in his way, no four-poster bed eating up half the square feet, no bureau in which to bunk his BVDs, no desk for correspondence he never received and answered, no chair to rest his bones even when he was so tired, he ached down to his marrow.
In his bathroom, which he had stripped of the cloud-like towels that had once rested on golden rods, flushing away them like birds from perches, he removed his clothes and weapons, each in proper sequence. First, the weapons, which he lined up on the marble counter in a neat, tidy little row of wrath. Two steel daggers. Four handguns, two with suppressors. Seven clips of extra ammunition, because he’d popped off one of his backups playing target practice with a lesser. And then a pair of throwing knives, a length of nylon rope, duct tape, a chisel, and a hammer.
Those last four on the list? No one else knew about them. They were for him. They were . . . private.
His clothes were next. The leather jacket first, which he folded over the edge of the claw-foot tub. The black T-shirt, which he folded and placed by the jacket on the heated marble floor. The boots which he lined up together by the shirt, the socks that he folded on top of the shirt, the leathers that he folded and draped on the jacket. When he was completely naked, he picked the shirt and the socks back up and put them down the laundry chute. He resented this. In the Old Country, he had worn his clothes until they had fallen off of him, replacing items only when necessary. At first, this conservation of resources had been out of necessity. Then it had been a matter of efficiency as he did not want to waste time on the inconsequential.
Now, he lived here. Where people didn’t want to eat their roast beef next to someone who smelled of the street, of sweat, of lesser blood and gunpowder.
Of death, given and received.
This delicate sensibility had had to be explained to him and he resented the compliance that was required. But it was what it was. In the course of his life, he had had to yield to higher powers from time to time. Whether they were virtuous . . . or not.
Pivoting back to the display of the only things that mattered in his life—regardless of what Balz thought—he was drawn to the nylon rope.
And the chisel.
And the hammer.
His body moved forward, called by his private tools. On the approach, he saw different versions of them, flipping through memories of the many sharp edges and forced confinement aids he had used over the centuries as if they were photographs of people whose company he enjoyed and of happy events that had been shared amongst family and friends . . . parties, festivals, birthdays.
Without a conscious command from his mind, his hand reached out to the chisel, his fingertips traveling across the sharp end, the business end, the end that he had driven through many a soft tissue and into many a hard bone. Inside of him, his talhman roared, the horrible energy traveling from the center of his chest directly down his arm, to his dagger hand. A trembling ensued, shaky, shaky.
But not from weakness. From denied strength.
As he pictured using the chisel, the hammer . . . his saw and his axe . . . the other tools of his terrible trade . . . he saw the bodies of his victims lying on different kinds of floors. Wooden floors, finished and unfinished. Marble, stone, and ceramic tile. Carpets, rugs, linoleum. And then there were the outside scenes. The spongy mattresses of wet leaves. The cold gloss of iced-over ponds and drifts of snow. The grit of concrete, another set of knuckles to be leveraged. Then the ocean’s yielding sand, the rocky shores of rivers, and the greedy splash of lake water.
Syn’s breath quickened and sweat broke out across his chest, riding a wave up his throat, into his face.
In his mind, he pictured limbs bent wrong. Mouths cranked open in screams. Intestines blooming out of incisions he’d made in lower bellies.
Massaging the flat, steel face of the chisel with his forefinger, he warmed the cold metal with his body heat, stroking . . . stroking—
A tug on his cock made him look down at his stiffened sex in surprise.
It wasn’t a tug. His erection had knocked into the handle of the drawer between the