gave me the leverage I needed to get the rest of them off me. With Khane’s help, I fell back to Mecca’s side and continued breathing life into her. I didn’t care what anyone had to say, she was not gone. It was something that I was not accepting. Ever.
I knew I was delirious, losing my sanity, but if Mecca was leaving, I was set to follow her wherever she was going. I stilled and my blood froze in my veins. My abrupt stop had caused Khane to go still and stare up at me.
Was that her pulse that just jumped under my fingertips?
40
Khane
My brother was on the warpath and rightfully so. The love of his life had been gunned down by our father, the devil that turned us into death soldiers.
I stared into the face of one of the few left of the fifteen that were my father’s keepers and instrumental in setting him free. It had taken Arjen and me three weeks to find them all because our dedication to avenging Mecca had been that strong.
The men’s loyalty to our father had cost them their lives. Time didn’t matter. Who they were associated with didn’t matter either. We weren’t going to stop our deathly rampage until they were all dead.
The screams were music to my ears. I relished the sound of death, the incredibly unnecessary actions one would take to prevent that which was inevitable. Arjen was feeding my sinful connection with a death straight from the pages of the devil’s playbook.
We had hunted high and low, near and far until we found the man with the accent. He was someone me and Arjen knew. He was who had hired the assassins that facilitated the highway ambushes on Mecca and us.
Adrik Morozov was my father’s long time Russian associate. Adrik was the closest thing my father had to a best friend and my father’s connection to all sorts of illegal business in Russia. Now, his loyalty to our father had Arjen, the Lord of Untimely Death, peering down at him.
The man had suffered at Arjen’s hand for the past week as he fed him pain to extract the information we needed to find most, if not all of the members of our father’s loyal rescue party.
Arjen had the man on his knees in the prayer position with his face tilted down. It wasn’t so much the position that was the kicker, it was how Arjen had staged the man’s face.
He began asking questions, and each time the man gave an answer he didn’t want to hear, he’d force him to open his mouth and bite the pointed edges of the stone wall before him. The man resembled a mouse biting into a too big wedge of cheese.
His mouth was wide open, with the jagged edges of the gray stone wedged between his teeth. His shrill yells bounced off the walls like invisible yo-yo’s, the sound waves almost tangible.
Each day, Arjen would come up with a new horror to put the man through, siphoning information from him each time. Now, he had a tight grip of the man’s hair, controlling his head.
“How many of you are left?”
Blood drizzled down the man’s chin from the stone pushing at his teeth and biting into his tongue.
“We are it. Fifteen.”
Fifteen was the answer we had gotten from each man we had tortured, and I was starting to believe it as the truth because we were down to the last two, and the answer hadn’t changed yet.
“I don’t believe that shit.”
Arjen pressed the man’s face into the jagged edges of the thick chock of stone until a nasty crunch sounded, breaking his nose. Blood poured from the man’s face.
“Open your fucking mouth and bite the rock,” he ordered. The sight was horrific enough to make the devil proud. Once the man had his mouth wide open, Arjen shoved his face into the stone so that a wide wedge was back between his exposed teeth. The pressure that was put on the back of the man’s head had his jaw stretched alligator wide.
A sickening crunch sounded before teeth went flying in different directions from the sudden punch Arjen delivered to the back of the man’s head. I had witnessed horrific shit, most of it delivered by my hands, but Arjen was earning his nickname this day.
Piss leaked from the screaming man’s pants. Arjen jerked the man’s mangled mouth from the rock as blood and teeth continued to fall from his face. He leaned down