Chapter 27
Twenty-Seven
Damned if I do, bored if I don’t.
—Hux to Bernice
Hux
“She’s okay,” Creed said at my side.
We both stood in the doorway of her hospital room and watched her sleep.
Well, a medically induced sleep, anyway.
“Bruised ribs. Broken hand. Shallow cut on her throat. Ear to ear. Sprained ankle. Cuts and abrasions,” I croaked. “But she’s alive.”
She was lucky.
Everything was mostly bluster.
She’d woken up just long enough to have an asthma attack, so she’d been sedated.
Keeping her calm was the ultimate priority right now, and the doctor planned to keep her that way for at least the next twelve hours as her body recovered from the shock.
Boone came up to stand beside us, though he wasn’t able to get to our sides due to us standing in the doorway.
“You get him there?” I asked.
“Yes,” Boone answered.
“Good,” I said. “I’ll be there after I sit with her a bit.”
Then I went inside and took the lone chair next to her bed.
I picked up her hand covered in a cast and warmed her fingers up between both of my hands.
“Creed,” I called. “Get her a couple of heated blankets. She’s freezing.”
I heard his steps retreating and continued to study those cold fingers.
“You scared the shit out of me, Bernice,” I told her.
She didn’t reply and that was the worst feeling in the world.
I stayed by her side for twelve hours.
I only left when they weaned her off of the medication keeping her asleep.
I would’ve stayed until she woke, but I had some anger to work out of my system, and a man hanging in my meat locker waiting to take every bit of it.
“You know the good thing about being a butcher?” I asked as I sharpened my favorite blade.
The man’s eyes came to me where he hung off the meat hook in my slaughtering room.
It was a floor-to-ceiling concrete room with stainless steel everything. A drain was in the middle of the floor to help wash away the blood that was inevitable.
There wasn’t a single thing that was uncleanable.
“No answer?” I asked, eyeing the man’s terrified eyes.
“Too bad.” I ran the tip of my blade down the length of the man’s chest, starting at the middle of his throat and stopping just above his pubic bone.
Blood immediately welled.
“Anyway,” I said. “I’m really good with my knife. And though I’ve never actually skinned a human, it can’t be all that different from skinning a pig, right?”
Chan pissed himself.
“It’s okay, there’s a drain.” I smiled. “I’ll clean that up later.”
I got to work, slicing and dicing.
I stopped when he passed out and waited for him to wake up.
When he woke, I began again, enjoying every single second of it.
I got to his hand and said, “Hmm. You know, this might be easier if you don’t have that hand. Usually this is the part where I’d cut off the hooves. Same thing, right?”
The man watched through glazed eyes full of pain as I walked to the table and picked up the loppers I used to snip off the limbs.
I placed the loppers onto his wrist and closed them.
The scream that left his throat was music to my ears.
Creed, who hadn’t said a word this entire time, said, “You probably should put a tourniquet there if you want to keep him alive. Wouldn’t want him to bleed to death too quickly.”
“Ahh, you’re right. I’m used to dealing with things that are already dead.”