“Just fucking kill me.”
“Begging so soon? We haven’t even gotten to the good part.” He grabbed a fistful of my hair, painfully tugging my head back. “What should we do to this pretty face of yours? Is this how you convinced her not to kill you?” Cillian pulled a blade from his waistband and brought it to his mouth, licking the steel blade before pressing it against my cheek.
I knew what would be coming next, but nothing could have prepared me for the searing pain of having my flesh sliced. He cut from what felt like my eyebrow down through my cheek until it reached my jaw. Warm blood spilled down my neck and over my shoulder.
“Fuck…you!” I panted, my breaths coming hard and fast as I swallowed back the fire scorching my skin.
“Now, isn’t that better? Gives you a bit more character, wouldn’t you say?”
As I thrashed in his grip, he tightened his hold on my hair, and through gritted teeth, he whispered, “Hands flat on the table.”
I shook my head.
“You ever seen what a man looks like without a nose, Silas?” He pushed the blade against the open wound on my face, forcing a loud grunt from my clamped jaw. “Hands on the fucking table before you find out.”
I’d never wanted to be more like Leni than at this moment—her gift of compartmentalizing pain, of hiding in her mind.
Splaying my hands across the surface, I stared that bastard in the eye as I attempted to control my breathing.
“There’s the implacable son of a bitch I know.”
The words barely left his mouth when he pounded a mallet into my hand. The crush of bones hit my ears in time with the guttural howl that escaped my throat. Nausea overcame me, and I heaved, pounding the table with my other hand as the pain rolled through in torturous waves. Tears pushed behind my closed eyelids.
“Next,” he deadpanned. And I began frantically shaking my head. “Fuck! No, don’t fucking do this.”
Again, he fisted my hair, tearing my head up, face mere inches from mine. “Things will get messier and exponentially more painful if you don’t cooperate. Now, give me your other hand before I cut off every fucking finger first.”
I narrowed my eyes and spit blood on his face. “Like I said, get fucked.”
A low crack echoed around us when his fist connected with my jaw. More blood spilled from my mouth.
“Suit yourself.” He slid his gaze to a large man standing behind a small metal table at the far back wall of the room.
“Pliers.”
Fucking breathe, I said to myself as my chest grew tighter.
In and out.
In and out.
Tactical breaths.
It would be over soon. I wasn’t afraid of dying. I toed the line of the living and that of the damned every day for the last sixteen years. Death wasn’t about the things we’d never experience, or what we’d lose because our consciousness ceased to exist. The tragedy was in the burden for those we’d leave behind. The thought wouldn’t have been on my radar a month ago, but today things were different.
Leni.
“Leni,” I whispered out loud.
The buzz of a cell phone broke the silence. Cillian sighed with annoyance before reaching into his breast pocket and pulling out the device. His scowl twisted into a lascivious grin as the other person on the line relayed information I wasn’t privy to.
The moment his slanted eyes met mine again, he flashed a row of white teeth and dropped the pliers onto the table.
“Looks like we’ve got ourselves a special visitor.”
He didn’t have to say the words. She’d come for me.
Fucking Santino.
