Chapter 8
Lincoln
For a very long time I have fantasized about taking out every last one of the sick fucks who work at those auctions. And over
the past eighteen years I’ve killed at least forty of them, maybe more. I’ve never actually counted. They all met accidental ends. From falling out of a skyscraper to jumping in front of a train—deaths that, while suspicious, were different and spaced
out enough so as to not form a pattern and unintentionally leave a trail of breadcrumbs for the Brotherhood to find.
I’ve enjoyed every single kill, but I already know this one is going to be special. This one I’m going to take my time with.
It’s not often I get to inflict the kind of pain they deserve, but for this man I’ll make an exception. I’ll revel in watching
the fear in his eyes while his life slips away from him. I only wish I could let her witness it too.
Clutching the six-pack to his chest, he walks out of the store and straight into me. He bounces off me and I put my hand on
his forearm to steady him, keeping my head bent low and the hood of my sweater pulled down over my face. I mumble my apology.
“Watch where you’re fucking going, fucking asshole,” he yells loudly.
I murmur another apology and then go into the store, pretending to look at potato chips while I watch him through the window.
Grumbling to himself, he tosses a lit cigarette into the gutter before climbing into his car—a bright green Chevy with one of those ridiculously huge exhaust pipes.
Alec Brown. Twenty-eight years old. A high school dropout.
Recruited by the Brotherhood at the age of sixteen, he’s never risen far enough up the ranks to be anyone of significance.
The Brotherhood won’t miss him—which is kind of a shame.
He’s a mere Pawn, and I prefer to take out higher value pieces, all in pursuit of the King of course.
But Pawns are aplenty and their abundance, as well as their relative insignificance to the cause, makes them much easier targets.
Killing one of the Brotherhood’s major players is a more difficult crime to both execute and cover up.
I follow him to his house, wait for him to walk inside and imagine him locking the dead bolt I know he has on there—like that
would be enough to stop me. Alec thinks he’s untouchable, but I’ve already been inside his house. I already know the layout
and where the weakest points of entry are, such as the kitchen window with the broken lock. It’s how I got in last night,
when I searched his house for any information that might lead me to some of the key members of the Brotherhood. As expected,
I didn’t find any, but I did grab his back-door key, hanging on a hook on the refrigerator. It took less than a few minutes
to make a mold, and tonight’s entry will be much easier because of it.
I wait, and I watch. It’s not the kind of neighborhood where anyone is likely to be suspicious of an SUV parked down the street and nobody bothers me.
Light spills out onto the lawn as he moves from the den to the kitchen a few times, drinking his beer, smoking cigarette after cigarette and sometimes talking on his cell phone.
It’s two hours and fifty-six minutes before the downstairs lights go off and the bedroom light is switched on.
Another six minutes before it goes off again.
He’s had a similar routine for the past two nights, and I did consider the possibility of already being inside waiting for him when he got home earlier.
Pictured the look on his face when he switched on the light and saw me sitting on his sofa patiently expecting his return, or staying by the door in the shadows so that I’d be the first thing he’d see.
But something about waking him from his sleep appeals to me. I want to see the slow realization dawn on his face when he sees
that he can’t move. I want to watch him discover who I am and what I’m going to do to him.
When another half hour has passed, I climb out of my car and head across the dark street and through his garden, skirt around
the house to the back, and let myself in. My boots are quiet on the thick carpeted floors leading straight to his bedroom.
The door creaks a little when I push it open, but he doesn’t stir. He’s lying flat on his bed, on top of the covers, wearing
only tight black boxer briefs. From here I can see that the snake tattoo on his neck winds all the way down to his chest.
I check my watch. It’s been four hours since he bumped into me outside the drugstore. Four hours since I touched him and left
the pathogen on his skin.
I give him a nudge with my foot. “Wake up, asshole.”
His eyes flutter open and he looks at me for a few seconds, sleep still clinging to him. I flick on the light and he sees
me—the masked man dressed all in black standing at the foot of his bed. He tries to move. Can’t. “Who the fuck? What the fuck?”
he sputters, his head jerking up and down like somehow that will give him the momentum to move. It won’t.
“No sense in wasting your energy trying to get up, Alec. Your nervous system is being attacked by a pathogen. Biochemical
engineering at its finest. A company in Japan that I invested in has been developing it for over a decade. They have the vaccine
too.” I flex my hand, now encased in a leather glove. “Makes me immune to the effects. So I’m able to easily administer it,
maybe leave it on someone’s skin when they bump into me.”
“You. Outside the store,” he snarls. “What the fuck have you done to me?”
“I’ve infected you, Alec. The same way that you infect every single person around you. My kind of bacteria is much smarter
than yours though. It attacks the spinal cord, disabling the body from the neck down. The good news is, you can still feel
pain though. Lucky for both of us, huh?”
He shakes his head, his face red with the effort of trying to move his now-paralyzed limbs. “Untraceable in toxicology reports
too. Comes in handy more times than you can imagine.”
“F-fuck! Who are you?” he sputters.
I sit on the bed beside him and take off my mask, letting him see my face. “Don’t you recognize me, Alec? The one they taught
you all to fear? The freak, isn’t that what they call me?”
His eyes widen in horror. I’m almost unidentifiable from the man he’s studied pictures of. My head was shaved back then. I
had no beard. But it’s the scars they all recognize. The thick twisted knots that cover almost the entire right side of my
face, from my cheekbone to my neck. Distinctive—that’s what the surgeon who painstakingly removed the hundreds of particles
of gravel and road from my face and body told me. I guess he was right.
“N-no. You’re an urban legend. Not real,” Alec babbles.
“Oh, I’m real. And if you know the legend, you’ll know who Imogen DeMotta is to me.” I trail the tip of my knife over his
eye socket and down his cheek. He’s pissed himself now. I can smell the urine soaking his boxers. “Or maybe you’ll remember
her as Lot 51?”
“I was just doing my job, man,” he wails. “I only did what they told me to.”
I bring my face closer to his, smell the sour stench of his breath. Beer and cigarettes. Did he breathe on my girl? Did his
filth taint her? “You touched her,” I snarl.
“I only—”
I slam the base of my knife handle into his teeth, causing the front ones to break and his gums to split open. No point in
interrogating him because he speaks the truth about only following orders. Men like this are never given any high-level information,
and they never think to ask for it either. No ambition.
He howls in pain, so I slice out his tongue while I let him know that I’ve barely started yet. Hardly even scratched the surface
of the agony he’s about to endure. I take the cloth parcel out of my bag and open it on the bed beside him. His eyes dart
to it and then back to me, wild and animallike. “They’re nettles.” I explain, taking a handful in my gloved fist and crushing
them until the sap starts to seep out. “You ever get stung by nettles, Alec?”
He shakes his head, and any sounds he makes are strangled by the blood still pouring from his mouth and down his throat.
I coat the blade of my knife in the sap. “These grow everywhere on my land. Particularly vicious little bastards. I was pushed
into a patch once when I was a kid. Stung like a motherfucker all over. But, you know what was the real hell?” I press the
tip of my blade against one of the thick veins on his forearm. He wails and chokes so much that I’m forced to prop his head
up with another pillow. Don’t want him to miss the show, or choke on his own blood before we get to the best part. “The kid
who pushed me gave me a split lip beforehand and the cut was still open.”
I slice the blade into his arm, not enough to rip open the vein yet, just enough to bite. Tears squeeze from the corners of
his eyes, and he thrashes his head, the moans coming from him unnatural and inhuman. Fucking music to my ears. “Nettle sap
in an open wound burns like hell, right?”
He makes another garbled sound. I slice another cut. And another. “This is what you get for touching her, Alec.” I drag the tip of my knife over his abs before cutting through the fabric of his boxers. Every move I make accompanied by the melodic sounds of his pain, like my own personal symphony.
I coat the blade with fresh sap, and then I hold up his flaccid cock. “Were you there when they operated on her? When they
stole her chance of ever having a child?”
Every woman sold at auction is sterilized to prevent any unwanted pregnancies. Not that the Brotherhood care about the women
having to go through that, but a pregnancy might get in the way. The women are bought only to be used and abused until there’s
nothing left of them, not even their soul.
“Did you ever get hard looking at her? Thinking about what you’d like to do to her?”
He shakes his head.
“Liar!” I slice him from balls to tip, and to ensure he knows what pain really feels like, I stuff some of the crushed nettles
in the open wound. His eyes roll back and just when he’s about to pass out from the pain, I slap his face hard, bringing him
back. “Not yet, buddy. We’re not done yet.”
I stare at my face in the mirror above his sink, my cheeks spattered with thick welts of his blood and my clothes and gloves
covered in him. I clean myself as best I can before wiping down his bathroom. I’m a ghost who doesn’t exist. No fingerprints
or DNA of mine will show up in any kind of system, and I don’t intend to leave any behind today. The person I was is dead
and buried and I intend for him to stay that way, which is why I’m usually much more careful than this.
This is the messiest kill I’ve carried out in a very long time, and there’s no way to pass this one off as accidental, but
it had to be this way. There’s only so much rage I can carry inside me before I have to let a little of it out.
And he touched her. He touched my fucking girl.
Alec is the kind of man who has enough enemies so his murder won’t come as a surprise.
The brutal nature of it might though, and I can’t help wondering if I’ve just alerted the Brotherhood to a threat they were previously unaware of.
Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it will flush some more of the evil scum out into the open.
And I’ll go on picking them off until I find the one I’m looking for, the one they call the King. When I do eventually find
him, he’ll beg for mercy like the pathetic stain on humanity he truly is. And I will take even greater pleasure in exacting
my revenge on him, for every single day of her life that he kept her from me. Every single second of pain she has ever endured,
he will suffer one hundredfold. The Brotherhood will wish they had never heard the name Imogen DeMotta.