Chapter Four. The Huntsman #2
From behind her, her right-hand man steps forward, his long white locs covering his chest and those unblinking blue eyes fixed on me.
“I didn’t formerly introduce you last time, but this is my counselor Mirror.”
Mirror? If that shit is on his birth certificate, his mother must’ve hated him.
Abena glances at the still-silent man and says, “Tell him the news you brought me not too long ago.”
“Eshe hasn’t been killed. She’s alive.”
Since that ain’t news to me, I don’t say shit.
First, I don’t owe her an explanation. She gave me a week to kill her niece, and it’s been three days. Second, rage wraps around my voice like barbwire, tearing into it, shredding it.
She’s violated me. Her and her man. They’ve violated my space.
Doesn’t matter that this room is nearly empty and reveals nothing about me. Doesn’t matter that the few precious things I own are locked away behind a steel-enforced door in my closet that’s only accessible by retina scan.
This world hasn’t given me shit. Everything I have, I’ve fought, stolen, and killed for.
I’ve bled and have been broken for. And for her to touch it, to walk up in it like she owns it, like she has rights to it?
This woman who has never known what it is to sleep in a gutter with only a stolen magazine for cover?
Never known what it is to paw through a restaurant’s trash and fight rats for dinner?
Never had to wear shoes until her toes pushed through the soles and were scrubbed raw by the pavement?
Yeah, she’s violated me tonight by being here. This is my shit. And I don’t know how she found the place I lay my head, and I’ll figure that out later. Right now, though, the only heart she needs to be worried about beating outside its chest is hers.
“You want to explain to me why I received word less than an hour ago that my niece was spotted riding through downtown Boston? I paid you to get a job done. To carve her fucking heart from her chest and give it to me in a box. This shouldn’t have been too hard a job for the gotdamn bogeyman of the underworld.
She’s one woman. You mean to tell me the Huntsman can’t kill one fucking woman? ”
The question ends on a shrill scream, and my fingers ache to wrap around her skinny-ass neck and snap it like a fucking chicken’s.
She knows as well as I do that Eshe isn’t just any woman.
If she were, Abena would’ve sent one of her bitch-ass boys after her niece.
But Eshe would’ve sent them hos back to her in pieces.
Probably with smiley faces carved in them.
After officially meeting her, I don’t put it past the crazy bitch.
“That whole selective mutism shit might work when you don’t have five million of my dollars with nothing to show for it.
” She tilts her head, a sneer riding her face.
“I guess underneath the reputation and all-black clothes, you’re just like any other man.
Get right up to the edge but, when it comes down to it, can’t get a woman off. I’m sorry—I mean, can’t off her.”
She smiles, but there’s no warmth there. Whoever gets fucked by Abena deserves whatever they get. When you get in bed with a cobra, you’re knowingly taking your life in your hands.
“Did you even find her?” she presses.
I continue to stare at her, mentally counting the seconds it would take me to cross the space separating us, snap her neck, disarm her underboss of the Heckler I don’t trust cleaners to come behind me like some of the families do.
That’s more people who know my business.
But I’m not used to doing it in my own home.
And while I drag the bodies of the two men over my kitchen floor into the utility room, my annoyance grows.
Quickly but meticulously, I strip them of their clothes and stuff them into a separate duffel bag to burn.
Then each body goes into its bag for transportation to a pig farm outside the city.
After returning to the kitchen, I mop and then scrub the floor and island and walls, ensuring no blood or brain matter or evidence of the two men—or even Abena and her second—can be located in my apartment.
Once that’s taken care of, I head to the bathroom to shower and take care of the cuts on my body.
Staring in the fogged-up mirror at the various bandaged or superglued wounds, my mind flies to the woman who is at the root of all this shit.
No, she didn’t put the wheels in motion, but it comes back to her. We have unfinished business.
I brush a fingertip over the slice directly above my pierced nipple, and a heated knot twists tight and deep in my stomach. For a moment, the pain of the knife and the pleasurable pulls of her mouth on my flesh sear my memory, my body.
My gaze drops to the red bruising on my wrist, and the lust hardens into something darker, something that I creep closer to like a naked, starved creature inching toward a nurturing fire. Something sticking, smothering that I want to backpedal away from on scraped palms and feet.
Chaining me to that bed tonight … Eshe took me back to a place I promised myself I’d never return to. Transformed me into a person I vowed never to be again.
A victim.
She’ll pay for that.
Her and her aunt.
Starting tonight.