When he was done, he gave me a slight curt nod. The passion that had suffused his face with human beauty was gone, leaving him once more cold and perfect as a statue. He flipped open his burner phone and dialled a number, bringing it to his cheek as he greeted Wrath.
I turned to the mirror, eyes already falling to the sketch he’d drawn on my shirt.
A wobbly, blood-drawn heart.
And just like that, Priest had once again turned one of the worst moments of my life into one of the very best.
Priest
There was an art to torture.
Few were natural talents and even fewer learned true skill.
It wasn’t one’s capacity for violence that made a torturer proficient.
It was one’s capacity for patience.
A man in physical agony can withstand a surprising amount of physical pain before he breaks. It’s the mental suffering that opens them up like a stuck lid banged against the counter.
In fact, it’s a simple recipe, really. First, imagination. Nothing was unthinkable; everything was geared toward the absolute desecration and dismantling of a human mind and body. Add that to prolonged time, both of inflicting torment for hours but also anticipation, so that they wonder themselves into madness guessing at when the next strike will land, and small hurts collected over time. Timing was everything, which explained why the tortured made the best torturers. Nothing counts more than experience.
With the hooded would-be rapist, I started as you might imagine, by targeting his erogenous zones. I strung him up in the barn on Angelwood Farm where the club often disposed of bodies or conducted illicit meetings. Manacled his hands in thick cuffs attached to chains on a pulley system fixed to the vaulted wood ceiling and strung him up until the satisfying pop of his dislocating shoulders echoed in the drafty barn.
Then I went 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.