It was a shrill sound, with an unnatural pitch. When she looked at him, her gaze was unfocused, and she seemed to look right past him as she said, “You’re here. I got your location out of him ten minutes ago.”
She laughed again, and the tone put Bryson’s nerves on edge.
He looked her over. She didn’t seem hurt. Just to her right was a small pool of blood and a silver knife.
He knelt down. Gently bringing his hand under her chin, forcing her to look at him.
“Adria, what is it? Where is he?” he asked.
She shook her head, and he saw her attention focus on him, if only for a moment.
“Bryson. I tried,” she said, and she gestured towards the knife.
“I got him to talk. But I couldn’t finish it,” she said, closing her eyes.
When she opened them, they were clouded and a spine-chilling laugh cackled through her.
“But here you are, anyway,” she said, motioning dramatically with her hands.
Bryson stood up. “Stay with her,” he said.
Kaydon grabbed a bathrobe and draped it around her shaking form. Adria didn’t even seem to notice. Seth knelt down, his face assessing.
Moving back into the bedroom, Bryson followed a trail of blood. Tracking it, he followed the drops into a walk-in closet.
Just past the threshold, he paused.
Jonathan was there.
Tied to a chair.
The knife near Adria’s side revealing its purpose as Bryson took in Jonathan’s face and torso. Strips of skin had been meticulously peeled back, hanging like loose ribbons at a birthday party.
The smell in the room was clearly coming from him as the scent of blood and dying flesh mingled. Normally, a body would need hours if not days to reach this level of aroma, but Adria had taken her time. She had kept him alive while killing so many pieces of him.
Jonathan’s head lolled at an unnatural angle, suspended by mere threads of gristle and sinew. The right side of his face bore a precise laceration that bisected his cheek from eye socket to jawline, the edges curling back to reveal glistening red muscle beneath. When Jonathan’s eyes flickered toward Bryson, both sides of his face twitched in grotesque synchronicity. The damaged side moved like a marionette with half its strings cut. His labored breathing quickened, and wet gasps bubbled through his blood-flecked lips.
His biceps had been methodically filleted, strips of muscle peeled back and pinned like butterfly wings, exposing bone-white tendons that dangled uselessly from the wounds.
The woman was a surgeon.
Many, many times Bryson had been forced to watch his father torture. Never had he witnessed anything like this.
If anyone thought her weak, he dared them to stand here. To see what he was seeing. To breathe in the metallic air of her handiwork and understand the lethal error of their judgment.
“Please,” Jonathan said, his voice barely a whisper.
It was a whisper of a whisper.
He was a ghost already, just waiting on that final shove.
Adria had gotten him to the door. She just hadn’t pushed him through.
That didn’t make her weak. It made her strong.
Bryson brought the gun to the pathetic excuse for a human being in front of him.
“You deserve so much worse than this,” Bryson said, pulling the trigger.
