“All of us. Every single time, even if we were getting late for school.”
“She’s lying,” Harkin weakly shouts. “They’re all lying.”
“I’m lying?” my beautiful wife grits, eyes wild with rage. “You used to sit at the head of the table with your paper folded next to your breakfast plate. If we dared to leave without acknowledging you, you’d say, ‘Aren’t you forgetting something, princess?’”
The giant towers over him as he darkly orders, “Kiss your wife,Dr. Leroux.”
Lizbeth’s limp legs scrape across the floor as she’s roughly thrust forward to her husband. The mangled side of her facebrushes Harkin’s, but he takes a deep breath before he presses his nasty lips to her bloody cheek.
I have my own score to settle with the cunt, which I don’t want Delilah to see, so I kiss the top of her head and softly suggest, “Why don’t you wash the blood off?”
She looks up at me knowingly, her eyes gentle despite the defiance in her tone. “I’m not afraid of you.”
Daigon drops Lizbeth on the floor then lifts our father-in-law with the chair he’s tied to onto the table. I gently move Delilah to the side to survey the array of weapons and find the dullest one as Daigon asks, “Do you know how to control the heat?”
“Yeah, the thermostat is on the wall behind you,” Delilah says. “Are you cold?”
A wide smile takes over his face as he turns, clicking through the settings to blast the heat. The marble is uncomfortable to walk on even in my shoes as heat floods the entire house. It takes him asking for salt for me to figure out what the weird fuck is doing. Delilah’s confused but she acts like our assistant, and I laugh at the small silver saltshaker she collects for him.
“I don’t think it’s going to be enough for him,” I say lightly, watching her confusion grow.
In The Dollhouse, one of the punishments for the masks was a heat room. Ten minutes made it feel like my skin was peeling off. It was a struggle to stop my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth when I wasn’t the target of the punishment, and I was only giving the guard a glass of salted water. It doesn’t take long for the heat to burn my eyes. Harkin’s elevated position means he feels it more intensely as Delilah collects a large bag of cooking salt.
“Where’s the island?” I ask as I hover my finger over the control for the heating.
He chooses to shut his fucking mouth, so I turn on the heating in all of the other rooms to reduce any cool breeze.
Daigon empties a bottle of water from the bar cart, fills it with a clear spirit, then mixes an unhealthy dose of salt into it.
I take the opportunity to fuck with Harkin’s head as I lift his pant leg to reveal his calf. Tracing the fleshy part of his leg with the tip of the blunt knife, I quietly ask, “Do you want to live?”
“They won’t let you go now,” he whispers, staring at my left arm. “You need my help.”
I haven’t received any contact from the Wards, and Ruby said they keep to their deals when a sacrifice is made, so I know Harkin’s full of shit. They’re all going to die, so there won’t be anyone coming to collect Delilah after the twelve months are up. He’s a dead man, clutching at straws to stay alive. I’ve been in the same position before; it’s why Asher lives in my fucking head.
“Okay, tell me,” I whisper. “I’ll help you.”
“I’ll need to speak to her,” he whispers lower.
“No, tell me if it was worth it.” I meet his eyes as I push the dull edge of the blade into his calf.
“It was all Helene,” he lies. “She’s untouchable. I had no choice.”
“Funny,” Delilah snaps as she passes me a bottle of ice-cold water.
“It is,” Daigon says, coming to my other side. “From our perspectives, it seems you were the only one whodidhave a choice. Drink.” He grabs Harkin’s jaw in a bruising grip, forcing his lips to part like a fish, then pours the full bottle of his concoction down his throat. The grains swirl through the liquid, clinging to his wet chin as he chokes on the salty liquor.
I carve through his leg with the knife, smiling at the gurgled screams. Delilah wraps her hand over mine to counteract his shaking. All three of us move around him, cutting out our pounds of flesh, pouring a mixture of salty liquor into the pockets we create while his eyes get more and more sunken in.
“Stop,” Harkin feebly shouts. “I’ll give you it.”
Delilah writes the mumbled coordinates Harkin manages to force out around his flinching. I don’t trust the cunt, so I check them. None of the maps show any land mass where the coordinates are, but it’s in the Channel Islands and Delilah said it was off the coast of England.
My t-shirt sticks to my back from the heat. Delilah has thick beads running down her temples, and Daigon takes one of the empty bottles into the kitchen with his t-shirt molded to his body.
Harkin’s lips are like raisins, shriveled and finally incapable of spewing his arrogant bullshit as his head lolls back. Despite my low energy from the heat, I can’t stop my smile when she laughs full of joy. I can’t look away or complain as she falls into me, wheezing, “You’re so fucked up.”
I look at Daigon, who’s the cause of her hysterics as he holds the now filled bottle at arm’s length. But the liquid isn’t clear. It’s fucking yellow.
