A Delicate Kind of Carnage (Pretty Savage #3)

1. Reth

RETH

My body wants it.

That’s the first coherent thought that claws its way through the wreckage of my mind.

Before the bone-deep cold of the stone floor leeches into my skin, before the suffocating darkness presses against my eyes like wet cloth, before the stench of this room—old copper blood, bleach, piss, shit, and that sweet underlying rot that never quite leaves—there is only the wanting.

It lives low in my gut like a parasite with hooked teeth, spreading outward through my veins, wrapping iron fingers around my spine, squeezing the base of my skull until my vision tunnels and my teeth ache.

More.

I know exactly what she put in me. I felt the needle slide in.

The familiar warmth that followed. Heroin cut with something worse, something she’s perfected over the years to keep her victims docile.

My body doesn’t care about chemistry. It knows only the screaming absence of that warmth now.

The void is chewing through me from the inside out, gnawing on every nerve ending, turning my blood to broken glass.

All it took was one goddamn hit, and now I’m sitting here with my skin crawling like I’m trying to tear myself out of it.

“Fuck!” I’m on my feet, legs shaking like a newborn foal. “Valeria!”

The scream rips out of me like I’m tearing my own throat open. It slams against the stone walls and ricochets back. I don’t wait for the echo. I’m already pacing—six steps, wall, six steps, wall—because that’s all this fucking box allows. Six steps and stone. Six steps and stone.

The motion does nothing to quiet the storm inside me. The craving and the rage have fused together into something molten, the same temperature, the same vicious hunger.

“Valeria, I know you’re watching, you sick, rotten, cock-sucking cunt!”

My fist explodes against the wall. Skin splits instantly. Blood sprays. The pain is sharp, honest, beautiful.

I hit it again. Harder.

Again.

Because the pain is the only thing cutting through the withdrawal and the grief and the black tar flooding my chest. My knuckles are already pulp. I don’t stop.

Mary is dead.

Mary is dead.

The memory won’t leave me alone. It plays on repeat behind my eyes like a snuff film I can’t turn off.

Her body crumpled on the floor of that goddamn room.

The fireplace poker—thick iron, still warm from the flames—stabbed through her throat at a brutal angle.

Blood everywhere. So much fucking blood.

It had poured out of her in thick, dark sheets, soaking her hair, seeping into the cracks between the floorboards.

Her eyes were open. Wide. Surprised. Like even at the end she couldn’t believe that someone she loved like a mother could do this.

Valeria had stood over her, calm as ever, wiping a single red speck from her cheek with the back of one manicured finger. Then she’d looked at me and smiled like a proud mother watching her son take his first steps.

“Valeria!” I roar again, voice cracking like breaking glass, and look right at the camera set high against the ceiling in the corner, staring directly at it. “You evil, soulless whore. Open that door so I can rip your fucking spine out with my bare hands. Valeria!”

I grab the metal chair—the same one I’ve sat in while carving information out of men for her pleasure—and hurl it up at the goddamn camera with every ounce of strength left in my ruined body.

It hits the far wall with a deafening crash, metal twisting, one leg snapping off and spinning wildly toward the drain in the center of the floor.

The drain that’s swallowed more blood than most battlefields.

A maniacal laugh erupts from my lungs, something primal.

Something completely wrong. “You better kill me, Valeria. Or I swear to God, I’ll kill you.

And it’ll be slow. So fucking slow. I’ll peel your skin off with a goddamn potato peeler.

” I pull my hands through my hair, tugging viciously at the ends, pacing.

“I’m gonna split you open from cunt to throat, tear your insides out and watch them steam in my hands. You hear that?”

I slam my shoulder into the reinforced door so hard something deep inside pops and shifts wrong. Pain flares white-hot through my arm, but I do it again. And again. Blood from my ruined hands streaks down the steel.

“Come in here! Face me, you gutless, pedophile bitch! I’ll rip your fucking heart out and make you choke on it!”

The viewing slot in the door slides open with a soft mechanical hiss. I’m against the goddamn door the moment her eyes appear—dark, flat, amused. Like she’s watching a particularly entertaining animal destroy its cage.

“Nazareth,” she purrs, voice dripping with that false warmth she’s always used like a blade. “You need to calm yourself, boy.”

“Fuck you!” I slam my fist into the door, not registering the way my flesh bursts open, then throw myself against the door again, screaming, fists pounding steel until fresh blood runs down my forearms. “You killed my sister. Your own grandson’s mother! Psycho cunt!”

“You were unwell that night,” she says softly, like she’s soothing a fevered child. “The things you think you remember—”

“I remember everything!” I’m sobbing and screaming at the same time now, snot and blood and spit running down my chin onto my chest. “I saw you kill her!”

“That’s not—”

“Oh, no, no, no, no.” I retreat from the door, glaring at her eyes, knowing exactly what she’s trying to do. “Don’t you fucking dare. Your voodoo, goddamn motherfucking mind games won’t work on me, Valeria. Not anymore. You murdered Mary,” I bite out, spit exploding from my mouth.

“You were so hurt when she confessed to knowing what you’ve been through.” Valeria's voice through the slot. Soft. Precise. A scalpel finding the exact place that's already open.

It’s like a knife jabbed into my chest, the memory flashing so bright it knocks me off my feet, my knees hitting the concrete.

Mary's voice. Mary's face. The way she looked at me like she'd been carrying it for so many years and couldn't carry it one more second.

"I was scared, Reth. And afraid, and I didn’t want to go back to that home. I didn’t want to go back to being an orphan.”

I can hear her. I can actually hear her, her voice in this room, in this cell, and I press my fists against my eyes like I can push the memory back out, and I can't. It's already everywhere.

“I was a little girl, and I didn't know what to do, and she promised me nothing bad will happen. She swore to me."

“You knew.” My voice breaks on sobs. “You knew what they did to me,” I cry. "All I wanted to do was protect you."

My fist hits the floor. The stone takes it without flinching.

"But you knew. You fucking—"

Again.

"—you fucking knew."

The skin splits open further. I don't feel it.

“You have to forgive me. I just…we were alone, Reth. Had nothing, no one—”

“I had no one!” I scream. “I had fucking no one!”

“I chose a life. A life for both of us.”

“Everything I did was for you, Mary.” I’m not crying, I’m dying, tears like knives cutting out of me, my ribs breaking over and over again, and it’s too much. It’s too heavy, too thick, too loud, too dense, and I fall forward, forehead meeting the floor with a sick, dull thunk that I barely notice.

“I loved you, little sister.” Spit dribbles from my mouth.

“I protected you…and you…you fucking knew!” A scream tears from my lungs—this rotten, vicious thing that’s not human—my nails scratching the stone, desperate for purchase, breaking, bleeding.

But nothing, no ache, to burn, no break comes close to the pain squeezing marrow from my bones.

I’m on my hands and knees on the floor of this room, and I’m me and my fourteen-year-old self simultaneously and there is no difference between those two people right now.

They are the same person. They have always been the same person.

The boy who waited for someone to come and the man who stopped waiting and learned to be the kind of thing that doesn't need anyone to come, because needing is weakness and weakness is—

She's gone.

She confessed, and she's gone, and I didn't—I didn't get to—

I didn't tell her I forgave her. I don't know if I forgave her. I don't know if I would have forgiven her if Valeria hadn't—

“The guilt is eating you alive, isn’t it?”

My gaze whips to Valeria’s eyes, hatred melting my skin, my flesh, my soul.

“Poor boy. You always did love her too much.”

“Fuck you!” I’m on my feet and ram my shoulder into the steel door before falling back to my knees and onto my side. My hands are destroyed—knuckles split to the bone, blood everywhere. The room tilts violently.

Mary. My little sister. The only pure thing I ever had in this fucking life.

The girl I held in a hospital room when I was little and promised to protect forever.

Dead because of me. Because I wasn’t strong enough.

Because I kept crawling back to this hell for her sake.

Because Valeria knew exactly which lever to pull.

“I wonder what your little therapist would say if she knew.”

“Sophia,” I murmur, and somehow everything hurts even worse. She’s out there, waiting for a man who might already be gone. My Cherry-red. The only woman I’ve ever been inside. The only one who ever made me feel human.

I close my eyes, and if I try really, really hard, I can still hear her laugh. I can still feel arms around my neck for the first time—the first time I’ve ever allowed someone touch me there willingly. Her hands, her fingers, so fucking soft and warm.

God, I need her.

I need her voice. Her face, her smile. Her body.

Feel the way her tight walls clench around my cock like she wants to keep me buried inside her forever.

I want to crawl through the dark and find her.

I want to pin her down and fuck her until the memory of this room disappears.

I want to wrap my bloody, ruined hands around her throat while I drive into her deep and make her scream Nazareth until her voice breaks.

I want to fill her with so much of my cum that it leaks out of her for days.

I want to own her so completely that even if I die down here, some part of me stays alive inside her body.

I need her so fucking badly it feels like another kind of death. There is no part of me able to move, no feeling except this solid weight of loss and want, heavier than any chain.

I’m nothing.

I’m every bone I’ve broken.

I’m every life I’ve taken.

But I’m nothing.

"There he is," I hear Valeria say softly. Like she's been waiting for exactly this. Me on the floor with nothing left. This is the destination she's been navigating toward all along.

Then something small slides through the slot and hits the floor right in front of my face.

A little plastic bag. White powder. Not much. Just enough.

The sight of it reminds me how badly I need it, the craving a living blade now, carving through muscle and bone and whatever’s left of my soul.

White powder means relief.

White powder means escape. Salvation and hell and the gentle hush of nothing.

My body lunges for it before my mind can catch up, bloody fingers shaking so violently I almost drop it.

I stare at it. Look back up at Valeria’s eyes in the slot.

“Fuck you,” I whisper, voice raw and broken.

She waits, patient as ever.

Mary’s blood-soaked hair. Sophia’s green eyes. The basement when I was fourteen. The men who taught me exactly what my pretty face was good for while Valeria watched.

The nights I begged for it to stop and learned that begging only made it worse.

I tear the bag open with my teeth, tell myself just this once. Just this fucking once.

Just until everything’s numb.

I press my face to the floor and inhale.