A low, feral growl starts in the back of my throat. “I want him to breathe long enough to regret the day he learned her name.”
“Copy that,” Jax smirks, pulling a butterfly knife from his pocket and flipping it with a hypnotic, metallicclick-clack. “Silas, go long. I’ll flush him down the ladder.”
We move.
Jax scales the opposite building with the agility of a stray cat, while Silas disappears into the shadows of the basement entrance, a silent mountain of muscle. I stay in the centre of the alley, lighting a fresh cigarette, the cherry glowing like a sniper’s lens.
The kid—he can’t be more than twenty—slips his hand inside the window frame. He doesn’t hear the metallicshinkof Jax’s blade against the railing above him.
“Nice view, isn’t it?” Jax’s voice drifts down, airy and lethal.
The intruder jolts, his boots slipping on the wet iron. He looks up, eyes wide and white in the dark, and sees Jax grinning down at him like a demon. “Who the fuck?—?”
“Wrong answer,” Jax chirps. He kicks the ladder release.
The heavy iron ladder slides down with a screeching, ear-piercing scream of metal on metal. The intruder panics, sliding down the rungs, hitting the pavement with a wet thud right at my feet. He tries to scramble up, but before he can find his footing, Silas emerges from the dark. He grabs the kid by the back of his neck and slams him face-first into the brick wall.
The sound of his nose breaking is a wet, sickening crunch.
“Easy, Silas,” I say, stepping forward, the smoke from my cigarette curling around my face. “Don’t break the toy before I get to play with it.”
Silas spins the kid around, pinning him to the wall.The kid’s face is a mask of red, blood dripping onto his cheap hoodie. “Please,” he bubbles. “I didn’t—I just wanted?—”
“You just wanted to touch something that belongs to me,” I finish for him. I reach out and grab his hand—the one that touched her window. “Jax. Hold him steady.”
Jax steps in, grabbing the kid’s other arm and pinning it wide. Silas maintains the chokehold. They look like two fallen angels flanking a sacrificial lamb—hot, heartless, and hungry.
“You liked watching her?” I ask, my voice dropping to a whisper. I take the glowing cherry of my cigarette and press it firmly into the centre of his palm. The smell of burning flesh fills the alley—acrid and foul. The kid screams, a high, piercing sound that is cut short when Silas squeezes his throat.
“Music to my ears,” Jax hums, leaning his head back.
I drop the butt and pull out the hook. The light catches the heavy, serrated piece of cold steel.
“You used these eyes to look at her,” I growl. “You used them to stare into her private sanctuary. Now I’m taking them.”
I don’t hesitate. I use the blunt end of the hook to pin his head against the brick, and then I use my thumb. I press hard into the corner of his left socket. The kid’s body goes into a violent, rhythmic convulsion, a strangled, wet shriek tearing through his mangled nose.
There’s a sickening pop as the pressure gives way, followed by a wet, squelching sound as the globe of the eye is forced out of its housing. It hangs by the optic nerve, a slick, white marble trailing red against his cheek. I don’t stop. I move to the right.
The secondone is easier. I feel the warm, jelly-like fluid coat my knuckles as I scoop it out. The kid is no longer screaming; he’s making a high-pitched whistling sound, his shock so absolute his brain is short-circuiting.
“Jesus, Boss,” Jax murmurs, his eyes wide and bright with a sick kind of admiration. “He’s got a look of permanent surprise now.”
“He shouldn’t have looked,” Silas says flatly, his grip unyielding even as the kid’s blood soaks his sleeves.
I look at the boy—now a blind, sobbing mess of blood. His sockets are empty, weeping red holes that stare at nothing. He’s pathetic. He’s nothing.
“This is for the window,” I growl, stepping behind him. I hook the serrated steel under his jaw, forcing his head back so his hollowed-out face meets the rain.
I don’t just cut. I rip.
I jerk the hook back with a violent, upward twist. The steel teeth catch on his windpipe, tearing through the cartilage and muscle like wet cardboard.
The alley explodes into a spray of hot, copper-tasting red. It paints the brick, it paints Silas’s black turtleneck, it paints my own face.
The kid hits the ground, his throat open and pulsing, the blood jetting out in rhythmic spurts.
“He earned every drop,” Silas says, wiping a stray fleck of blood from his jaw with a thumb, looking like a demonic god of war.
