Looking back to Dom’s face, her chiseled jaw tensed and her eyes dark, I swallowed hard. I knew what she was going to demand of me. And I knew that if I complied, I’d be one of them. I could only hope answers awaited on the other side of the warehouse walls.
Holding it out to me, Dom’s furious eyes spoke more than her words did. “Finish him.”
9
KIERA
I blinked hard,my eyes shifting from Dom’s cold eyes to the black metal glinting in her hand.Surely she can’t mean it. Not really.
But before I could stammer out a response, she stepped forward, pressing the cool, metal handle into my palm. Goosebumps sprung to life up and down my spine as my fingers tightened around the weapon.
Dom watched me carefully as I examined the blade, giving me a small nod as she stepped back into the shadows.
The heft of the scythe in my hand awoke some deep, ancient hunger at the pit of my gut. I was seeing red, and somehow in this moment, I knew that I was capable of it — of killing him. Still, my gaze shifted to Spencer and Leo, certain that even if Dom had lost her mind, one of them would stop me.
To anyone else, they might have seemed stoic. But I knew my captors. And they were terrified. The tight set of Spencer’s jaw, the slight furrow of Leo’s brow: without a word, I could tell that they were worried that this was too much for me, that I wasn’t ready for whatever this was.
But overriding that fear was something bigger than all of us. Even through all the tension, I could feel the trust between us like it was a rope pulled taut. I wasn’t sure when exactly I’d earned that trust, but now was my chance to show that it wasn’t misplaced.
“What the fuck is that?” The man’s eyes went wide as he thrashed in his chair. The sound of the metal chair scraping cement was enough to make me jump, nearly dropping the scythe.
WhatwasI doing? I’d never been more convinced that this fucker deserved to die, but could I really be the hand to deliver the killing blow?
As the uncertainty ate at the edge of my resolve, Leo caught my gaze, and pulled down the collar of her shirt. It was just enough to reveal the hilt of her tattoo, to remind me what lay beneath.
And looking at that sprawl of ink, I realized that this wasn’t just some rogue op. This killing — everything we were doing here — was part of my initiation to Valemont Violence. Sanctioned by whoever the fuck their Oracle was.
If this man hadn’t already been marked for death by our higher ups, his actions had been enough to secure his fate. Now, it was just a question of whether or not they could rely on me to fulfil the mission.
The thought of that sent a chill down my spine. Had Dom been trying to keep me away from Valemont Violence because of some selfish vendetta, or had she been trying to protect me from the full force of what this was.
“You stupid fucking slut.” The man growled from the chair, trying to take advantage of my hesitation. “You’d better kill me now, or I’ll make sure you regret it.”
Leo moved forward to punish him for the insult, but I stilled her with a step forward. The man’s eyes went wide as theyflashed from the scythe in my hands up to my eyes. I wasn’t sure what he saw there, but one thing was clear: his bravado evaporated, replaced entirely by fear.
“I didn’t mean…” He pulled hard against his chains, panic setting into his voice. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, okay?”
Clearly he’d expected his taunting to scare me, to make me back down. Clearly, he had no fucking idea what I was made of. “For what?”
He shook his head, “If you let me go now, I’ll disappear. They’ll never know I saw a thing. I won’t cause you any trouble.”
“And miss out on that big pay day? Somehow I doubt that.” I shook my head, pacing around him. “Besides, this isn’t about me. This is about her. And every other girl like her.”
The whites of his eyes showed as he strained his neck, struggling to keep an eye on me as I looped around behind his chair. His gaze flickered to Dom at the edge of the room briefly, voice shaking. “She promised if I told you–”
“I don’t give a fuck what she promised. You’re dealing with me now.” The words even startled me as I came to a halt behind him. The pillar hid most of his shivering frame from view.
There were only his arms, ripped behind his back at an angle that had caused a dislocation at the very least. From here, it was easier to forget his humanity, to see the monster hiding beneath the sheepskin.
Letting the blade drag slightly against the column, I brought it around to the front of him, resting the tip against the collarbone furthest from me. “You should know more than anyone that there’s no honor here. No amount of answers that will save your life. Not after what you’ve done.”
Then, before he could utter one more pathetic word, I sunk the tip of the scythe beneath his skin, ripping through flesh and arteries without discrimination as I opened him from shoulder to shoulder.
I had no idea what I was doing — I just guessed that the neck would be an easier spot to make a lethal blow. But the blade cut deeper than I’d expected, washing blood over the cement like a crimson tsunami.
My position spared me having to look into his eyes as he died, but the blood wasn’t much easier. The scythe shook in my hand as adrenaline froze me in place. What the fuck had I done?
But my saviors simply sprung into action, not sharing my hesitation. Leo unchained his body and laid him on his back to contain the bleeding while Spencer rushed over to a supply closet to grab cleaning supplies. Dom stood in the shadows, pocketing the man’s phone before sending some sort of message from her own.
