Chapter 23 #2
A thin, nervous laugh bursts from his scabby mouth. “You can’t know that. I’m telling the tru—”
“Oh really? You wanna know how I know that? Huh?” I fist his shirt in one hand, pulling the fabric tight around his neck. His eyes pop, and finally the arrogant sneer he’s carried up to now slides off his face.
“I know her virginity was still intact, because I was the one who took it.”
My molars grind.
“è stata la cosa più bella che qualcuno mi abbia mai regalato.”
It was the most beautiful gift anyone has ever given me.
He tries to swallow but can’t because my fist beneath his Adam’s apple is pressing against his windpipe. I let go and shove him backward before returning to the photographs.
“Now tell me again, where the fuck did you get these photographs?”
“Th—they were in her bedside drawer.”
“Ah,” I nod. “Hers.”
I scan the pictures again, not looking for proof that it’s her, because it is—that’s obvious. I’m looking for something else. The reason why. Why would she pose like this for someone? It seems extremely out of character for her—for a virgin.
Tuning out his whiny explanations, I zone in on the shape of her limbs and the lines of her muscles. She’s lax, everywhere, which suggests she wasn’t engaged in the moment—she wasn’t there.
It hits me. She was unconscious.
With that clarity, I look again, flicking through each image with the lens of a forensic assessor, not someone who… cares.
The sixth sense I honed during those years of utter darkness snaps into gear and I search for the signs. Her skin is slightly greyish and waxy, her limbs too loose and contorted into unnatural shapes.
She’s been posed.
Oh so slowly, I rake my gaze back to the scrawny bastard.
“You did this,” I growl.
He takes another step back, bumping into Lorcan who snickers and stays rock still.
I prowl toward him, enjoying the widening of his eyes and the stutter of his lips.
“N-no. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I-I just found these and thought you should know.”
“So you could blackmail him,” Paddy reminds the room. “Regular little goody-two-balls aren’t ya?”
“You were the one,” I continue, the truth pounding loud and clear in my ears. “Those hands were yours.”
I eat up the space and speak through slammed teeth. “Hai toccato ciò che è mio.” You touched what is mine.
He swallows, then tries to bolt, but Lorcan digs his fingers into McAllister’s arms, holding him to the spot.
I stop a couple of inches from his face. “Tell me, if you’re so obsessed with her, why didn’t you fuck her when you had the opportunity?”
His mouth opens and closes like the piranha he is.
“She was unconscious, right? You had a chance. With your own. Fucking. Niece.”
I allow my spit to rain down on him. My anger has crossed every internal border and is now surging through my whole body like a Cat 5 hurricane.
I grab him by the throat, yank him toward me then throw him against the wall of knives. He yelps as several clatter to the concrete floor.
Walking over to him slowly, I see nothing but red.
“You’re the reason she’s scared. You’re the reason she can’t trust anyone.” I close in on him and grip his cheeks, squeezing them together and bruising the bones with just one hand. “You’re the reason I can’t touch her.”
“I-I’m sorry, I didn’t—”
I’m done. I don’t want to hear his explanations, his pleas. I just want him dead. I want to kill him—brutally. And I couldn’t have found myself in a more perfect place—a butcher’s shop.
“N-n-n-noooo,” he protests as I deeply scan the blades. He runs to the opposite side of the room but Brody catches him, holding him fast.
I lift a beauty down from a meat hook. A large, pristine machete with a long curved blade and smooth wooden handle.
“Good choice,” Paddy murmurs as he looks on, genuinely entertained.
I don’t even think about the etiquette of turning up to another clan’s headquarters and violently carving up a human before their eyes. Something tells me it’s not an uncommon sight anyway.
“Come here,” I growl.
Brody releases Callum and pushes him into the center of the room.
He stands there trembling but all I see in his eyes is a young girl, barely fourteen, begging her uncle not to touch her. Watching the room spin as she digests whatever poison he put into her body just for kicks and photographs.
He’s one sick motherfucker.
I don’t hesitate. I bring the blade above my head then swing it at a right angle bringing down on his shoulder. It’s sharp as fuck, slicing off his entire arm. He stares at it in shock, while I go for his other arm which also falls to the floor.
He sways like a drunk but before he can buckle at the knees, I whack the machete into his shins. The cut isn’t quite so clean, the blade getting wedged in his sinewy muscle. I haul it back out and go for the other leg.
Blood pours from the wounds, slickening the floor. He falls forward and face plants the sodden ground and I go at his back, slashing and slashing and slashing until his pulse limps to a halt. But even then, I keep going and don’t stop until his body is in bits.
When I finally stagger backward into the door, I’m a red, bloody, sweating mess, but at least I’m calmer than I was when I realized what the photographs were.
The room falls silent but for the drip, drip, drip of blood from jagged parts of his skeleton.
“That wasn’t bad for a rookie,” Paddy eventually says, then a few more seconds pass before he smirks.
I wipe a bloody hand across my brow as my pulse begins to settle. “You boys do this kind of thing often?”
Brody drags a giant barrel into the room and starts emptying cans of acid into it.
“Every couple o’ weeks or so,” Paddy replies, like it’s as routine as playing a recreational sport. “We’d have to dispose of the bodies either way. May as well make an art out of it, ye know?”
I arch a brow. It’s all I can manage since I just used up every ounce of adrenaline carving up a human.
Lorcan comes to sit by me. “How did you know he was lying? I saw the pictures—thought he was telling the truth. How did you know she wasn’t really posing?
He seems genuinely keen to learn, but I find it hard to explain. Those years I spent disconnected meant I had to hone my instincts, sharpen my senses. I don’t just read words—I read bodies.
I breathe in deeply, then let it go.
“I’ve found that when you’re less concerned with what comes out of your own mouth, you learn to see things others don’t. And if you think that way for long enough, it becomes second nature.”
“Is that why they call you Il Diavolo? Because you can see things other people don’t? It gives you an edge over others?”
“Maybe.”
That, and I have a lot of pent up, bitter vengefulness in my system that only seems to have softened in the last couple weeks.
I watch Brody toss parts of Callum McAllister into the tub of acid and try not to vomit at the smell of dissolving flesh.
I turn to Paddy. “Thanks for bringing me here, and for letting me do the honors.”
“You’re welcome. It was generous o’ ye’ to cut us the Cuba deal. It’s us the fecker owed, not ye. We weren’t going to see any money from him so…”
He shrugs like Callum’s death was inevitable. I suppose it was. If I hadn’t killed him just now, they would have, and it probably would have been a lot more painful and drawn out.
My bones are stiff but I stand and brush myself down.
“Can I ask you a favor?”
Paddy looks up. “Sure lad.”
“Can I keep the machete? As a kind of souvenir?”
“Aye, take it. We’ve plenty more where that came from.”
Lorcan hands me a plastic bag and I drop the blade inside and let myself out of the shed.
“I’ll see you around sometime,” I say over my shoulder, hoping silently, that time doesn’t come around too soon.
“Ye too, Bellucci.” I hear the grins. “Ye too.”