Chapter 27
The yard stretched in front of me, a rusted labyrinth of steel and shadow. My boots crunched over broken glass and shell casings, each step a countdown. The music in my ear had died sometime during the screams, but the beat had burrowed under my skin and stayed.
Left. Right. Another row. My shoulder brushed flaking paint, my fingers trailing along cold metal to keep me grounded.
Joe’s voice came again, closer now. “…check the south fence. If he’s bleeding, he’ll—”
I smiled, sharp and humorless. Not bleeding anymore, asshole. Perks of being hell’s unwanted science project.
I rounded the end of the container stack and he was there at the far end of the aisle, gun up and mouth set in that hard, practiced line he used when he wanted to look in control.
My grip tightened on the knife. I took one slow, deliberate step forward, kicking a rock across the pavement so Joe’s head snapped up and our eyes locked across the distance.
The second he saw me, it cracked.
“Hey, Batman,” I called, voice low and threaded with something wild and hungry. “Miss me?”
Joe’s face went slack, mouth hanging open as the barrel of his gun dipped. When his brain finally caught up, he said, “Jesus Christ… Dany?”
The way he said my name hit low like a kick straight to the lady bits. I watched the recognition crawl over his face in slow motion, and I knew what he saw; my hair wild, shirt torn and half hanging off one shoulder, blood smearing every inch of my body.
He saw all of it.
“I don’t understand what’s going on.” He lowered the gun and tried to hide it beside his thigh. Like he could cover this up and keep lying to me.
“You know, that’s funny because up until about thirty minutes ago, neither did I. In fact, I was under the impression that you didn’t have any living relatives.”
“Dany, I can explain. I–I’m, uh, I’m undercover. I work for the St. Louis–”
“Cut the bullshit!” I roared and flung my knife at him. It landed with a satisfying sound and a scream.
“Jesus Christ!” he yelled. “Are you crazy?”
“Bat shit, actually, but that’s beside the point.”
Joe howled and dropped to one knee, clutching his arm. My knife stuck out of his bicep at a stupid angle, black handle bobbing when he moved.
“Ow, fuck!” he yelled, staring at it like it had personally betrayed him. “What the fuck, Dany?”He glared up at me through a curtain of messy hair, breath panting white in the cold. “You threw a knife at me!”
I didn’t answer. Just appreciated the way he squirmed.
He grabbed the handle and hesitated, knuckles bleaching. His mouth twisted. “If I pull this out, I’m gonna—”
“Bleed,” I finished. “That’s kind of the idea.”
His jaw clenched. “You need to calm down and listen to me.”
“Pretty sure I’ve had my fill of men telling me to ‘calm down.’” I tilted my head.
He sucked in air through his teeth, yanked the knife free, and slapped his hand over the wound, a wet sheen spreading under his fingers. The knife clattered to the concrete beside him. I didn’t look away from his face as I stepped around it and nudged it back to me with the toe of my boot.
Metal rasped against pavement. A little shiver went through me at the sound.
Bliss.
“Dany,” he tried again, voice tight. “I’m undercover. I had to play along. I couldn’t tell you. If my cover’s blown, this whole thing—”
“You’re really sticking with that?” I bent, scooped the knife up, and wiped it on my thigh, leaving a fat, dark streak across the fishnet. “You’re standing in a graveyard of your coworkers, your arm is leaking like a busted pipe, and you still think I’m buying ‘undercover cop?’”
“I work for the St. Louis—”
My foot connected with his chin in a fit of rage. I was so fucking tired of his bullshit.
He cried out, and I waited not so patiently for him to shut the fuck up so I could scream at him some more. That moment never came though because he did the one thing I should have expected, but didn’t.
Joe grabbed the gun he’d tried to hide, fingers slick on the grip with trembling hands, and stood as he pointed it right between my eyes.
Disgust and pure, volatile hatred soured my tongue.
Fine. Have it your way then, I sneered inside.
“Go ahead,” I said aloud and stepped with purpose toward him. His finger tightened on the trigger. “You were ready to pull the trigger on whoever killed your men. It was me, Joe. So do it.”
“Dany, I’m warning you,” he growled through gritted teeth.
“My, my,” came a low rumble from the shadows. “Do you hear that, Dany? A warning.” Luci stepped into full view under the moonlight and looked like the goddamn king of midnight.
Joe swung the gun in Luci’s direction. “Who the fuck are you?”
I scoffed, “Don’t worry. You’ll be well acquainted soon.”
Fear morphed into impatience on Joe’s face. We were getting to the good part: when a narcissist shows his true colors.
“You know what, fuck this,” Joe spat.
“Don’t, Luci,” I murmured under my breath as Joe rushed me.
His hand wrapped around my throat as he shoved me against a shipping container. I couldn’t stop the smile from spreading across my face.
Like father, like son.
“Is this what you do to women, Joe?” I rasped out.
He rolled his eyes so hard I wanted to cut them out.
“God, listen to yourself. I gave you more than you deserved. You were a fucking stripper in a shitty bar with a hero complex and a trauma kink. I threw you a bone. Gave you a nice story, a warm bed, someone to cry on when your nightmares got too loud.”
Each word carried a sort of mocking sarcasm that set my blood on fire.
Joe pointed his gun to my forehead and looked me dead in the eyes.
“Don’t,” I rasped, and by his smile I could tell he thought that I was speaking to him. Pleading, even. But I wasn’t. I was talking to the Devil ready to tear his throat out from behind for laying hands on me. I locked gazes with Lucifer and the fiery pits of hell were burning in his eyes.
You said you believed in me, I thought, hoping he could hear it. Now trust me.
Maybe I was crazy, but I wanted it to hurt. I wanted Joe to show me what he was really capable of and, yeah, maybe part of me thought I deserved it. I fell for his shit and I deserved the consequences.
That didn’t mean I was going to live under them anymore, though.
Luci’s jaw clenched and he nodded once, but didn’t back away.
“Don’t what?” Joe asked. “Kill you? Oh come on, Dany. Someone’s gotta clean up the mess you made. I can’t just let you go.”
Though he held me still held me by the throat, I tipped my head forward and pressed my forehead to the tip of the barrel. “Do it, you dickless bastard.”
His laugh was malicious. “Now we both know that’s not true is it, Dany? I fucked you like the whore you are on top of my car.”
I took comfort in knowing that somehow, some way, he hadn’t. That it had been Lucifer claiming me all along.
“Do it, you fucking pussy.”
That was all his ego needed. Joe sneered and between blinks, the gunpowder filled my nose as he pulled the trigger.
For a split second, I felt everything.
The bullet hit between my eyes like a sledgehammer swung by God Himself. There was a blinding burst of white, a crack like the world splitting open, and then hot, wet nothing as the back of my skull slammed against the container from the force of the bullet.
Sound folded in on itself.
There was distant ringing, like someone had thrown church bells into a blender. The cold seeped into my scalp where my head had split open. Warmth ran down the sides of my face in thick streams, pooling in my hair, slicking my neck.
Somewhere far away, someone was shouting.
“Holy shit. Holy shit, holy shit—”
Gravity loosened, like someone had cut the strings tying me to my body.
I floated.
Then the tether yanked.
Heat roared back through me from the inside out, a furnace kicking on. The torn edges of bone and brain and skin crawled, knitting, pulling themselves back together in a grotesque, itching drag. The pressure inside my skull went from crushing to suffocating to…less.
I dragged in a breath like I’d been underwater.
Noise slammed into me.
Joe’s voice, ragged and disbelieving. “No. No, no, no—”
My fingers twitched.
“Get up,” Lucifer murmured somewhere above me, voice rich with dark pride. “Show him.”
I opened my eyes.
It was all worth it to see his piece-of-shit face when I didn’t fall to the ground. To watch the color drain from his skin and the puddle of piss that pooled below his feet when I wiped the blood from my forehead and licked it off my fingers.
He fired again.
The second shot punched into my chest, right over my sternum. Then a third. Fourth. Each impact rocked me, snapping my spine back into the container with a dull clang.
He didn’t aim. Didn’t take his time. Just squeezed the trigger again and again and again, screaming something wordless as the muzzle flashed over and over, lighting his face in stuttering snapshots of terror.
I stopped counting at five.
My body jerked with each hit, pain blooming hot and sharp, then fading to a deeper, duller burn as the holes started closing almost as fast as he could make them.
The gun clicked on empty.
Silence crashed down, broken only by his ragged breathing and the soft, obscene sound of bullets plinking onto concrete as my flesh spat them out.
They slid out of me one by one, fat and deformed, wet with blood before cooling in the open air.
I looked down.
My shirt was a disaster, shredded and soaked, but beneath it, skin was knitting over torn muscle and bone, leaving only faint, angry pink marks that were already fading.
I rolled my shoulders. It hurt. It didn’t matter.
When I looked back up, Joe was still holding the useless gun like a security blanket, arms shaking so hard it jittered in his grip.
“What are you?” he whispered.
I got my feet under me and stood.
Blood dripped off me in sluggish tracks. My hair clung to my face, sticky. My heart hammered, not with fear, but with something wild and electric and very, very eager.
I smiled at him, wide and sharp and full of every awful thing he’d made me feel. “My turn.”
I could have drawn it out; spent hours extracting his teeth one by one, or forcing him onto the Spanish donkey and weighted his shoulders until he split from ass to pelvis.
I didn’t because I was fucking done and had my eyes set on a different prize.
The air whooshed out of him as my foot connected with his balls. Luci was smiling off to the side, his silhouette still shivering around the edges from the rage wrinkling the space between his brow.
It was kind of cute.
Joe screamed as I gripped his hair and dragged him toward my murder weapon.
“I’ve always wanted to do this,” I said, maybe a little too giddy. “Luci, if you have a weak stomach, don’t watch!” I called out over my shoulder.
“Where are you taking me?” Joe cried and I could have gotten off to the sound of his fear.
“Right here.”
I threw him down on the pavement by the parking block. Unfortunately, I couldn’t position him and hold him still at the same time.
“Just kidding, Luci! Can you come hold him please?”
“It would be my pleasure,” he responded immediately, prowling over like he’d been waiting to tap in.
“A boot on his back should do, your highness.”
Lucifer’s deadpan stare made me giggle.
He did as I asked and pinned Joe on his belly, face hovering above the parking block.
I grabbed Joe’s hair again along with his chin to pry his mouth open.
After his perfectly white teeth were biting the concrete, tears and saliva falling all over the place, said, “It was nice to meet you, Joe. Enjoy your time in hell.”
I brought my boot down on the back of his head and didn’t even flinch when I felt the hard line of concrete meet the sole.