Chapter 11
“Time… It’s such a funny concept.” Steel’s emotionless voice was only challenged by the sounds of the hotel boiler room and the pitiful whimpers of the man screwed to the wooden chair before him.
He was sure there were people who would find the incessant hum of machinery soothing, like white noise in the background, but he was not one of them.
It was nothing to him, neither a distraction nor a calming influence.
Like his heart beating in his chest, it was there, but it was useless.
“We think we have all the time in the world, yet we move at such speeds, so impatient to get from A to B that we don’t even pause to think about what we have now.
” Steel reached for another black, eight-inch screw.
The coolness of the metal did not register as he fitted the flathead to the drill bit.
“Nineteen years, Harris. I had barely nineteen years with her. I can still hear her first laugh, her first word. I watched her grow, from a chubby, little infant to the beautiful, young woman who was gunned down in the streets like an animal. Nineteen years might seem like a lot, but it’s not.
I wanted more time.” He placed the point of the screw in the middle of the man’s lower left arm, parallel to the screw embedded in his right arm.
“But that time is something I’ll never get back.
I know that. What I need now is a name. You can claim client confidentiality all you want, but you and I both know that’s a load of horseshit. ”
Jeremy Harris was in his late forties. He had what could only be described as a seventies’ pornstache, along with a beer belly and a gold-plated tooth.
For years, he was part of the underbelly of D.C.
, his grimy, pudgy fingers in little bits of each pie.
His main source of income, though, was making identities.
Unlike Keys who fabricated a person and their background on the computer like they’d always been there, Harris had a way of bringing the dead back to life.
Figuratively, of course. As a family buried their loved one, Harris was busy taking over the deceased’s identity and selling it on the Black Market.
Griffin Shaw had purchased one or more of those identities.
Steel pulled the trigger. The metal, spiral thread pierced its way through flesh and muscle until it reached bone.
Ignoring the screams of agony echoing through the concrete room, Steel applied more pressure to the handle of the drill.
He no longer needed Scar to hold the man steady.
Despite Harris’ weak attempts to struggle when he’d first been seated in the chair, the middle of his hands and each wrist were already secured to the wooden arms. Harris’ feet were bound by rope, but not for long.
There was a loud crack, followed by an anguished bellow as the screw forced its way through the bone, down through tissue, and out the other side. As it made contact with the wood of the chair, the chuck of Steel’s drill started to enter Harris’ arm.
Satisfied the screw wasn’t going anywhere, Steel released the trigger and stepped away.
There was a discarded kitchen table propped against the wall with only three legs.
He wouldn’t trust the table to hold any of Jenna’s cooking, but he’d certainly utilize it to hold his recently purchased power tools.
The kind-eyed woman at the hardware store hadn’t even blinked twice when Steel placed the items in his cart on the checkout counter.
What would she have thought if she knew what the box of screws was really intended for?
“I need a name, Harris. We know Shaw lived under Adrian Voss after he escaped Primis. He went to your rival, Demetri.” Steel turned.
“He’s currently enjoying a lye bath behind you.
The hotel was rude enough to not even put that amenity on their website.
” Steel picked up the next screw. “The identity Demetri gave him lasted a good while. He could have kept using it, except he messed up. That ID was attached to a vehicle that got a ticket for being illegally parked outside my daughter’s campus back in December.
” Steel was careful to avoid the puddle of piss on the floor beneath the sniveling, whimpering man as he approached again.
“I know that Shaw came to you exactly three weeks ago. Five days after he murdered my daughter.”
Steel placed the tip of the screw just outside Harris’ right ear. He wasn’t a surgeon and didn’t know where the man’s eardrum was precisely located, but he figured he had the general location. Worst case, he got another screw and tried again.
After all, the man could still speak without his hearing. Hell, he could shout it for all Steel cared, so long as he gave up the identity or identities Shaw was now using.
“Stop! Please… I don’t know. I… Oh God, please, for the love of God, please just stop…”
The man’s pleas, ironically, fell on deaf ears. Steel wouldn’t stop. He couldn’t. Not even when he had the names, because this man aided and abetted Melanie’s murderer. He wouldn’t be walking out of here, and not just because Scar had discovered a sledgehammer in a maintenance room two floors up.
There was nothing humane about what Steel was doing, but then, there wasn’t much humanity left in him. There was no peace, no solace, no redemption. A monster had taken his daughter from this world, and now he had become the monster.
Twenty-six days since his little girl had been taken from him, stripped of her future and he had lost his soul. Sixteen days since Steel had watched her coffin be lowered into the ground and he had embraced the darkness.
He didn’t know what was happening at home. He knew Scar was in contact with Tally, but Steel had not reached out to anyone. Not his wife, his sister, or his sons. He’d failed to keep Melanie safe, and he wouldn’t rest until he’d wiped Griffin Shaw off the face of this planet.
Pressing the screw hard enough against Harris’ face that droplets of crimson trailed down his outer cheek and into the edges of his pornstache, Steel had the fleeting thought of whether he’d ever go home.
After he found Shaw and carved his daughter’s name into the man’s chest, did he even have a home to return to?
The monster had been unleashed, and there was no guarantee that the man worthy of his family, of Jenna, would ever reemerge.
When Jenna was five years old, she’d nearly drowned.
Her parents had been hosting a gathering at their Seattle estate to show off something they had purchased that was so insignificant that Jenna couldn’t even remember what it was.
The glamour of the event, though, was overshadowed by Jenna being pushed into the pool by a boy around her age.
At the time, Jenna had not yet learned how to swim.
Her sister, Caroline, had been the only person to realize what had happened and jumped in after her, but by then, Jenna had panicked so much that she’d inhaled a lot of water.
Until a month ago, Jenna would have sworn the memory of drowning was one of her worst. She’d eventually learned to swim and got over her fear of the water, but the useless flail of a panicked five-year-old child was never forgotten.
Over fifty years later and Jenna was back in that pool, flailing, panicking, drowning…
Only this time, there was no one there to bring her up.
She was utterly and completely alone. Abandoned by the man she loved.
The hypocrisy of that statement was not lost on her when she’d been the one to send him away, to tell him to go, to find the man who had taken their daughter from them and make him hurt…
and yet, she couldn’t help but resent him.
Jack was gone, and she wasn’t just talking about physically being absent from her side.
The man she’d married, the boy she’d fallen in love with, was gone.
She’d seen it at the viewing, the night before the funeral when neither of them could sleep, and then at the graveside. Jack was gone. Only Steel remained.
Jenna and their children were likely the only people on the planet who’d ever met Jack.
The steel mask he wore around the rest of the world was a stranger to her.
She’d seen glimpses over the years, flickers of the coldness.
It always baffled her how others perceived her husband, because he wasn’t hard or cruel with her.
She could understand to a point the respect and the loyalty that he cultivated over the years, yet there was a difference between her admiration for her husband and the fidelity others offered him.
But she couldn’t have understood, not fully anyway. Because she’d never seen Steel. Not the way others had. Not until now.
In addition to her grief and sorrow that weighed so heavily on her that each breath took enormous effort, fear gripped her.
Reality was adding to the force, pressing down on her chest like a boulder.
Jenna didn’t know Steel. She thought she knew all of her husband.
More than their children, his sister, and their friends, Jenna thought she was the sole person who knew Jack Duncan.
Sitting next to him at the viewing and then the funeral, feeling the coldness radiating off him like an iceberg, Jenna realized how wrong she’d been.
There was a part of her husband that she didn’t know, the darkness within that had kept him alive for twenty years in the Marines.
And she had no choice but to come to the terrifying conclusion that Steel wasn’t the mask.
Jack was.
And that fear that gripped her throat like a noose came from the unknown answer of whether she could love Steel.
She wasn’t so blind as to not know her husband had darkness inside him, but she thought she’d known that darkness, understood and embraced it with him. Seen it as a part of him, a sliver of the man he was.