I held up a few different knives, listening to the sweet whimpers and harsh exhales of my victim.
Considering the mood I was in, they weren’t enough.
I eyed Wrath sitting on a bale of hay in the shadows. “Get me the chainsaw.”
“Fuck!” Cal Mulligan shouted, tears coursing down his cheeks.
Curtains had worked his geeky magic and found old Cal online in about thirty seconds based on the driver’s license we’d found in his wallet. He was a forty-three-year-old living outside of Entrance working for a local trucking company.
And he was a convicted sex offender.
“Fuck, man, please,” he begged through his sobs. “Some guy I met paid me a fuck ton of cash to rape the girl.”
“To rape Beatrice Lafayette,” I confirmed. The chill in my voice had frost coating my throat. The cold cast of my heart was turning my blood to fucking ice.
When he didn’t answer quickly enough, I slid the Karambit onto my right hand and punched a hole with the end of one knife just below his sternum.
Hot blood seeped out of the hole like sap from a tree and ran down his thick stomach to catch in the dense bush of his groin. Disgusting, pathetic excuse of a man.
I twisted the knife for no other reason than I wanted to crank up the volume on his screams.
“YES!” he hollered, sobbing so hard now his body shook and swayed, the bone in his dislocated shoulders grinding. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. Yes!”
“How did you meet him?” I asked flatly, leaving the knife in his gut, ready to unzip his belly with it and pull out his innards like I’d promised Bea I would. “Why did he want you to do that shit?”
“He-he didn’t say,” he panted.
I crashed my fist into his face, sending it careening to the left. “Try that again.”
“Priest, brother,” Zeus tried to soothe me. “Don’t kill ’im yet.”
I couldn’t, wouldn’t be soothed. The image of the fuck’s hands on Bea’s pure, gorgeous flesh, the way he’d marked her fragile face with a vivid bruise, the fact that if I hadn’t been there, she might have been taken for only the third time in her fucking life by a worse kind of monster than me…
Fuck.
My eyesight tunneled.
I grabbed Cal fucking Mulligan’s fleshy cheeks in a tight grip and brought my snarling face an inch from his own. “You tell me everythin’ you fuckin’ know in the next ten seconds, or I’m gonna spend the next ten hours killin’ ya so slowly, all you’ll remember of your pathetic fuckin’ life is pain.”
“He paid me five grand to hurt ‘the pretty blond girl’ that spends all her time with Priest McKenna,” he spewed through his heaving breaths. “Told me I could find her by hanging out around Hephaestus Auto for a few hours. That you worked there.”
I stilled as everything in me centered around this new information.
Not the serial killer.
This wasn’t him. This wasn’t his gig or his motivation.
This was someone else entirely.
And just that easily, I knew who the fuck it was.
“What was the name of the man who sent you?” I demanded. When he hesitated, eyes rolling in his head like loose marbles looking for help from my witnessing brothers he would never get, I warned, “You tell me now, I’ll kill you in five hours instead.”
Cal’s bloody, torn lower lip warbled, his belly shaking under the blood like red Jell-O. Watching a man come apart at the seams was a special kind of headiness.
“W-Walsh,” he cried. “Sean Walsh.”
Adrenaline fizzed in my blood, urging me to hunt down Sean Walsh and splay him open with my knife, skin flesh from muscle, muscle from bone, then whittle those into pretty fucking trophies for my fucking mantel.
“Sean Walsh,” I repeated just in case Curtains hadn’t heard.
A forgotten Walsh relative out to avenge his dead kin.
“He met me outside First Light Church,” Cal sang like a fucking canary. “After a meeting.”
“Didn’t know they held Rapists Anonymous,” Wrath muttered darkly. “Woulda made a point to hang out outside those buildings too if I’d known.”
The crack of his knuckles resonated through the barn.
Cal Mulligan sobbed louder.
“Enough,” Zeus ordered, already turning to clap a hand on Curtains’ shoulder and look over it at the computer screen. “Shut it down.”
“Gladly,” I said with one of my small curdled smiles.
Sinuously, I ripped the Karambit from Cal’s belly and dropped into a kneel in the pool of blood on the floor. A second later, his small cock was in my hands, the knife curling and cutting like butter through the appendage.
His howl rang through the damp wooden structure and sang through my blood.
“Leave him,” I snapped as Wrath moved forward to lever him down from the ceiling. “Let the motherfucker bleed out.” I flashed that little grin at Cal as he whimpered and shouted with pain. “This is my kinda mercy. Be grateful for it.”