My blood hummed, and to my shock, my mouth watered, as if vengeance had a taste and it was delicious.
“But in the end, you gotta get me, it’s worse to leave ’im broke and alive enough to feel his wrongs every day for the rest of his miserable existence, locked up with men who he put in lock-up himself. Might not even last long inside,” he admitted. “But better to put him through the shame of it than kill ’im quick.”
I flexed my hand opened and closed, testing the weight and the feel of the weapon. I knew it was Zeus’s preferred method of torture because I’d seen his collection of brass knuckles in his house, and now I got why. I’d be able to feel the pain I inflicted on Danner echoed back through my hand like a barometer of justice meted out.
“Does it get better?” I whispered to him even though I knew the answer by the ghosts that haunted his eyes at all times.
He paused, grimaced. “Not a liar, never wanted to be and can’t tell one now. You’ll suffer all the days’a your life. That’s why we gotta match his sufferin’ to yours, so he can wear half the burden of it.”
I nodded, slanting my head so I brushed my cheek against his and pressed a kiss to his lower jaw. “Thank you for not lying.”
His nod was curt, a muscle jumping in his throat, but I knew it was good emotion that pained him then, and it alleviated just a bit of my own ache.
“Now,” I said, striding forward so that I loomed over the cop who had killed my King. My smile was stretched and branded into my face, hot, distorted, smoking with heat. “I’m going to beat you to within an inch of your pathetic life, and then, if you don’t tell me where you’ve hidden your deceits, I’m going to let Priest take that very last inch away.”
And when Danner didn’t move or blink or mumble behind his gag, I took it for what it was––a morbid initiation––and cocked back my arm the way King and Priest had taught me to and began my systematic desecration of Harold Danner the moment my brass-covered knuckles tore through his cheek and crushed against his bones.
* * *
Priest took over when my arm shook too badly to continue, but I sat on the ground at Wrath’s feet and watched The Fallen enforcer at work. It was bloody, gruesome even, and I understood the horrifying purpose of tying Harold to a chair without a bottom so that Priest could beat his exposed balls blue with the end of a heavy, tied hemp rope.
Cyclops tended to my sliced, raw knuckles, dabbing at the cuts with vodka poured from a skull flask on his belt, wiping up the streaks of the cop’s blood that trickled down my forearm with the edge of his Harley Davidson tee. I wasn’t close to Tayline’s Old Man—he’d always been to distant, too into Tay and nothing else—but I knew that would never be the same after this. You couldn’t watch a man beat another nearly to death, until the victim sobbed and wailed like a newborn, without forming intractable bonds with each other.
He held my hand when I was done, dwarfing mine in his palm.
It took three hours for Priest to get him to the point of agony where his secrets spilled from him like so much confetti, littering the air with his sins.
We didn’t rejoice.
Instead, cold as automatons, we cleaned up the mess––Boner with the bleach, Wrath burning the bloody towels––and hog-tied the comatose former Staff Sergeant before throwing him in the trunk of Sander’s stolen SUV. It was still dark enough, quiet enough, for Wrath and him to drop him off at one of the downtown police stations and get away unnoticed.
The rest of us got back on the bikes and made our way up the mountain.
I was the first one off the bike at Lionel Danner’s ranch property, climbing down from Nova’s bike to open the gates and then opting to run by foot to the corner of the acreage where a massive willow tree wept in the middle of a field.
There was a heart carved into the bark, the initials HD & SH embellished within it. Harold Danner and Susan Hobbs, his wife. I didn’t allow myself to dwell on the murderer’s love for his wife because it would’ve made me soft.
And I was nothing soft now.
Only hard shell over hollow innards.
I dropped to my knees under the sweet carving and started to dig.
The rocky earth cut into my already sore, bleeding hands, but I barely felt it. Beneath this soil lay Zeus’s salvation and in the storm of my selfish mourning, that was the only objective keeping me anchored.