The man began to mumble something in Spanish, and when I leaned closer, I decided maybe he was saying the Hail Mary prayer because he knew he was about to die.
Aspen hummed and jammed his knives deeper into the man’s kneecaps, and our friend let out a horrible wail, but when Aspen yanked the blades free, the guy laughed. Adrenaline sent electricity skittering up my spine. The sound was creepy in the dark.
I yawned, my jaw cracking. We’d been at this for over forty-eight hours, and I was beyond exhausted and to the jittery point where I probably wouldn’t even be able to sleep if my head hit the pillow. We’d discussed tapping out and asking Corbin to help, but after the first ten hours or so without even a name, it would’ve felt like giving up. And God, how annoying ifCorbinhad been the one to get him to talk when we couldn’t? We would never hear the end of it in that dry, snarky tone of his.
No, we’d chosen to stay, not expecting this type of a hold out.
“Aspen, I’m tired.” I rested a hand on his shoulder and gave his tight muscles a squeeze. “And I’m fecking bored of this.”
He grunted when I snatched one of his knives and went around behind the busted-up bloke. I yanked his head back and dragged the blade across his throat. Blood poured down his neck, ran all the way to his sliced-up stomach, and then rained onto the sand. We didn’t do this often because the mess wasn’t necessary, and I grinned as the man gurgled. It would be a race to see if he drowned in his own fluids or if his blood pressure crashed and killed him as his heart gave out.
Aspen held out his hand for his knife, but I shook my head and wiped it as clean as I could on the soon-to-be dead man’s hair. I walked around to stand next to Aspen, then leaned down and brushed a kiss to his cheek as I passed the blade back—something he held more dear than some people did their children. He snorted and shook his head. His deep brown eyes glittered in the low light, and I wasn’t one for mushy moments, but I was happy to be looking at him. He tipped his chin toward me, and I attacked his mouth.
Things had been weird since the cabaret, but my heart thudded in a brilliant way and my cock pulsed as every bit of my body was blasted with excitement.
“What a fecking waste of time,” I muttered against his mouth before kissing him again. “Except for this.”
He shrugged and stood, and I swallowed hard as he crowded closer to me. It wasn’t often I noticed he was taller than me, and fecked if I would let it intimidate me, but right now it felt like it mattered. He pressed his mouth to mine, but we battled it out for a moment. Eventually I gave in—because I was tired—and sucked on his tongue as he invaded.
When he backed off, I cleared my throat. We both stared in an assessing way at the corpse we’d created.
“Not our best work,” he said.
I shrugged. “I know. When he wouldn’t give it up, I started feeling all prideful about dragging the information out of him, ye know? At first I just wanted to crack him, but the longer it went on.... I always hate killing people with a good set of balls. He was committed, gotta give him that.”
Aspen nodded and held his knives up, inspecting them. “How many men have we not broken? This is what? Third one?”
I nodded. “Usually something makes them run their mouth.”
The liquor store clerk was a right fecking mess. We’d even gone so far as to flay the skin off the back of his biceps and tops of his feet, which were two of the most sensitive spots on the human body, but he just hadn’t opened his mouth to talk.
I slapped the dead man and his head wobbled. Outside, the waves crashed harder, and I glanced that direction, but when the shack didn’t cave in, I ignored it. “Was he that brave or was he more afraid of Reyes than us?”
Aspen shrugged as he went to a knee and stowed his knives in the brown leather case he used to carry them. We’d spotted this dump from the yacht, and we’d come out here on a whim to check it out, so he’d only brought the bare essentials with him. When we were getting creative with a victim, we didn’t need much more than a good blade and our fists to destroy a man—everything else was icing on the cake.
He glanced at me, and I sucked in a breath as he slid his steady gaze down my body to where my cock was still poking the front of my trousers, trying to get to him. “Difficult to say. It’s strange to imagine being more scared of someone far away than the guy slicing off your skin, but I would take that before I would give up anything on Sloan.”
I chuckled and sighed, glancing around the shack. “What a waste. Too bad he wasn’t born Irish. Should we just leave him here?” I’d been awake so long my brain wasn’t working quite right, but I couldn’t figure out any reason that wouldn’t work just fine.
Aspen shrugged and opened his knife case again. I whistled when he pulled out a blade that was closer to the size of a machete; the cutting edge was almost as long as the entire length of the case. “We could haul him out and toss him in the ocean. If I puncture his lungs—” Aspen jabbed at the air. “—he should sink.”
“Yeah, all right. Let’s do it.”
We untied the man from the chair, then took the tall bastard outside and dumped him on the perfect white sand at the edge of the water. I went back in for the chair and sent it out on the waves like a small boat. I laughed because for some reason the wood bobbing in the water seemed particularly hilarious. The moon shone, silvering the waves, and we didn’t bother going in for the lantern because we could see just fine. I watched in fascination as Aspen jammed that wicked blade through the man’s back several times on each side, and then we heaved him into the water.
“Oh, look at this shell,” I said, noticing a sand dollar. I bent and picked it up. “Vail would like that, don’t ye think?” I grinned at Aspen.
He gave me a small, soft smile as he nodded. “Yeah, let’s take it to him.”
We stood there for a while, and I rubbed my thumb over the warm shell, which hadn’t cooled from the day spent baking in the sun even though it was dark. The corpse drifted in the waves for a bit before it disappeared.
I let out a happy little hum. “Sharks might get him if there are any in this area.”
“Fingers crossed,” Aspen said, and I could tell he was tired because theeejitrolled his eyes, something he rarely did.
“Should we do anything else with him? I don’t want to go fish him out again.” I crossed my arms. “Feck, maybe we should’ve taken a picture of that tattoo on his calf.”
“I’m too tired for that shit. He’s fine where he’s at. It was just a Reyes Cartel tattoo, and we already know what those look like.” Aspen waved a hand at the water. “You go in there and you’re going to end up getting bitten by a shark. I’ll have to explain that to Vail. No thanks.”
