Chapter 4
SABLE
I let the tie slide from around Woody's neck and held it in my hand as if I had some way of using it against whoever was knocking.
I expected Woody to smirk, but instead he said, "Stay here."
He grabbed a different gun off the shelf, turned off the safety and stalked over to the door. His entire body was rigid with tension as he peered through the peephole. He swore softly, his shoulders relaxing slightly, before he unlocked the door and slid it open.
"There you both are," Leif said cheerfully.
"Yes, we are. Did you want something?" Woody asked, not stepping aside to let Leif in.
"I wanted to see how the lessons are coming along," Leif said. He placed his hand on Woody's chest and pushed him aside to move past and into the room. "Looks like I'm interrupting something." Leif eyed the tie in my hand.
"We were practicing strangling people," I said. "In theory, anyway. Do you want to see?" I held up my hands.
"Do I want you to wrap that around my neck? Hell yeah, I do." He hurried forward and turned his back to me, giving me a boyish grin over his shoulder.
I exchanged looks and shrugs with Woody before looping the tie around Leif's neck and pulling slightly, not enough to actually strangle him. Of course.
"You're good at this," Leif said." I've always been into a bit of light choking."
"Of course you have," Woody said.
"Because I'm kinky?" Leif asked.
"Because you're the kind of guy who would die of strangulation." Woody closed and locked the door again.
"Thank you, Nostradamus," Leif said sarcastically. "Tell me, how are you going to die?"
"I can't decide," Woody said. "I might die of boredom listening to you talking about paint samples. If I'm lucky, I'll die in bed, fucking our woman." His eyes darkened as he regarded me.
"No offense, but that sounds traumatic." I gave a little shudder. Being mid-fuck only to find your partner had… No thank you.
I carefully removed the tie from around Leif's neck and tossed it onto the counter beside us.
"It'll be more expected when we're a hundred years old." Woody stepped over to the coffee maker and pulled a couple of cups out of the cabinet below it. One was bright pink. The other yellow with the words 'judgy as fuck' on the front.
Which one belonged to who?
"You really expect us to live that long?" I asked. I wanted to think we would, especially under the current circumstances.
"We'll live to a hundred or die trying," Woody said, adding sugar to the pink cup before handing it to me.
"That's pretty much how it works," Leif said, taking the 'judgy as fuck' cup before Woody could.
Woody glared at him. "You good there?"
"Absolutely. Thank you." Leif took a sip.
Woody muttered something about "annoying motherfuckers" before he grabbed another mug and started to make a third coffee for himself. This one had a picture of a rooster on the side and the words 'world's biggest cock.' What other interesting crockery did they have in there?
“So, you've been practicing strangling. Anything else?" Leif asked.
I told him about the gun lesson we'd had before that. He listened with interest, nodding every so often and making the right noises.
"It sounds like Woody knows what he's doing," Leif said with only a hint of teasing. He wanted to get a rise out of the other man, but not disparage his skills. Not when there'd be times all of our lives depended on it.
"We were just about to practice with knives." Woody leaned against the countertop, his hands around his coffee almost protectively, as though he expected Leif to try to take that one as well.
"Your timing is perfect," Woody added, giving Leif a meaningful look over the rim of the cup and taking a sip.
"Because I'm so good with knives? I know you're not suggesting practicing on me," Leif said.
"Why not?" Woody asked. "How else is she going to know how it feels to slide a knife between someone's ribs unless she tries it?"
"I'm not going to slid a knife between Leif's ribs," I said firmly. Not that anyone thought for a minute I would.
"Woody has a point,” Leif said. "You should know how it feels so you don't hesitate, but I'm not going to let you practice on me. We'll get in a side of beef. You can practice on that."
"I have something better in mind," Woody said. He jerked his head toward a door to the back of the room. One I'd noticed, but didn't know where it led.
"You think she's up to that?" Leif asked.
"There's only one way to find out," Woody said, eyeing me speculatively.
"Why do I get the feeling I'm not going to like this?" I asked. "What's in there? Please don't tell me you keep bad guys locked away in case you need to practice on them."
I wish that sounded implausible, but it didn't. I could totally imagine my three men locking assholes and thugs away, until they needed to hone their skills. Or for shits and giggles.
"Not alive bad guys," Leif said. "Remember those three attackers from such shit shows as last night?"
"I have a vague recollection of being traumatized after they blew the door in and died outside in a pool of blood." As if I could forget any of it. The whole scenario was nightmare fuel.
Except… part of me was starting to get used to it. Blood, death, violence. What did that say about me?
I decided it said I was good at adjusting to new situations, and I'd do best to leave it at that. Otherwise, it might say I was unhinged as fuck. I wasn't ready to accept that yet. Give it another attack, kidnapping, or two.
"You're telling me the cleanup crew brought their bodies down here so you could store them for… What?" I asked.
Leif glanced down at his shoes.
I closed my eyes and shook my head.
"Right. Okay. Right." I shouldn't have asked.
He stepped over to me, cupped my cheek and held my gaze.
"If we didn't kill them, they would have killed us," he reminded me.
"Anything we do to them here? They're already dead, we can't make them any deader.
Believe me, if we could, we would. What are you going to do if you have a knife in your hand and the only way out is to use it on someone else?
You don't know where to use it, how much pressure to use before it actually works.
It's like cutting meat but at the same time it's not. "
"Because it's a person," I said.
"Yes, because it's a person, and because we know how to slice chicken breast, or bacon, or a piece of steak. The average person doesn't know where to start slicing a human." Did he have to sound like he enjoyed it so much?
I opened my eyes a crack.
"You don't have to do this," he said. "If your life was threatened, you'd do whatever you have to do, but if you're prepared, if you know exactly what's necessary, it'll make it easier." It sounded as though he was speaking from experience. Yeah, okay, of course he was.
I glanced over at Woody. "Is this where you tell me I should run before a situation gets to the point where I'm using the point on someone?" Meaning the pointy end of a knife.
"If you can run, absolutely fucking run," Woody agreed. "Sometimes that's the safest and best option to save yourself. The object of the exercise is survival. Not being a hero because you feel like you have something to prove." Also the voice of experience right now.
"What we're trying to teach you is what to do if you can't run," Leif said.
"Right," Woody agreed. "You didn't want to feel helpless. I don't want you to feel helpless either. Every woman should know how to take care of themselves."
A haunted look flicked across his eyes. He tried to blink it away, but it lingered there, long enough for me to see it. Long enough for me to understand.
He was thinking about his sister. If she had the skills to protect herself, would she still be around now? He didn't want what happened to her to happen to me.
Honestly, that made two of us. Whether she was dead or alive, I didn't want to disappear without a trace like that. These three men, they'd hunt the entire world to find me. If they never found me, they'd never stop hunting. Vice versa was true. I'd never stop looking if any of them went missing.
I'd burn the world down if I had to. Pull it apart. Shatter it into a million pieces until I found out exactly what happened to them. I had to know how to be ruthless.
If that meant stabbing a knife into an already dead corpse, I would. It wasn't as though I hadn't done it already. I'd carved a skull into a dead man's forehead.
Stabbing someone in the ribs or the heart? That was something else. They were right. I had to try this.
"Okay, what do I need to do?" I asked.
Leif smiled and picked up a knife from the shelf beside the guns.
"Come with us." He walked over and unlocked the door at the back of the basement and gestured for me to step through with them.
The moment I crossed the threshold, the temperature plummeted. I rubbed my hands up and down my arms, the cashmere soft under my palms.
I followed them into another room off to the side of the darkened corridor. "You have a morgue in here?"
"Doesn't everyone?" Leif said with a laugh. He handed me the knife and opened one of the drawers.
"This is the one who led the other two. For the record, I killed him second." He peeled the sheet off his face down to just below his navel.
I regarded the man's waxy face. Remembered his voice as he spoke to Woody and Forrest.
Reconciling this corpse with that man was difficult. He looked like a prop out of a movie.
Tentatively, I reached out and touched his hand. I almost expected him to snatch my wrist, jump up and throw himself at me.
Of course, he lay still. Cold and hard to the touch. As dead as the man I'd mutilated. Perhaps more dead, because the other man was still warm at the time. Yes, I know there weren't different levels of death, but it seemed like it right now.
"If you want to go for a slow death, slide the knife in here." Leif placed the side of his hand on the corpse's stomach, between his ribs.
"Or here, straight through his heart." He placed his fingertips on the man's chest.
A strange sensation passed through me. One that took a moment to understand what it was. A thrill of excitement. This man tried to kill us. He'd failed. He'd failed so badly he was lying dead, right here for us to do this to him.
I wrapped my hands around the hilt of the knife. Raised it probably more than was necessary and jammed the blade straight down into the cold, still chest.
It slid through easier than I expected. Skin, flesh and muscle gave way to the colder, harder steel.
"You're a natural," Leif said. "How do you feel?"
I stood with the knife embedded all the way to the hilt. Turned to him and admitted, "Turned on."
"Funny, me too." With a twitch of his eyebrows, he slid open the drawer beside the corpse.