Chapter 25 #3
The knife feels good in my hands. Damn good, and after I tell March to flip Knavish over, Roman shocks me by helping.
Roman never gets his hands dirty. That’s what he has us for, but I appreciate the assist in preventing Knavish from moving his legs.
Wish we were doing this somewhere private, but it is what it is, and March keeps his hand pressed over Knavish’s mouth when I sever the fucker’s Achilles tendons.
Yep, that’ll do it. That’ll keep him from running.
Then March grabs Knavish’s hair and yanks his head up off the ground.
Roman lands a solid punch to Knavish’s head hard enough to stun the bastard so I can dig inside his mouth.
I get a good grip on his tongue—an arduous task for sure, given the saliva and blood pooled in there.
Slicing off his tongue will keep him from screaming.
But he still has some serious fight in him, thrashing in their hold and gagging on his own blood. I want to say I’m impressed by his tenacity, but I’m not. I’m just glad he’s not bleeding to death too quickly. The longer he stays alive, the more fun it will be for me.
March and Roman release him, and Knavish flops down on the dirt, writhing and moaning in agony.
Good. I crouch over him, killing him slowly with little, shallow cuts.
A swipe here, a stab there, each one sapping away his spitefully spunky spirit.
He’s still got that definite gleam in his eyes, but all it takes is a jab of the blade to destroy that as well.
I obliterate his left eye, blinding him while leaving the right one intact. He needs to watch as I hack off every finger on his right hand.
His gurgling groans are music as I ruin him.
“Sit him up,” I demand, and once March and Roman reposition him to keep him from choking to death on his own blood, I sink the blade in his stomach nice and slowly, savoring the resistance of flesh and muscle.
Glorious.
I’ve reduced him to a gooey rag doll, sitting there in a puddle of shit and piss, head slumped forward, face absolutely grotesque, and his hand chopped to pieces.
The hand that he used to hurt Alice. He’s making pathetic, garbled whimpers, and while I’d love to keep going, I have neither my tools nor the time to carve Knavish into a masterpiece, not with a whole party of Wonderland’s aristocracy within spitting distance.
“I’ll see you in hell, you motherfucker.”
One more jab of the blade into the side of his throat finishes him. Knavish falls backward, hitting the ground with a satisfying thud. I watch, content, as he bleeds out.
March whistles, then says, “Nice work.”
“He deserved what he got,” I growl.
Roman surveys the gory scene and, with his face scrunched in a scowl, says, “I never realized how bad this smells.”
He’s always watching through a lens.
“Torturing a person is messy business,” I remark as I dip my hands in the dirty water of the birdbath to wash off the blood. “All those body fluids come with a certain…aroma.”
Roman backs away, and honestly, he’s the only person I know who can have a front seat to what I did to Knavish and somehow come away without a speck of blood on him. March, however, got a fair share of splash on his fancy outfit. And me, well…
I glance down at myself.
Let’s just leave it at that I got more than splashed.
Roman palms his phone to make a call. “It’s done.
Bring her to the car.” He ends the call, then says to me, “Ivory’s bringing Alice down.
Get her and Ivory out of here. I’ll have the Tweedles make this”—he gestures to the butchered meat that used to be Rook Knavish and the puddle of blood around his corpse—“disappear.”
“Much appreciated,” I say as I gather my clothes and hat.
“I’ll keep everyone out,” March offers.
But it’s not quite over yet, and before I leave, I ask Roman, “What about Scarlett?”
For a moment, Roman looks gutted, but the pained expression fades as fast as it came. “I’ll deal with her.” Then, quietly, he adds, “I’ve always been fond of Alice. I am sorry my daughter caused this.”
“How you handle her is your business, but make sure she stays the fuck away from us. That’s all I want, Roman.”
He’s quiet for a beat—a single beat. “I’ll send her to stay with my sister in Godstow.
” He’s never been a man to show emotion, but again, the tiniest flicker of regret seeps through a microscopic crack in his armor.
“I hope time away from Wonderland will allow her to reflect on the hurt she’s caused.
And,” he adds in a broken whisper, “it might also give me a chance to fix the damage I’ve done as a father. ”
I wish I could reassure him that he’s not to blame for Scarlett’s behavior, but he contributed to the problem.
While he was busy building his empire, he made a grave mistake by thinking that fulfilling his daughter’s every desire would make up for his chronic absence.
Wrong. Yet, in contrast, Ivory doesn’t place value on material things.
She embraced the best traits from both parents, while Scarlett inherited the worst. And now this is where we are—Alice traumatized and a man dead in the maze.
Even if she learned nothing at the end of the day, Roman has.
The proof of that is in the defeat reflected in his eyes when he sweeps the gruesome scene I’ve left for him to clean up.