Chapter 15
DEVIL
There was a reason I was given this name. I could manage my rage, could quieten it until most people didn’t even realise it was there, but when it erupted it had no mercy.
“Please!” Pierce screamed, his body convulsing as I hit him with the cattle prod Tybalt conveniently plugged in for me when he learned who this motherfucker was.
No one hurt Jessia and lived. So, I drove the prod into one of the welts I’d already painted across his body with a blowtorch, blood oozing from each site until he looked like the monster he was.
His back arched, mangled hands straining against the chains holding him to the wall. His scream was satisfying but not enough, never enough.
“Why should I go easy on you?” I asked in a cold voice.
Whatever warmth I’d possessed had frozen when I saw the blind terror in Jessia’s eyes, when I felt that spike of panic and dread and desperation through the bond.
Raw, cutting, suffocating emotions, all caused by this sick excuse for a man hanging from the wall.
“You hurt my mate. You terrorised her and threatened her.”
I’d held her while she shook and gasped down air, tears in her eyes at the wedding invitation this sick fucker sent. So no, I would not have mercy.
“I’m sorry,” he babbled, his voice blown out, little more than a rasp. I’d been at this for hours, and I saw no reason to stop until he was dead. “I’m sorry, I’ll leave her alone. I swear. She’s nothing to me. You want her? She’s yours, keep her, I don’t care.”
I drove the prod into another welt and turned the charge up to full. “I intend to keep her, but I don’t need your permission.”
His scream covered my words, and he couldn’t see me because I’d already burned his eyeballs to gory pits, but I spoke the words anyway. He thought Jessia was his, thought she belonged to him, a possession to lend out at will if it saved his ass. And that didn’t just make me angry. It made me livid.
“Please!” he screamed. “Please.”
I ripped the prod away, shut off the current, and discarded it as I searched for a knife.
“That,” I said with icy rage, “is enough of your pathetic pleading.”
It wasn’t a clean slice. I had to hack his tongue off with rough, messy cuts, but the blood that spilled over his chin and the desperate whines he was reduced to were a balm to my rage.
I threw the dismembered tongue aside and contemplated the slab of bloodied meat in front of me.
So many places left for pain to burrow. So many possibilities.
“Right,” I said, approaching the table of tools. “What shall we do next?”