out her eyes, because he had an ego of astronomical proportions, and the little woman had just stepped all over it with her boots. Literally.
“That’s enough, my dear,” my father said.
“Yeah,” I intervened. “While I do enjoy watching this motherfucker getting his ass handed to him, and I’d pay eleven million to see more of it in the future, we have more important things to attend to,” I said, and she straightened up, finally looking at me.
Damiano flipped me off while Klaus actively struggled to stifle his laughter.
~ Didn’t hold grudges, my ass. You liked seeing him squirm just as much as I did.
“I’ll leave you boys — and lady — to it,” my father said as he turned and respectfully tilted his head in her direction.
He leaned down and whispered something in her ear, and she nodded as she looked at me, then my father left.
I stood up from the chair and chose to introduce myself first, because she was there for me.
“Grimm,” I held out my hand, and she took it with a firm grip.
“I know who you are. I’m Midnight,” she introduced herself. “Actually, I know you all,” she approached Klaus. “You’re the cleaner, big fan,” she shook his hand. “You’re my favorite hacker,” she winked at Hannibal and the boy almost fainted in his chair. “And you are…” she tilted her head to the side and pretended to think about it for a second. “The sexist Italian wanker.”
Damiano rolled his eyes and simmered in his seat. He opened his mouth to attack her, but no sound came out as she glared at him like she’d just found her new favorite toy, which she wanted to torture beyond its breaking point.
Interesting
.
“Why are you all so tall?” she asked as she sat down on the table next to Hannibal’s hand, which froze on the mouse for a moment.
“You’re too small,” Damiano replied, rolling his eyes.
“You know what they say, the bigger they are,” she grinned at him and didn’t finish her sentence as she turned her attention to the screen. “What have we got so far?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I sighed, sitting back down and taking the cup in my hand, stroking my fingers over the unicorn head drawn on it.
“Nothing doesn’t exist, Ripper,” she said as Klaus sat down next to me. “You’re looking at the picture the men who took her painted, what happened before that?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re looking at the kidnappers, but you’re ignoring her,” she began. “Nikolai told me that she was hiding something. Did you try to find out what?”
“No, I couldn’t convince her to tell me,” I said, and I bit the inside of my cheek, wishing I had something more to go on.
“What happened in the days before the kidnapping? I want to know every step she took.”
I sighed.
I thought in detail about all the time we had spent together, feeling the knife shift in the wound, then I started telling her everything that had happened from the moment I made myself known, and at some point, she stopped me.
“Wait, you said you kissed her at the hospital?”
“Yes, and that night someone tried to break into her home, that’s why I moved her things to my place…”
“So, this shit started when you made your so-called relationship public?”
“Sort of. I initially thought it was one of my enemies who wanted to hurt her to get revenge on me, but no… it’s someone from her past, that’s all she told me after she got fired.”
Something seemed to add up in her head, then she jumped from the table and snagged the cigarette Damiano was lighting up, taking a long drag out of it.
“Don’t you find it weird that she was fired a day before she was kidnapped?” The air got stuck in my throat. “It seems oddly convenient, I mean… if you get fired, no one asks why you didn’t come to work, right?”
~ Why didn’t you think of that, idiot?
“You think the director might have something to do with this?”
“Well, he’s the one who fired her, so there could be a connection there.”
Things seemed to line up in my head as I remembered the preposterous reason Arella had been fired for. She would have never offered herself up like that for a surgery, and since she worked in that fucking hospital for three years, that director should have known that she wasn’t the type. While it was a stretch to believe that her boss could have had any involvement with her kidnapping, it was a lead worth following.
“He wasn’t there when I kissed her.”
“He’s the director,” she shrugged. “He has unlimited access to all surveillance cameras in the facility, and I think we should have a chat with him,” she grinned, then took another drag of the cigarette before giving the bud back to Damiano, patting his back. “Thanks, pretty boy.”
*
Director James Colt was a man of medium height and questionable morals.
It took Hannibal ten minutes to find all the rottenness that lay inside him, namely the fact that he owed tens of thousands of dollars to drug traffickers, money he lost while gambling in the casinos used as money laundering facilities.
He had pawned everything he owned and even tried to sell his wife just to get rid of them, since his roulette addiction was stronger than his respect for the mother of his two children, whose college funds were long drained.
I wanted to kill him just for that, and if we added the fact that he might have been an accomplice to Arella’s disappearance, he was in for a world of pain before getting acquainted with death.
He had been rendered unconscious by Midnight, and as a result, he found himself naked on the floor of the crematorium, directly above the grate where his blood would soon be flowing down the drain.
I threw the ice filled bucket in his face.
“Wake up, Jamesy,” I grabbed his hair and lifted his head, waiting for him to open his eyes.
Rotten eyes…
He mumbled something unintelligible and seemed quite at peace before his vision cleared and he could see the sick grin on my face.
He flinched violently, ripping himself out of my hands. Panic could be read in his eyes as he crawled backwards until his back bumped into Midnight’s legs, who looked down at him with boredom.
He shivered, trying to get away from her, but she caught his right hand and plunged the meat hook into his palm.
The echo of the howl that ripped out of his throat brought me morbid fascination.
“Scream louder,” I laughed as I grabbed his left hand, using the second hook to break through his palm.
I screamed in sync with him.
“We can scream until we spit out our lungs, James. Nobody’s going to hear us.”
I threw the thick chain over the beam above us, then pulled on it until the director stood up on his toes and tied it to the grate on the floor.
He hung there like a piece of meat ready to meet his end, thrashing as though he had a chance of escaping.
“Stop struggling so much. We don’t want you to lose your hands,” Midnight said sweetly.
“At least, not yet,” I added.
“Who are you? What do you want?”
He started crying.
I started laughing.
Midnight looked at her nails, a bored expression on her face.
“Oh, come on, James, you know who I am. You watched me on those cameras like a fucking porno, you sick fuck.” I grabbed his cheeks between my fingers and forced him to look at me. “Take a closer look,” I encouraged, and he narrowed his eyes.
He recognized me, and his body began to shiver more violently than it would have had it been dropped in Arctic waters.
“I don’t know anything,” he frantically shook his head.
Midnight started laughing behind him.
“How do you know I want information, James? Maybe I’m just a psycho who wants to torture you until you don’t know your own name.” I shrugged.
“I don’t know,” he continued.
“Who told you to fire her?”
“Fire who?”
I grinned and nodded to Midnight, who took a thick, long spike and hammered it to his right shoulder. His howl sent shivers down my spine, and I grinned as his blood poured thickly out of his wound, falling down his chest and onto the grate.
“That’s one, James, you won’t like what happens after the second.”
I couldn’t stop myself from headbutting him in the face, only because his face seemed rather clean.
“Arella Santino. Who told you to fire her?” I repeated the question.
“Nobody. She tried to bribe me with—”
He didn’t get the chance to finish his sentence.
“You really expect me to believe she would offer herself to you?” I yelled in his face at the same time my fist connected with his jaw. “You spread these nasty lies about her for what?” I punched him again. “What did you do to her, James?” I gripped his throat in my palm and cut off his air as I leaned over his face. “I’ll ask you again. Who the fuck told you to fire her?”
“Nobody,” he cried, blood spurting out of his mouth.
Another spike pierced through his left shoulder, and Midnight handed me the current clamps.
James’ eyes widened when he saw them, following the cable to the battery I had them connected to, then he started to frantically shake his head and beg me not to do it.
“Please, man, they’ll kill me if I tell you…”
~ How I hate it when they call me “man”.
“James, you’re already dead… how much pain you take until you shake hands with death is entirely up to you,” I told him, then attached the clamps to the spikes and stepped away from the metal grate, taking the remote in my hand.
“Who told you to fire her?”
He shook his head, starting to say a crooked prayer, and I swore through my teeth as I pressed the button. The current aggressively traveled his body, and when I stopped the electricity and jumped back up, white saliva was slipping out of his mouth.
~ Disgusting.
“Who?” I yelled at him, starting to lose my patience.
~ As if you had any to begin with.
“I don’t know. They were traffickers. They told me they’ll erase my debt if I fire her.”
“Where were they from? What did they look like?”
“Tan, fucking tall, one of them had blond hair. They all look the same, for fuck’s sake. Mexicans, I think…”
“You think, or you know, James?” I took out my hunting knife and pressed the blade flat to his stomach.
“I don’t know, they spoke Spanish. What the hell is the difference?” He spat in my face, and I wiped my cheek with the back of my hand.
“Do you know why they call me the Ripper, James?” I ran the blade down his belly, adding enough pressure to split the skin.
“N-no…” he whispered through hiccups.
“Do you want to find out?” I grinned, then moved the blade up, following the exact line, deepening the cut.
He screamed and thrashed in the chains, the hooks pulling at his skin, intensifying his pain.
I moved the blade down again, and up again, careful not to go too deep, feeding on his agony-filled cries until his belly was opened and I could see his intestines.
Midnight watched the whole thing from the side lines, fascinated.
“I’ll pull out your guts and leave them hanging out of you, and you will beg for death, which will definitely come, but it can last long, agonizing hours, which you probably already know, because you’re a doctor, right?”
“Please, I don’t know anything more… I did it to erase my debt. I have no idea who they were or what they wanted with Arella.”
“What if they want to cut her open and sell her organs, James? What if they want to drug her and turn her into a prostitute?” I pushed the spikes deeper into his flesh. “Would you have slept soundlessly at night? Would you have kissed your children knowing you sold someone? Would you have hugged your wife knowing that you have killed mine?” I cut out one of his nipples and shoved it in his mouth, but he spat it out.
“Please, I didn’t know what their plans were. They just told me that my debt would be paid if I fired her.” Blood came out of his nose, mixed with mucus.
“Please what, you piece of shit?” I clenched my jaw. “You swore an oath to do no harm and broke it because you’re too much of a coward to face the consequences of your own actions. How much did you owe those fuckers, huh?”
“Two hundred thousand,” he cried.
“Two hundred…” I rubbed my temples, hitting the side of my head a few times, trying to regain my composure after hearing the number.
~ Too late.
“You sold my heart for two hundred?” I screamed, grabbing the back of his neck as I sneaked my hand under his skin, grabbing his intestines before pulling them out as I stepped back.
I paced the room as he cried and I smoked several blood-stained cigarettes. I completely ignored his begging, doing my best not to put a bullet in his head.
He lasted ten minutes.
“Colombians,” he whispered, coughing out blood. “They were Colombian. It’s all I know, I swear.”
I nodded and took a step towards him, then shoved my hand through the opening of his belly, pushing under his ribs until I gripped his heart in my hand.
My heart pounded in my chest as I considered the fact that the flight she arrived on nine years ago wasn’t because she was coming back from a trip to Colombia, but because she was from there. It was true that she didn’t have the physical features typical of a Latina woman, but the director just admitted that one of the guys had blonde hair, so maybe Hannibal and I were wrong to assume that she wasn’t a Colombian woman just because she didn’t have the skin tone and hair to match.
I used my free hand to grab his face, forcing him to look me in the eye so I could watch the life draining out of him as I ripped his heart out, throwing it on the floor.
His body went limp.
I screamed in desperation, frustrated that I hadn’t found out anything of real value, because the motherfucker really didn’t know more, and I kicked his chest with my boot, so hard his hand ripped out of the hooks, and his cadaver fell over the grate.
*
“We have to find out who she is,” Midnight told Hannibal when we went back up.
“I don’t have enough information to go on. I searched through every database there is, I ran her face through all facial recognition software, I even hacked into WITSEC, and those fuckers are really good at inscription. I still couldn’t find her,” Hannibal turned to her.
I felt myself growing more desperate by the second. The hope that Midnight’s arrival had pumped into me started to slither away and Arella’s absence broke me to the core of my being.
“We know she’s from Colombia…”
I lit a cigarette and threw myself in a chair, bumping my head on the edge of the table. I was running out of patience, and the director burning in the incinerator hadn’t given us any more than we already knew. I was on the verge of leaving and turning all of Colombia upside down until I found her. House by fucking house, door by fucking door.
“Yes,” Hannibal replied with a frown.
“And we know there were others chasing her before, also connected to the cartels, right?”
“Yes,” I gritted my teeth, bumping my head against the table once more.
“So, it’s clear that the ones who took her are associated with the Narcos.”
“Yeah, but she’s not a fucking drug dealer,” I yelled, exasperated. “I can’t see any connection between my woman and the fucking Narcos,” I slammed my fist on the table.
I hated how every answer posed ten more questions.
“What if she’s the daughter of one, have you thought of that?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
No
.
The answer pierced through me like an arrow.
How could I have missed that?
I remembered that I had suspected that Arella had grown up in an environment as crime-filled as I did, and therefore had never batted an eyelid at what I had brought her into.
That was why my life and what I was doing didn’t scare her.
That was why the only question she asked when she first patched me up was whether I was killing innocent people.
“Fuck.”