Chapter Twenty-Eight
Thunder booms in the warehouse, and Simon stands, and Nomi thinks it’s possible that she may have miscalculated.
She’s seen evil; she’s familiar with it.
But when she witnessed Gino Hart at work with the drill and the battery cables, something inside her broke a little.
She knows what Simon Noone is, but watching him writhe in pain flipped her perspective—because how is Simon any worse than these guys?
Is a sociopath worse than garden-variety evil, if you’re the victim of it?
All she could think was It’ll be me next; it’ll be me, and maybe when this is over, Simon will make it quick, because god knows Lamonte and his crew won’t be showing her any mercy.
But now Simon’s standing, she’s having serious misgivings.
He winked at her—she’s got no way to interpret that—and right now he’s too tall and still, there in his filthy jeans and boots and sweat-loose black Henley, like he’s poised to take flight; if he suddenly sprouted sharp-bladed wings and mowed down every person in the room with them, she wouldn’t be surprised.
He looks calm as an ocean, but she can see the way his blue eyes are lit like torches.
She asked for this—Fuck them up—but now she’s not sure what she’s unleashed.
He told her about the experience of his migraine auras at the club; he told her she looked purple, yet in this moment, Nomi thinks Simon’s haloed in black: black as the underworld, black as a nightfire, black as the furious cosmos Nomi sees when she cuts her skin and closes her eyes.
She was scared of him before? Now she’s fucking terrified.
And she’s not fast enough to look away as he steps forward and grabs Gino Hart’s hair from behind, wraps long fingers around the handle of the bolt cutters, wrenches Hart’s head to the side and bites down on his neck.
Nomi hears the crunch, flinches. Blood spurts, Hart screams. His arm lifts automatically with the tool, and Simon uses the weight of momentum to yank the bolt cutters’ closest blade into Hart’s right eye.
Hart shrieks, Dinkins screams. Lamonte jerks away.
Ameche lifts his gun.
Fuck that. This is Simon’s time now. Nomi smacks both her tied hands up, into Ameche’s arm.
His aim flies north, and the Colt goes off at the ceiling with a crack like a whip.
Ameche snarls, backhands Nomi off her chair.
As the chair tips, she tumbles onto the concrete with a yell; hitting the concrete fucking hurts, but she kicks out as she falls, manages to shove the legs of her chair into Ameche’s crotch. He curls over, moaning.
Above her, like he’s releasing a dance partner, Simon lets Hart tumble down. Simon’s still holding the handle of the bolt cutters, so the blade comes free with a ghastly pop. Nomi’s distracted by that, and by the sight of Hart choking on his own blood on the floor in front of her.
And now Simon’s started, he will not stop.
Nomi sees him adjust his grip on the bolt cutters, then quickstep to Ameche and swing the bolt cutters into the side of Ameche’s head like a bat.
Ameche goes down. Hart is down. Simon’s closing; he’s knocking over all the pins.
His face is relaxed, elated. Part of Nomi is horrified to see that there’s an engine inside Simon that runs on people’s pain, that’s greased by their humiliation and hurt.
But when it comes to Lamonte’s crew, she’s somehow all out of sympathy.
Behind her, Ray Dinkins is babbling. “Oh shiiit, I didn’t do nothing, I didn’t do nothing—”
Lightning flashes, interrupting whatever Ray’s saying he didn’t do, as Simon walks past Nomi’s tipped-sideways chair, advances on Dinkins with light steps.
Nomi doesn’t turn her head: Her cheek is hurting from her collision with the floor, and she wants to stay low, doesn’t want to see.
There’s a cut-off scream that becomes a gurgling whistle, then a sound like kitchen scissors on a chicken leg, then a thump, and Nomi knows that Dinkins is dead, or nearly dead, or about to be dead, and that bolt cutters were involved, so she chooses not to look.
The most important thing right now is her gun: She has to find it.
There’s no way to predict what will happen here now, or how far Simon will take it—pretty fucking far, from what she’s already seen—and she has an ominous feeling that maybe he’ll be impossible to switch off.
Like, maybe this is it: Whether he’s been a sociopath from the start, like he just told her, or whether the torture jogged those circuits in his brain back into an order they’re more familiar with, now he’s been unleashed in his original form, the black prince of murder.
And she couldn’t give a shit what happens to Lamonte’s guys, but without her gun, she’s got no chance at all.
Ignoring Hart gargling on his own blood, ignoring her broken finger, she army crawls toward the left.
To her right, another ruckus—she glances over.
Lamonte is roaring like a bull, his heavy-lidded eyes wide open as he lunges toward Simon, who’s moved to the workbench.
Nomi flinches as Simon sidesteps, slaps his hand on Lamonte’s shoulder; the bigger man howls as he stumbles forward into nothing.
Simon has stabbed a screwdriver into the top of his shoulder.
Nomi hears her breath panting, redirects her eyes.
She’s only three more crawling steps away from something glinting on the floor near the base of a roof pylon.
She crawls harder, grabs for it, it’s her .
. . box cutter. Fuck. But yay? She’s found the box cutter that apparently Simon used to wound Dinkins.
As in predead Dinkins. Dinkins when he was still animate.
Nomi huffs laughter and wonders if she’s succumbing to hysterics.
She controls it, clambers up, puts her back against the pylon.
For a moment, her mind takes refuge in the box cutter’s glinting blade, then she snaps out of it and starts awkwardly sawing at the tape on her wrists.
Simon is moving, crouching down. He’s got a chisel and a mallet, and he’s finishing off Hart. Nomi gags a little at the sound of the man’s screams, at the sight of the blood—Jesus Christ, there is blood everywhere.
She’s got the tape off, but her hands are shaking.
She tries to recover her firmness, the iron certainty that adrenaline gave her as Simon makes the last strike that finally puts Hart to sleep forever.
Nomi braces her knees. She’s got a support pylon, she’s got a box cutter, and if she can find her gun—
There’s a garbled cry, and on her right, a rush of movement.
Nomi’s surprised when Claude Ameche runs at her, is even more surprised when his tackle bowls her over—she lands on her shoulder and cracks the side of her head against concrete, and for a moment, all she can see are black sparkles, fizzy rockets, fireworks.
When her vision recovers, Claude Ameche is on top of her, crushing her, hammering with his hands.
“Buckin’ bish!” He’s screaming, and the damage to his face is terrible: mashed ear, swollen lip, bloodshot eye, probably a broken cheekbone. “You buckin’ bish!”
“Fuck you!” Nomi screams, and she ducks her head before remembering she has a goddamn box cutter—she stabs and slashes as best she can.
Ameche yells; blood streams down his facial crags and crevasses onto his shirt.
But he’s strong, and when his hands find her neck and squeeze, Nomi can’t think of anything but Can’t .
. . breathe . . . and she drops the box cutter as her arms turn to jelly, there’s a red film over her eyes, darkening rapidly from the edges . . .
Then the pressure is gone and air rushes in with a whoop. She coughs, coughs again, rolls over—
Claude Ameche is lying on his back beside her; nearby, the battery charger. Ameche’s body is jolting. Simon is looking on, fascinated. He turns the dial on the charger up as high as it will go. Nomi hears an electric whine, smells smoke.
She yells, hoarse voiced, and scrambles away on her ass.
Bumps into Gino Hart’s body, yells again, flips onto her hands and knees to scramble elsewhere, keeps her eyes down and focused on the concrete because everywhere she looks, some unbelievably horrifying shit is happening.
She keeps scrambling until she runs into a pair of brown leather loafers, and then there’s a hand in her hair, someone’s hauling her up, and suddenly she’s face to face with Eric Lamonte.
“Where’re you going, Miss Pace?” Lamonte rumbles, and even when Nomi screams and brings up an elbow, he seems to anticipate her, pulling back her head and smacking her in the throat.
Nomi goes down, retching, and then it’s too late. Lamonte has her by the hair again, she’s on her knees, and warm metal is kissing her cheek.
“I am not a tradesman,” Lamonte hisses. “I don’t need garbage tools. I am a professional, and if you don’t call off your dog, I’m gonna put a bullet through your jaw, do you understand? Nod if you understand.”
Lamonte’s normally swarthy face is white, only flushed around his deep-set eyes. He’s sweating. He still has a screwdriver half-embedded in his shoulder. He looks desperate.
Nomi nods.
“Now get up,” Lamonte commands, “before that fucking crazy motherfucker loses interest in Ameche and—”
He hauls at her again, and Nomi does the thing she was taught by Irma the first week she was on the force: She goes limp, like a bag of sand, all her weight shifting to the lowest part of her body.
Lamonte, like most attackers, isn’t expecting it.
He overbalances, stumbles forward, the metal barrel of her own Smith her hearing is still muffled like she’s underwater. But he’s not out of surprises yet: He dives for his coat pocket, yanks out a blue pearl handle, pops out the switchblade, takes a step—
“Hello, friend,” Simon Noone says.
Nomi startles almost as hard as Lamonte—but Lamonte is the one who looks most afraid.
Simon, by contrast, looks like the Angel of Death: His boots and hands are covered in blood; the knees of his trousers are smeared dark with it.
Below the torn collar of his black Henley, the wounds from the drill are red-black and weeping.
His injuries make him look like he’s stepped straight off a battlefield, but his blue eyes glow against the bruises on his face, the wet ink of his hair.
He’s a body length away, still advancing. His movements have a sinister grace, and Nomi thinks she can feel something like static electricity crackling all around him.
Lamonte backs up, appalled, slashing the knife in a wide arc. “Stay the fuck away from me, you fucking psycho!”
Nomi almost feels sorry for him. Here’s a man who’s senior, who’s fought his way up through the cesspool of mafia politics to make it to the position of general, now confronting someone completely outside his worldview.
For people like Lamonte, murder is business. For people like Simon, murder is fun.
“You’re going to die here in this warehouse,” Simon says conversationally as he walks steadily, inexorably closer, heedless of the knife’s danger. He holds out his hands, which are dripping with red but completely empty. “If it makes you feel better, though—look, no weapons.”
Nomi gets a sickening feeling that Simon’s playing with his food.
“You want to make me feel better?” Lamonte is still backing up, jowls wobbling, slicing the air in front of himself. “Go set yourself on fire, you fucking freak—”
“I would,” Simon says, grinning, “but Hart didn’t bring the blowtorch.”
And he finally walks close enough that Lamonte’s blade finds its target: The knife shears through the fabric of Simon’s shirt. Nomi sees the white skin below his breastbone peel open, bleeding fast.
“Simon!” she screams.
Lamonte makes an ugly grin.
But that’s all he gets to do, as Simon grabs the box cutter out of the back waistband of his trousers and makes a quick, ferocious slash that draws a crimson line straight across Lamonte’s throat.
The line starts leaking. Lamonte drops to his knees.
When he keels sideways, Simon sinks over him with the blade raised, and that’s when Nomi finally looks away.