I understood what he was saying right away. The defiance in my wife’s eyes had probably cut Rattler down to size. He couldn’t stand not being able to break her.
In all certainty, in all truth, I knew my wife had stood up to him. Atta had a lot to lose—she had just lost her father, grandfather and uncles. Rattler was probably threatening her brother. And since the bison had stopped him from killing mywife, he took his rage out on a woman who resembled her, the sick fuck.
The snakes.
It was all clear. The fear my wife had buried deep inside, but had automatically slipped out.
The only reason I didn’t explode was because I had something more important to do.
My eyes rose to meet Jack’s. He shivered, took a step back. I spoke to him, and he cleared his throat and lifted his hands.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, “but I don’t have the language. English is all I know.”
Two words automatically left my mouth, in English this time. “Show me.” I walked out.
Chapter 26
Mariano
House of horrors for people who were not prepared to see what Jack had to show us. Another old barn was wedged between Jack’s land and the Green Ranch. So, of fucking course, it was theirs. It was filled with glass tanks. Tanks and tanks of poisonous snakes. The barn was stuffy, even though the wind was chilled, and instead of the smoky tinge of fall, a musky scent filled the air.
My eyes met Marciano’s and Angelo’s when we passed the rows. The tanks were filled with macabre body parts. Whether animal or human, some of them were hard to tell. Such as the black viper slithering between two eyeballs. Fresh by the looks of them.
Faustis thrived in darkness. This was all scare tactics from boys who played with their dicks for fun. Got hard off the fact they were scaring something smaller than them—women—not recognizing the power a woman held.
A woman held the power to haunt a man for the rest of his life. Maybe not in big ways, but in small ways. Small ways that added up to the moment when he took his last breath, and her spirit stood over him, about to steal the last moment of peace from him.
Our faces might be the last these fuckers saw, but it would be my wife, and Atta, who worked through our hands, stealing the one thing these motherfuckers had going for them.
The air in their lungs.
Something moved behind me, and I turned my eyes away from the tanks to make sure we weren’t being ambushed. Jack held a shotgun, and when our eyes met, he nodded. He was standing guard at the door. Dolly kept barking, but Jack said she was just upset she couldn’t get out with us. He’d made her stay in the truck because of what could potentially be underfoot. Slithering landmines.
“Fuck.” Marciano wiped sweat from his brow. “Those baskets.” He nodded toward them. “Dens? The wicker, or whatever the fuck they’re made of, is moving.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s exactly what that is.”
“Sick,” Angelo said, and he shivered.
Yeah, I couldn’t have fucking agreed more.
“This place.” Angelo wiped his forehead. “It paints a clear picture of that night.”
My fists tightened. I had to stop myself from breaking every tank with my knuckles. My mind wandered back to the night Jack had described. “Atta is already there—did they take her?” I questioned out loud.
Jack cleared his throat. “Rattler isn’t an ugly guy, by looks alone,” he said. “Has that dangerous vibe to him. Was older. Young girls.” He shrugged. “They see the opposite of what their parents are tellin’ ’em.”
That was a delicate way of saying Atta had probably accepted Rattler’s invitation for adate.Angelo was hard before, but after Jack’s words, he was about to fucking lose it. It wasn’t the time. One of those snakes got loose, even Fausti blood couldn’t cure venom, not in the fucking literal sense. I gave him the order to stand down, but he was so far gone inside of his own violence,Marciano took a step closer to him. Ready to intervene if he went to lash out.
I cleared my throat. “We don’t know how long Atta’s there before Sistine is. Did Sistine sense something was off? If it was close to a blizzard, something made her leave the comfort of home. Maybe Atta called her? They forced Atta to?”
Jack shook his head. “Reception is still crap around these parts.” He blinked. “Until recently. Not that it matters. In a storm of that size, she couldn’t have made the call.”
“That confirms my theory,” I said, my eyes on Marciano and Angelo. “Sistine left to check on Atta.” My jaw clenched even at the thought of saying what I was going to next. “The dead men frightened our women with snakes. To fucking break them.”
Jack nodded. “That’s about the speed of it. The bison saved them. Unexplainable too. And if it wasn’t for them probably thinking Ash’sherd got loose, they would have kept to the barn, most likely. The one time the herd got loose before,Ash brought all the boys out to the snake barn and beat them senseless. That’s something not even a boy forgets.”
“Call Remo,” I said to Marciano. “Have him find someone in the family to come and get these fucking things.”
