Brutal Prince (Brutal Birthright)

“Is there a point to this metaphor?” I say impatiently. My shoulders are fucking burning, and if Zajac is going to kill me, I’d rather he go ahead and do it already. “Am I supposed to be the person swimming in the dirty water?”

“No!” he snaps, eyes on my face now. “That’s everyone in Chicago, who wants to think their city is clean. You’re the person who eats the bacon, thinking you’re better than the man who butchered it.”

I sigh, trying to pretend to be interested, while actually scanning the room. I’m eyeballing the two bodyguards, looking for some way out of this mess. All the while I’m chaffing my wrists inside the rope, trying to twist them free bit by bit. Or else just rubbing my skin off—it’s hard to tell.

Zajac is done monologuing. He cuts off my suit jacket and shirt with a dozen quick slashes. Parts of the sleeves still hang off my arms, but my torso is bare, bleeding from five or six shallow cuts. The Butcher is skilled enough that he could have done that without touching my skin, but he slashed me on purpose. He’s whetting his knife.

He presses the point against the lower right-hand side of my abdomen.

“Do you know what’s right there?” he says.

I don’t want to play this game with him.

“No,” I say.

“Your appendix. A little three-and-a-half-inch tube of tissue, extending from your large intestine. Likely vestigial for the modern human, but sometimes brought to prominence when it becomes infected or inflamed. I don’t see any laparoscopy scars, so I assume yours is still intact.”

I stay stubbornly silent, refusing to play along.

The Butcher rests the flat of the blade on the palm of his hand. “I had intended to wait until after the election for this, but you had to make a nuisance of yourselves, smashing up my casino and bothering my mistress in her place of work. So here’s what we’re going to do. The Gallos are going to return the money they stole from my casino.”

I don’t know how much they got, but I hope it was a fuck ton of cash.

“You’re going to sell me the transit property, at a steep discount.”

Nope. Also not happening.

“And you’re going to provide me with a city government position of my choice, after your election.”

When pigs fucking fly.

“As a down payment on these services, I’m going to take your appendix,” Zajac says. “You won’t miss it. The surgery, though painful in the absence of anesthetic, won’t be fatal.”

He raises the point of the knife once more, positioning it directly above the apparently non-essential portion of my guts. He takes a breath, readying himself to slice into my flesh. Then he begins to press the knife into my belly.

He pushes it in agonizingly slow.

I grind my teeth together as hard as I can, eyes closed, but I can’t help letting out a strangled yell.

It really fucking hurts. I’ve heard that being stabbed is more painful than being shot. Having recently been grazed in the arm by my loving wife, I can definitely attest that having a knife slowly, torturously burrowed into your guts is about a hundred times worse. My face is sweating, and my muscles are shaking harder than ever. And the knife is only an inch or two into my flesh.

“Don’t worry,” the Butcher hisses. “I should be done in an hour or so . . .”

“Wait a second, wait a second . . .” I pant.

He pauses, without taking the knife out of my stomach.

“Could you take a break for a second and scratch my nose? I’ve got an itch, and it’s driving me crazy.”

Zajac gives an irritated snort and tenses his arm to drive the knife deeper into my body.

At that moment, a bottle comes flying through the doorway, with a smoking rag stuffed in its neck. The bottle shatters on the cement floor, the flaming liquor spreading out in a pool, and shards of fiery glass spinning outward. One catches the bouncer’s sleeve. He spins around, trying to slap it out again.

There’s another smashing sound, and then an explosion, loud and close.

“Deal with that,” Zajac hisses to his men.

The blond one splits off at once, skirting the wreckage of the Molotov cocktail and heading through a side door. The bouncer heads straight for the main door, only to catch a bullet in the shoulder the second he walks through.