I tilt my head to Veyn’s watchful expression.
“Put me down, please.”
No question.
No objection.
The barbs extract and I’m gingerly pulled off him and set down. The stones beneath my feet are warm, as if touched by fire, as I start downward. A deep part of me understands that I should be ashamed of my nudity. Of the fact that I had a man inside me where these two could see. But as I draw closer, it’s not their thoughts I care about. They’ll be dead soon, anyway.
“Did you kill my boys?” I ask again when I reach the bottom step and level the pair with a steady stare.
Bernard is huffing slightly like an exhausted dog after a run. The heavy panting has snot and spittle expelling from between his lips. I think he knows what’s about to happen. Or his mind is struggling to understand how they’ve come to be here. How he’s bound to an altar with no restraints. Why his brother is not helping him. But more importantly, why his brother is holding a knife over him.
“Listen, you crazy bitch—”
The crack is a reverberating force that snaps through the chamber. A violent slap that nearly makes me jump, but I keep steady as I watch horror fill Augustus’s blockish features.
Then blood.
A long, slow trickle down his face from ear to ear, over the bridge of his nose and across his cheekbones. It bubbles from the thin, perfect slice that appears from nowhere.
“Watch your tongue, human. That is my woman you are speaking to.”
Being called Veyn’s woman is a label that will require contemplation, but I set it aside for now to focus on the pair. On Augustus who is trying to cry out and touch his face, but his hands won’t move. Won’t release the blade. So, the blood continues to run down his chin and splatters across his naked chest.
“What are you?” he sputters, crimson teeth bared.
“Lenora Usher,” I murmur, moving the final few steps to stand on the opposite side of the same altar where I gave my innocence to a demon. “Did you kill my boys?”
I know it was them.
They had done it in broad daylight on a street full of people who all watched my boys collapse across the filthy ground at their feet and did nothing. Not one person moved to help them.
Save them.
But I don’t blame them. Who would risk their lives when these two were standing over Ames and Eliah’s bodies with their smoking guns? Weapons that they still held when the police did show up to find my boys tortured. Bodies broken and abused.
“Did you kill them?” I hiss through my teeth, tears hot in my eyes.
The fear is comical in Augustus’s eyes. This monster who has no true understanding of horror, who has only inflicted it in others — afraid. I’m almost proud of myself.
“They … they came into our turf,” he sputters. “They knew the rules.”
“They were on the street.”
His throat muscles flex. “Look, shit happens in this business, okay? That’s … that’s the way things are.”
I reach the other side of the dais with Bernard, a whimpering slab fixed between me and his brother. The sounds are silent, but I can make out the frantic shapes of his mouth forming the other man’s name. Calling for his brother to save him. The sight makes me wonder if my boys had called out for each other when the gun went off. Had they rushed to save each other only to meet the same fate?
The hot iron rod of pain twists in my chest. It burns a path up my throat. I can taste blood and I realize I’d been sawing into the inside of my cheek.
“I suppose then you will understand that this, too, is merely a part of the business,” I manage through a whisper choked with emotions that I’m doing my best to keep in check.
Bernard is thrashing.
Leaner, thinner than his brother’s solid bulk, he is a pathetic sight of hysterical sobbing that, thankfully, we can’t hear.
“Don’t do this,” Augustus growls, spittle speckling his bottom lip. Adding to the sticky gloss of blood staining his mouth. “Don’t fucking do this. We were only following orders, okay? We were only doing what we were told.”
