“Yes, sir. Now.”
“You can’t say?”
“Protocol, sir. It’s unsafe to say on this line.”
It was three AM, or thereabouts. I guessed he’d been woken. Which only spoke to the silent advance of my beautiful army. And the soundproofing. What a good man he’d been to make this eagle’s nest penthouse so lovely and quiet. I looked around at the girls. They were so very pretty, and bloody.
The guard hung up. I took the cellphone then spun it across the floor.
Girls, I sent to the ones nearest the elevator. Bring him to me.
The only flaw in this would be if he went to one of the other floors. Or had a ton of guards. I sent some more females.
There’d been no need. He came to this floor in the elevator, and he stepped out. Clueless.
The shots fired were only his. I bade them sacrifice themselves rather than kill him outright. By chance, earlier I had noticed one of the females greatly resembled his daughter.
As he was dragged into the room, stunned but intact, I brought her to my side.
“Hello, Ted. Time to learn what happens when you fuck with me.” I questioned him as the women stripped him, then began to nail him to the wall with knives they had rescued from kitchens and sheaths.
“You scream well. Where are the tissue samples and my blood?”
The young woman who was related to him walked forward with a knife and drove it home into his right palm. His face writhed, and he choked and babbled.
Blood already marred the wall.
Red shook my shoulder. I looked to her.
“Please. Listen to me. Isak. Kill him, I guess that has to be done. But please…” She shook me again. “No more torture.”
I stared at her.
“Please!”
Choices, remember. My mind had butted in.
I massaged her shoulder. The touch of her body ran into me like a shock.
I recognized the wrongness of what I did, and I swallowed. Why? This felt so incredibly good.
“I need some retribution.” A lot of it.
“You have it. You have it, Isak.”
“The fridge down the hallway. Two doors down!” Ted shrieked then mumbled, his breaths sharp gasps. Which would be due to the pain of two… no, it was now three knives in his body. Both hands, one ankle.
The girl, who was his niece, I realized, was poised with knife four.
“And the footage of me controlling your daughter? That video, you mentioned. Is that elsewhere? I can tell if you lie to me.”
“It’s…” He hung in the spreadeagled position, his last free leg scrambling to touch floor and take his bodyweight. The girls had hoisted him high before knifing him. He burbled out more info like a leaky sieve, “It’s here. On a USB stick. Nowhere else. It’s too valuable. My patron lives somewhere else. We found the trail you left, even though you swop cars, use new women. Without knowing what you can do, it looks normal.”
“Of course it does.” I’d left a fucking trail. In the future I would be more careful. “Good.” What to do? I eyed him. He had not begged. A tough man. Not a single, please don’t hurt me.
Fuck this. I stepped back, having identified another of the women as the niece’s mother. Two relatives. Messy. But apt.
I drew Red to my chest and buried her face in my shirt. “Don’t look. Shhh.” Then I did what I should have already done.
Cut him up. Slowly. Skin him. Take your fucking time.
Then burn this place down.
It had to happen. It was the best way to remove the evidence.
I made sure we were long gone before the burning started and only watched from afar. Sirens had been screaming through the streets for ten minutes plus before I managed to tear myself away from the sight.
What a light show – pieces peeled off the outside as the façade roared with the climbing flames. This was a conflagration worthy of Hell. Window glass shattered and fell like lethal confetti. I’d lit an enormous candle to celebrate my revenge.
The embers drifted a long way on the sea winds since they came from ten stories up. I held my hand in the air as if to catch them and watched a few wander by, singeing my arm hair.
I had brought out Red and myself while ensuring she acted normally and shielding us from CCTV. However, I’d let my calming influence stop, and here she stood, face shining with tears and contorted by utter grief. I should have been watching her. That pulsing pain from her wound surged, and I did what I’d been doing since it happened – I suppressed the pain.
She trembled when I touched her arm.
“What have you done, Isak?”
I looked to the burning tower. This was a rhetorical question, obviously. I waited.
“Were you merciful?”
To which ones? “I was.”
No, I hadn’t been merciful. I’d watched him die through the eyes of the women. It had been an agonizing death of a thousand, cuts with most of them delivered by his niece.
Red didn’t know.
I opened my palm and studied the Keppra pill in my palm.
Going onward to kill the patron would be eminently doable and fucking amazing, but if I did… if I did that, I doubted I would ever find peace with Red. I would use her up until she was a husk.
“Though it would be the most awesome fucking using,” I muttered to myself.
“What?” Red looked up at me. Her mouth wobbled. Then she looked back to the tower and whispered. “Make it go away.”
I wasn’t a wizard. Her sadness though, strangely it tore at me inside my chest. I came up behind her and pulled her back into my body, then rearranged her hair where it fell
