“All right, see you in aminute.”
I snuck up behind the guard, grabbed his short hair in my fist, and yanked his head back swiftly. Before he could even scream, my hunting knife was slicing his throat wide open and the sound of blood gushing amidst his final gurgling breaths was all that wasleft.
From inside the house, I heard Bear shout, “Didn’t think you’d see any of us again, did youfucker?”
A loud slam came from the back room as I made my way through the dark house. It was the Unacceptables’ modus operandi to never turn the lights on or remove our masks. Too many of our enemies had cameras, and staying out of jail and off hit lists was a toppriority.
“Burn a girl alive in our parking lot and you think we’re not going to come after youagain?”
I saw he was missing his thumb, and it clicked—I knew who this guy was, and he was missing way more than just adigit.
“Ralph, come on. Just tell big ol’ grizzly Bear over here what he wants to know and we won’t cut your dick off too. You’re already halfway to being as smooth as a Ken doll down there. Do you want to have to piss into a bag for the rest of your pitifullife?”
“You’re just going to have to kill me, you fucking cowards.” Ralph spit in Bear’sface.
“Wrong answer.” I chuckled, ripping his right boot off. “You see, you have so many more things I can slice and dice off. I was really close to the corpsman in my unit while I was in Iraq, and when we were bored he would explain to me how to cut an enemy up without letting him bleed out too fast in order to get as much information from him as we needed before hedied.”
That was all it took. He knew from experience that we weren’t all talk. He’d survived one torture situation, and he wasn’t foolish enough to think he was going to endure another without giving us everything we needed to know. I kept promising he was going to live if he just told us where the other safe houses were and who had actually pulled the trigger on Abel. Such a damn idiot—he should have known better than to trust two men who were brothers of the guys who’d sawed his nads off with a breadknife.
