Chapter 16 #3
Behind me, the music has almost faded all the way out because the sound that takes over is the tinkling of the bells on the jester girl’s costume every time the swing moves.
The sound shreds something inside me.
“You read their requests,” I state, my voice dropping to a lethal register.
“You sat here and turned suffering into entertainment.”
“I was paid!” he rushes out with mounting panic. “I didn’t have a choice!”
I stare at him and realize I genuinely don’t care about his excuses, his fear and about whatever happens to him next.
The knife moves before he can speak again.
I drive it straight through his hand into the folding table while he’s splayed out on his stomach.
His scream howls through the room smothering the carnival music.
Blood splatters across the keyboard, across the glowing chat feed and across my hand.
His entire body convulses violently, trying to yank free while the blade keeps him pinned in place.
And I feel nothing.
Only the cold certainty that men like him deserve to break the same way they break others.
Then I stab him straight through the back of his abdomen, hoping I hit his kidney. I wrench my knife out just as the clown trips backward as I whip my head in his direction.
For the first time since we entered the room, the painted grin slips from his face.
Real fear surfaces underneath the greasepaint.
Tyler moves to the side haltingly; Glock trained directly at the clown’s chest, careful not to scare him into doing something foolish to the girl on the swing. The red carnival lights glint showing the rage simmering behind Tyler’s eyes while thunder drums somewhere outside the warehouse walls.
The clown’s breathing turns labored.
His gloved hands lift slightly but he’s not surrendering, he’s calculating and looking for a way out.
“There’s nowhere for you to go,” Tyler affirms.
The clown bolts anyway.
He lunges for something near the props table and he doesn’t make it.
Tyler fires once.
The suppressed shot punches through the clown’s shoulder and spins him sideways into a stack of circus crates. Rotten wood splinters across the floor while rusted carnival props crash around him in a destructive avalanche of color and dust.
The girl on the swing cries out and the bells on her costume jingle agitatedly as she attempts to lower her feet to the ground.
The clown groans, clutching his shoulder while greasepaint streaks across the floor beneath him.
My vision darkens around the edges.
This room, the costumes, the music, the lights, all of it built around turning terror into entertainment.
Something inside me fractures as violence detonates inside me.
I cross the room before he can crawl away.
He looks up at me sprawled on the floor below stuttering circus lights, blood soaking through the ruined shoulder of his costume while fear finally destroys the last of whatever performance he was hiding behind.
“You fucking bitch,” he breathes.
“I’m going to make sure fear is the last living thing inside you before I kill you,” I seethe.
I take hold of the front of his clown suit and throw him backward into the wall, portraits tumble from their hooks and onto the floor.
Then I clutch him by his wig and kick his legs out from under him.
He crashes onto the ground and lets out a guttural scream.
Synthetic curls are in my hand, and I toss them to the side while he thrashes on the concrete floor.
The bells sewn into his costume chime, I fucking hate that sound.
“Reap.” Tyler’s voice rumbles quietly at my side, not trying to stop me.
Tyler easily captures the clown’s wrist before he can reach for anything else. His grasp is brutal and controlled, pinning the man down.
Trying to stop the part of me unraveling without extinguishing it completely.
The clown sobs now, “I didn’t touch her!”
All I can see is the girl on the swing and the way he laughed.
Before I fully process what I’m doing, I lift my knife and it strikes the floor next to his throat with a deafening clink.
He’s motionless as a strangled sound lodges in his throat.
I lean over him, breathing hard enough my lungs ache, my face inches from his.
“You hurt her.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine anymore.
“You would’ve kept hurting her!”
His entire body twitches.
Tyler stays behind me, one hand still crushing the clown’s wrist into the floor while his Glock remains on him in case he tries something stupid.
But the clown isn’t fighting anymore, he’s begging, and something about that splits me open from the inside out.
Suddenly, the room feels too bright and too loud.
The smiling clown murals expand across the walls like they are mocking us.
The monitor glows behind me. Barbaric people behind their screens being fed.
I snap.
My hand wraps around the clown’s painted collar and I drag him across the concrete.
He screams and claws at me with his good hand, but I don’t stop, I feel the numbness taking over.
The swing chains creak while the jester girl gawks at me with wide horrified eyes.
“Reap.” Tyler says my name again sharper this time.
His voice sounds like I’m underwater because all I can hear is the music, the bells and the begging.
I wrench the clown down in the center of the room directly beneath the immense spotlight. His costume is soaked in blood now, bright colors darkening while his painted smile has faded apart from tears.
“Do you think this is funny?” I bellow.
The words scrape out of me raw and vicious.
“You made a stage out of a woman’s abuse and wore a painted smile while you did it?”
“Please, don’t!” he screeches.
A little horn sits to the side of him, it must have fallen out of his pocket.
It’s bright red, made of cheap plastic and something meant to make children laugh.
I scoop it up and cram the red ball side down his throat as far as it will go.
A pathetic squeak echoes through the room and something about that sound nearly drives me feral.
Tyler positions himself at my back now, close enough that I can feel the heat radiating from him and to stop me if he decides I’ve gone too far.
But he doesn’t intervene because he understands exactly why I’m unravelling.
My hands are shaking uncontrollably now, I can barely feel them.
The clown notices and his eyes lock onto mine.