to work on the bastard.
Now, he was naked and shivering in the deepening winter night, the chains chiming with his fierce shudders. It was like music to my ears, the rattle and the rumble of his pained groans, though they were warped by the screwdriver I’d driven through the soft underside of his chin into the roof of his mouth so it would stay open while I pried out his teeth with pliers.
He wasn’t a seasoned con, a lifetime criminal, because he broke too quickly. Humpty fucking Dumpty tipped so easily over the wall, fracturing into pieces that were tediously simple to put together.
Four teeth gone, nipples sliced off and fallen to the ground like rounds of discarded pepperoni, pathetic excuse for his manhood beaten black and blue by brass knuckles, and he was blubbering.
“He fucking paid me,” the motherfucker mumbled through the blood and metal through the center of his tongue.
“Take it out,” Zeus ordered mildly, belaying the leashed violence in every line of his posture where he leaned against my work table, watching me at play. “Wanna hear the bastard clearly.”
My fisted hands shook with the need to disobey, with the need to make it harder, not easier, for the man to talk, to think, to take one more breath, but I did as Zeus bid.
Not because he bid it, but because I wanted to know why this piece of shit had gone after Bea.
There was a cold, hard need in the base of my gut, a boulder of unsophisticated, almost primal yearning to rip this man and any other man who might desire Bea Lafayette apart with my bare hands. I wanted to fucking roar from every rooftop that she was mine, mine, mine.
I wanted her to wear my name on her skin, etched there forever by my blade. I wanted her name on my flesh in the same way, but visible, so that everyone who feared me would look at me and know they should fear her too.
Because if they fucked with Bea, they fucked with me.
And I wasn’t a man you fucked with.
Ever.
With a vicious, slanted pull, I ripped the screwdriver from the asshole’s mouth. His squeal matched the high yelp of the pigs in their pen outside.
“Please,” he sputtered, bloody spittle spraying from his ravaged mouth. “Please, stop.”
I cleaned the screwdriver on the bottom of my tee. Moments like this were why I tended to wear black.
“I’ll stop, you tell me what I want to know,” I said casually as I moved to my work table and surveyed the spread of my tools.
I always kept a canvas roll of my favourite torture devices and weapons in my saddlebags; a variety of blades from Karambits and gut hooks, scalpels and filet folding knives, bamboo for splintering fingernails, vials of poison, blunt instruments like hammers and mallets, various batons and whips, though I rarely used those. It was a collection I was proud of, one I’d collected over the years and took great care to keep clean and well-honed.
I held up a few different knives, listening to the sweet whimpers and harsh exhales of my victim.
Considering the mood I was in, they weren’t enough.
I eyed Wrath sitting on a bale of hay in the shadows. “Get me the chainsaw.”
“Fuck!” Cal Mulligan shouted, tears coursing down his cheeks.
Curtains had worked his geeky magic and found old Cal online in about thirty seconds based on the driver’s license we’d found in his wallet. He was a forty-three-year-old living outside of Entrance working for a local trucking company.
And he was a convicted sex offender.
“Fuck, man, please,” he begged through his sobs. “Some guy I met paid me a fuck ton of cash to rape the girl.”
“To rape Beatrice Lafayette,” I confirmed. The chill in my voice had frost coating my throat. The cold cast of my heart was turning my blood to fucking ice.
When he didn’t answer quickly enough, I slid the Karambit onto my right hand and punched a hole with the end of one knife just below his sternum.
Hot blood seeped out of the hole like sap from a tree and ran down his thick stomach to catch in the dense bush of his groin. Disgusting, pathetic excuse of a man.
I twisted the knife for no other reason than I wanted to crank up the volume on his screams.
“YES!” he hollered, sobbing so hard now his body shook and swayed, the bone in his dislocated shoulders grinding. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. Yes!”
“How did you meet him?” I asked