Chapter 32
Quill
Present Day
“No.”
Anger beats at me as I rip the paper into tiny shreds. “No.”
Stupid fucking idiot, I think to myself the next second. It would have made a lot more sense to accept the contract and then figured out how to save Piper the minute I was free.
Then again, Tragen, unlike me, isn’t an idiot. He’s the only one who seems to understand the depths of my obsession. I’m sure he’d see right through me if I did say yes.
Plus, even if I did manage to get out of here, he’s shown me how good he is at finding out what he wants to know. There would be no hiding.
So I guess this is what he meant when he said he’d make it easy.
It’s a set-up, and I’m going to die. Easy for him. Not for me.
I grit my teeth and look up at him.
He’s smiling, and I want to lunge at his throat. Maybe I could. I could probably manage to scratch him before he gutted me like a fish. I may be the best soldier, but even I could never measure up to him.
I could try, though. Getting gutted like a fish would probably be a kinder fate than whatever he’s got planned for me.
The only thing stopping me is that… well, I don’t want to.
I guess, in the hierarchy of things I don’t give a fuck about, he’s pretty close to the boundary that separates them from the one thing I do care about.
The one girl I care about, rather. Though with the way I currently feel about my annoying, cruel little possession, girl and thing are pretty much interchangeable.
Tragen, Liam and Dane are right at that limit where I’d probably feel just a slight pang of something if I killed them.
It wouldn’t stop me, but maybe it would slow me down.
So instead of attacking Tragen, I keep a sullen eye on him, waiting for him to do his worst.
His worst is to sit down across from me and slide a picture toward me. I don’t even have to glance at it to realize it’s a bad quality photo taken by a phone. Which he’s printed out.
Who is this fucking boomer?
Then my blood turns to liquid nitrogen in my veins, freezing them, suffocating me from inside as I recognize it.
A picture I’d hoped never to see again.
The proof that my possession is a fucking snake, and she should, by all rights, be dead. She would be, too, if I wasn’t a weak bastard.
Naked in the arms of a man. His cock inside her. She’s smiling. Fucking smiling.
The flash of the cell phone has him cast in the shadows and I can’t make out a thing about him, or he’d have spent the weeks following that picture being sent to me strung up in my living room while I carved away at his body, little by little, listening to the sweet music of him pleading uselessly for his life.
Instead, it was just my fate to get this picture from a private number, probably a throwaway I never managed to trace.
And for the flash of the picture to obscure him in shadows while every little part of her was overexposed by the piece of shit who took it and doesn’t know the first thing about photography.
Or maybe he does, because he couldn’t have found a way to torture me more.
She fucked another guy, and I should have killed her too. I spent my entire childhood and early teenage years fighting that urge, and now, although the urge is back in full force, I’m forcefully reminded with every painful breath I take that I just can’t fucking do it.
Instead I watched her sleep pathetically while imagining my fingers strangling out her lifeforce.
I half-tried in that back alley, too. I had my gun to her head, and I could have pulled the trigger at any moment. I could have pulled it while she was sucking the barrel like the fucking snake she is. I could have pulled it while she was gyrating her hips over it, the worthless whore.
My worthless whore.
That’s the worst thing about it. She’s still mine, no matter what she does. No matter what she is. No matter how much she wrecked me, I could no sooner kill her than hack off half my body with a blunt knife.
Not that I wouldn’t end my life without a moment of hesitation, but doing it by hacking off half of my body with a blunt knife is not something even I could stomach, no matter how much of a self-hating monster I am.
Instead, I put her up in a hotel suite and warned her to stay away from Devil Tower. Because the second I heard her parents were dead, I knew she would start snooping around. She’s not the type to hang back passively. And when you start snooping around Devil, you’re as good as dead.
My eyes have been glued to the photo for a long time when Tragen at last swipes it away. I turn my eyes to him as he slides it back into a manilla folder, then blink in slow-motion as he withdraws another one from that same folder, placing it before me.
It took just one picture, three years ago, to ruin my life. I don’t know what this second picture could be, but I have a very, very bad feeling about it.
I don’t train my eyes down to it right away. It’s like every nerve in my body is screaming at me to look away.
I suddenly realize, as I fix Tragen, as I see the glint in his eye, that the day Piper Day destroyed my life, I didn’t hit rock bottom like I’d always thought.
I should have known you can always sink lower.
Right now, as the threat of the photo just out of my eyesight makes every part of me vibrate with feverish nausea, I’m aware that the second I look down, I’ll find the real rock bottom.
I can tell from the way Tragen is staring at me. At the way his mouth moves to form words that I can barely hear over the blood crashing in my ears.
“You’ve already seen the first photo. I don’t think you’ve seen the second one yet. Why don’t you take a look?”
I guess it’s the soldier training in me that makes me do exactly what he says, like I’m on autopilot. I stare at the image below me, without understanding it at first.
It’s a new angle, a snapshot taken from up high, from another camera. One that flattens out the contrast from the first photo, making it all stand out starkly.
Tragen’s made clear that he sees everything, so I guess he had the room in the photo stuffed with hidden cameras.
I recognize that room now. It’s one of the smaller spaces leading out of the general areas where the soldiers have their orgies.
I’ve never participated, but I’m familiar with the little nooks where soldiers go when they want to fuck girls in semi-privacy.
Though it’s not private enough that you can really hide.
I spend an awful lot of time looking at every detail in the background of the photo, my subconscious overexerting itself to keep me from looking at its main subjects. Because when I see them, I’m aware it will destroy me.
For good, this time.
Still, no matter how much my subconscious tries to prevent it, there’s just no way I can’t at last focus on the three people lying in bed, one of them with his hand against a girl’s cheek, the other, with his cock visible, half-sunk between that same girl’s thighs.
The man with the hand on the cheek is Dane. The one with his cock out is Liam. And the girl in the middle is the one I would gladly have died a thousand times over for.
The girl who betrayed me.
“I told you I’d make it easy for you.” Tragen’s voice reaches me from far away, and I look back up, blinking at him yet again.
As the impossible photo sinks its way into my bones, the only person I care about in this world fucking my only friends, my heart wraps itself around my lungs and begins to strangle them.
There’s no air in this room.
No fucking air.
I can’t breathe.
Tragen’s already pushed a gun onto the table, and a second envelope. I don’t have to open that envelope to know it contains the same exact fucking contract.
I guess Tragen knows me so well he knew exactly what I’d do. He knew I’d rip up that first contract, and then accept the second one.
I’m fully aware I’m playing into his hands as I grab the gun and sling it under my belt. Then I pocket the envelope.
“Let me out,” I hiss. “I’ve accepted your contract. I’m going to kill Piper Day.”