next to his ear, telling him something I couldn’t hear.
The man’s lips were so damaged that his begging words were nothing more than bloody mumbles. Mercy was not on his side tonight as his mouth was placed back on the stone, his jaw even wider as his cries and whimpers, and trembling and begging groans were ignored.
A deep squint tightened my eyes when Arjen held the man’s head in place with a hand pressed to the back of his head. His arms were long enough that he stepped back from the struggling man and sent a powerful kick to the area where his hand had been.
The man’s face was crushed into the stone. The rest of his teeth, along with his jawbone, shattered as the red of blood mixed with the ebony of bone and teeth fragments poured from what was once his face.
A gaping opening was left where his mouth and nose used to be. His convulsing body slid down the wall, leaving a trail of blood and tissue behind until he hit the floor.
Arjen didn’t even stay to survey the damage he had done as he was on to the last man. For once, I was worried about my brother’s mental state when he was usually the one that worried about mine.
The man before him now was stripped naked. His bulky body hung heavily from thick iron chains that rained rust and sang a squeaky song with each movement. Biting metal gripped his wrist as he hung swinging listlessly about for our entertainment.
We had killed them all except the one hanging in front of Arjen in the secret basement prison under my house. Since my house sat in the middle of nowhere, on the peak of a mountain, the basement dipped into a stone cavern of openings and pathways that I had converted into an inescapable prison.
Arjen was playing human piñata with the last man, using a spiked baseball bat that would have made the character, Negan, from the show, The Walking Dead, proud.
Except, this man wasn’t spilling candy and confetti, he was spilling blood and fatty tissue. A portion of his stomach protruded where a thin layer of skin was likely all that held in his innards.
Thick colorful knots had risen all over his body, attempting to compensate and heal damage that was beyond repair. The man’s otherwise olive tone was a swirl of dark gray and an array of darker colors.
Each harsh blow Arjen delivered, knocked the wind from his lungs and sank him deeper into the wide open arms of death. The gurgling had started two strikes ago, so his internal wounds were taking their toll.
Each man who faced us, likely wished that they had left our father in that Russian prison, because our warped brains had cooked up horrors that made the king of hell jealous. Aside from an occasional nap and enough food for him to open his eyes, Arjen survived off adrenaline and rage.
If I’d not seen how fiercely he loved Mecca, I’d have not understood his level of urgency or the state of madness he embraced. We had tortured man after man, but they were all certain that we had captured all of our father’s helpers. It didn’t matter what they said, we’d never stop looking because anyone associated with helping our father in any way had signed their own death certificates.
The one thing that stopped Arjen from pounding into the man was his ringing phone.
“Hello,” he answered, his calm tone was in contrast with the brutality he was just unleashing.
He went quiet, nodding at the person speaking on the other end. With the phone pinned to his ear with one hand, he began stripping from his bloody coveralls with the other.
“Okay, we’ll be right there.”
He stared up while ripping out of the bloody plastic. Not giving me a chance to ask, he stated, “Silvia. She needs to see us now.” He took one look at my expression and answered the next question on my face.
“She wouldn’t tell me over the phone, but she didn’t sound good. Let’s go,” he tossed back, already heading towards the stairs, leaving the half-dead man hanging from the ceiling and the faceless one lying in a pool of blood, shit, and piss.
What the hell were we about to face now? Had Silvia Cardenas changed her mind about killing us over what had happened to her daughter?
41
Arjen
The multiple levels of guard protection Silvia Cardenas had around the resort she called her home didn’t bother checking our