Three Months Later
My wife is upstairs,in our newly finished penthouse, learning how to make pasta from scratch with Lulu. She’s safe and happy and so fucking amazing that it still sometimes stuns me that she’smine.
She’s all mine.
But I had to leave her so I could come down to the cell to finish a project that’s been ongoing for three months.
Elliott nods as I near the cell. My boy looks strong and fit. He’s added new tattoos to his arms and chest, and he’s dressed in dark-gray chinos with a navy button-down. I brought him on as a foot soldier last month, and so far, he’s doing me proud.
“How’s it going down here?” I ask him.
“He’s alive,” he replies steadily. I’m surprised that he volunteered for this duty, but he did it without flinching. “Barely.”
“Why are you down here, Elliott?” There’s no censure in my voice. I’m truly curious.
“Because you gave me the job.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean, why did you offer to do it? You spent weeks down here, behind that door. I would think that this is the last place you’d want to be.”
He blows out a breath and shoves his hand through his hair.
“I fucked up with Natasha. I’m glad that she’s safe and that you two are happy. I really am, this isn’t some weird plot to, like, steal her away or anything.”
I narrow my eyes, and he keeps talking.
“But I feel bad for the way I treated her. I was drunk most of the time, sometimes I was high or stoned, but that’s no excuse. You were right before, when you said that you never taught me to treat women that way. I don’t know why I thought it was okay. I guess I feel like I owe her this. I’ll babysit her asshole of a father until he’s dead, as sort of an unspoken favor to her. And then I’ll close the door on it.”
I reach out and cup the back of his neck. “I’m proud of you.”
His eyes, so much like my own, flare in surprise. “You are.”
“Yeah, I am. You’re doing well. Keep it up.”
Elliott swallows hard and nods. “I will. Are you going to kill him today?”
“Looks like it.”
“Good because I want the fuck out of this basement.”
I laugh and clap him on the shoulder. “Go. Send someone else in to clean up.”
Elliott nods and waits for me to go inside. I don’t bother to close the door behind me.
“Hello, Sergei.”
The man moans but doesn’t form words.
He couldn’t if he wanted to. I took his tongue a month ago.
I’ve kept him alive for ninety long days and nights. It smells like piss and shit and mold in here. Like death. Fuck knowsthat half the wounds on his naked body are infected, some with gangrene.
The man is rotten, from the inside out.
We keep injecting him with antibiotics, to keep him on this side of death’s door, but today, I’m finished.
It seems that death by a thousand cuts reallyisa thing.
“I like to make you bleed, Sergei,” I say conversationally. “I’ve always preferred knives over guns. It’s more personal. More direct. And there’s all that blood. Does it make me a little, oh, I don’t know,unhingedthat I like to make men bleed so much?”
