She gargled as she tried to breathe through her nose, gaspin’ as I squeezed tighter when she didn’t immediately answer.
There was a knock on the door, Roberto checkin’ to see if everythin’ was alright.
I ignored him, leanin’ closer to Irina’s gaspin’ face to threaten one last time. “You got eighteen seconds now, bitch, I suggest you get talkin’.”
Roberto knocked on the door again, louder this time. Again, I ignored him. I had time enough to deal with him when I was finished with Irina.
“You’re a dead man,” she vowed wetly, spittin’ into my face so her bloody salvia ran down my chin.
“I’m a dead man anyway I don’t find the woman you’re tryin’ to take from me,” I growled. “Now tell me what I want to hear, or you die in your own bed.”
A few seconds later, the sound of pipes roared up the drive like a rush of wind, and then the air peppered with gunshots. There was a loud crash as the door busted open downstairs, followed by shouts of Spanish and more gunfire, then the clomp of motorcycle boots up the stairs.
By the time Bat and Zeus appeared in the doorframe, I was done with both Irina and Roberto.
Zeus looked down at Roberto lyin’ on the floor with a bullet blown straight through his chest, eyes unseeing’ as they looked up at him, then over to me.
“You get what we need?” he asked mildly as he took in the sight of me sittin’ on the end of the bed tuggin’ my blood-stained tee back on while Irina sagged in the bed behind me, unconscious, tied to the headboard with strips of her high thread count sheets.
She had a thick gash across her face from the tip of one side of her forehead to the end of the opposite cheek.
I’d wanted to murder her.
Slaughter her not once, but twice, thrice, fuckin’ again and again like some cruel god punishin’ the worst of the worst in Tarturus with eternal punishment.
Only the thought of Lila, the thought of tryin’ to be worthy of her, held me back from the dark edge.
So I didn’t murder the bitch, and I wouldn’t let the club kill her.
Instead, I carved up her pretty face so good, Priest would’ve been proud, and I took the thing she valued the most.
Her goddamn beauty.
Then, I called the cops ’cause I knew there was no worse fate for Irina than rottin’ unseen and alone in some dank prison cell.
“Yeah, boss,” I grunted as I stood up and tagged my cut from where Irina had shucked it on the floor. “I got what we needed. They’re in Vancouver harbour.”
I stopped to pull out my phone as it vibrated and noted I had thirteen missed calls from the same unknown number.
Flippin’ it open, I followed the brothers outta the house, steppin’ over the dead bodies with ease, and stated, “What’s up?”
The ghost of a man I hadn’t seen in a decade came over the speaker, his voice like a bullet in my ear.
“Jon, I got a plan to help get Lila.”
LILA
I was in a moat filled with snakes. They writhed in the cold, inch-deep sludge and pressed up against my numb skin, seeking whatever heat they could find in the icy darkness. I’d stopped screaming a long time ago and now only the soft hiss of breath and the occasional splash interrupted the silence.
Powerful sedatives still muddled my blood, and together they churned sluggishly through my veins, clouding my thoughts. Mostly, when I opened my eyes, the left submerged halfway in brackish water, the snakes were menacing, their bodies flashing silver in the occasional light spilling in from some crack on the left side of the room. But increasingly, I realized the bodies were humans, women, naked and stewing like prunes in the bowel of some huge ship.
My thoughts rolled fruitlessly like a marble spinning in an empty bowl.
Time passed strangely, though, some part of me knew that I couldn’t have been there for more than a day or two max. The slurp of sucking lips roused me to the idea of drinking the slimy water I lay in, and a few times I puckered my lips, held my breath and pulled some into my mouth, straight down my gullet. It left a metallic taste like blood and a thick film on my tongue, which wasn’t really surprising. One of the women beside me had a long, thin slice across her belly that wept occasionally in thin red streams.
I had never pictured hell this way, hadn’t figured it would be a pit of naked, stinking, bleeding women submerged in slime, but now that it was my reality, I could hardly imagine anything worse. I wasn’t sure how many of us were still alive. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure I was.
As the hours passed, my mind cleared enough to know what had happened.