Brutal Prince (Brutal Birthright)

my drink. When I was sitting with . . .

AIDA!

I whip my head around, looking for her.

Thankfully, she’s not hanging from a hook right next to me. But I don’t see her anywhere in the deserted space. All I see is a table, covered with a stained white cloth. Which is not, generally, a good sign.

I want to yell for Aida. But I also don’t want to draw attention to the fact that she’s gone. I don’t know how I got here, and I don’t know if she was with me or not.

My shoulders are screaming. My feet can almost, but not quite, touch the ground.

I try twisting my wrists, turning them against the rough rope to see if there’s any chance of wriggling free. The movement makes me rotate slightly, like a bird on a spit. But it doesn’t seem to loosen the knot.

The only good thing is that I don’t have long to wait.

The Butcher enters the warehouse, flanked by two of his soldiers. One is slim, with white-blond hair and tattoos down both arms. The other looks familiar—he might have been one of the bouncers at Pole. Oh, fuck. He probably was.

But it’s the Butcher who draws my attention. He fixes me with his furious stare, one eyebrow permanently quirked a little higher than the other. His nose looks beakier than ever under the harsh light, his cheeks hollower. The pitted scars along the sides of his face look too deep to be from acne—it might be shrapnel wounds from some explosion long ago.

Zajac pauses in front of me, almost directly under the single overhead light. He lifts one finger and touches my chest. He pushes, making me swing helplessly back and forth from the hook.

I can’t help grunting at the increased pressure on my arms. The Butcher gives a small smile. He’s amused by my discomfort.

He steps back again, giving a nod to the bouncer from the club. The bouncer strips off Zajac’s coat.

Zajac looks smaller without it. But as he rolls up the sleeves of his striped dress shirt, I can see that his forearms are thick with the kind of muscle built by doing practical things.

As he rolls up his left sleeve with deft, sure motions, he says, “People think I got my nickname because of Bogota. But it isn’t true. They called me the Butcher long before that.”

He rolls up the right sleeve as well, until it matches the left precisely. Then he strides over to the covered table. He pulls back the cloth, revealing exactly what I expected to see: a set of freshly-sharpened butcher’s knives, their blades arranged by shape and size. Cleavers, scimitars, and chef’s knives, blades for boning, filleting, carving, slicing, and chopping.

“Before we were criminals, the Zajacs had a family trade. What we learned, we passed down. I can butcher a hog in forty-two minutes.” He lifts up a long, slender knife, touching the ball of his thumb to the blade. Without any pressure at all, the skin parts and a bead of blood wells up against the steel. “What do you think I could do to you in an hour?” he muses, looking up and down my stretched-out frame.

“Maybe you could explain what the fuck you want, for a start,” I say. “This can’t be about transit property.”

“No,” Zajac says softly, his eyes colorless in the stark light.

“What is it, then?” I ask.

“It’s about respect, of course,” he replies. “I’ve lived in this city for twelve years now. My family has been here for three generations. But you don’t know that, do you, Mr. Griffin? Because you haven’t even paid me the compliment of curiosity.”

He sets down the knife he’s holding and selects another. Though his fingers are thick and stubby, he handles his weapon as dexterously as Nero.

“The Griffins, and the Gallos . . .” he says, approaching me with a blade in hand. “Both alike in your arrogance. The Gallos bury two of my men under cement, and they think that’s the end of it. You take my donation, then refuse to even meet with me face to face. Then you both make a marriage agreement, without even considering my sons. Or issuing an invitation.”

“The wedding was short notice,” I say through clenched teeth. My shoulders are on fire, and I don’t like how close Zajac is getting with that knife.

“I know exactly why the wedding happened,” he says. “I know everything . . .”

I want to demand where Aida is right now if he knows so much. But I’m still wary of giving her away. She might have managed to escape. If so, I hope to god she’s calling the cops, or her brothers.

Unfortunately, I don’t think anybody is going to get here in time. If they even knew where to find me.

“This was a slaughterhouse,” Zajac says, gesturing around the empty warehouse with the point of his knife. “They used to kill a thousand hogs a day here. The blood ran down there,” he points down the length of a metal grate that runs below my feet, “Down that pipe, straight into the river. The water was red for a mile downriver from the plants.”

I can’t actually see the pipe he’s referencing, but I can smell the dank stink of dirty water.

“A little further down, people swam in the water,” he says, his eyes fixed on the blade of his knife. “It looked clean enough, by then.”