Chapter 2 #2
“But you took Harry away from us. It was your hand that stole his last breath. And I think that you’re recovering just a little too well considering your crime.
Your wife is dead because of you. Did you know that?
I killed her. Stuck a bullet in the back of her head.
She fell like a lamb at slaughter, but not before I made her shake first. Her death is all your fault, Jon.
You gave her that. But you don’t care about innocent people dying at your hands, do you?
Too many people are dead inside their heads because of all the shit you put them through.
That’s the worse torture; don’t you think?
Knowing you’ll never be the same person you once were because some evil bastard stepped into your life and decided to fuck it up.
You deserve to die, too, but I think death is too easy for you, Taylor.
So let’s give you what you gave so many men in prison.
Let’s make it an eternity of torture trapped inside a body that can no longer be used to taunt the ones unfortunate enough to be beneath you. ”
Eric began to move then, just as Jon Taylor’s eyes flew open and he tried to make his broken body work so he could get away.
Once Eric was by the bed, he reached for the catheter that was hanging by Jon’s bed full of orange piss, and he twisted the tubes to block them.
I started to pick at a couple of pads from Jon’s chest before I pulled his oxygen mask away from his face and let it rest on the top of his head. “Let’s deprive that brain of a bit more oxygen, shall we?”
There was something fascinating about watching a man go wild with only his eyes.
I imagined a feral animal that looked like Jon’s youth, scratching at the walls of his mind, punching, and kicking and screaming to be unleashed so it could get to me, all of it being silenced by my confident grin and his complete and utter helplessness.
“Rest in Hell,” I told him with a pat to his cheek, and then Eric and I walked out of the room, knowing our time was almost up.
We made it back outside with little fuss, just Gilly rushing behind us to make sure we were in the clear. When we got to the fresh air, she exhaled like she hadn’t taken a breath the whole time we’d been in there.
“You’ll need to go to him soon,” I told her. “Don’t let him die. I want him to suffer.”
“Get out of here,” she practically hissed, looking back over her shoulder.
“We’ll be back,” Eric told her. “To see Clint, yeah?”
She nodded furiously. “I’ll get in touch with Howard as soon as he’s ready to talk. I need to get the prison guards away, though. He’s in a bad way, so they aren’t too concerned with him escaping anytime soon. It’s more who gets in.”
“We can crawl through vents if that helps.” I smirked.
Her eyes met mine with nothing but seriousness. “It might be the only way. Now go.”
“Lead the way,” Eric said, gesturing to our bikes.
“You sure you wanna stick with me?”
Eric smirked. “Partner in crime, remember?”
“I remember. I just don’t understand it. All those years gone, and now you’re willing to take the fall for me.”
“If we’re together every time you do something fucking crazy, there’s only one of us that needs to go down for it.”
I scowled every time he’d said that to me since the first time he caught me running away from my responsibilities to go make someone bleed. “Nobody back at The Hut would believe this shit. You know they all think you’re a snake since you came back.”
“My actions will show everyone who I am in time.”
“Like I said, I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Now lead the goddamn way, king.”
And I did. I led the way, taking us far out of town to an underground boxing ring where I could spend an hour or two with a man who wasn’t going to ask me how I was holding up.
He wasn’t going to look at me with pity.
He wasn’t going to ask me if I was doing the right thing.
He wasn’t going to judge or tell me to stay on track.
We didn’t talk about the past. We didn’t talk about why he left or what shit he was still keeping from me.
We didn’t discuss anything. We were cold together. Angry.
We were a reflection of one another, going round for round and taking pound for pound.
Eric was a machine as much as I was.
He knew the life of the king. He knew that sometimes, especially when grief struck, the only thing to beat the numbness was relentless violence.
He allowed me that.
I took everything he had to offer.
I beat on him, and he beat on me for two hours in a dark and dingy warehouse filled with battered rings and dodgy ropes. I let the sweat pour down my back and over my eyes, all of my aggression hitting the target over and over and over and over.
I had to hand it to the old man; he sure knew how to fucking fight, which was a good job, because as soon as we were out of that warehouse, we had another job to do—a job that would take us into the middle of the night and involve more blood.
There was a long list of people who had to pay for Harry’s death.
We had a lot of names to strike out.