No time to rest, though. I jog onwards to the room we’d set aside for Pandora’s murder opera.
It doesn’t take long before I hear Allers’s voice, begging.
“Please! I’ve got money! I can pay you!” he yells.
I push the door open and walk inside.
Allers is strapped to the table, naked, with bright lights shining directly on him. Pandora, wearing gloves and bright-pink scrubs, waves a knife in front of him.
River stands off to the side, expression stern.
“I know you have money,” Pandora says with a soft laugh. “That’s how you bought all yourtoys, right? All the women you used up and discarded and dismembered and threw away!”
I survey the room, but Asch isn’t here. My hackles rise.
“Asch?” I ask.
No response.
Pandora looks at me. “No Asch. Maybe he doesn’t have the stomach for it.”
That isn’t true. I’ve seen what he’s done for us.
“Blaze!” Allers calls out. “Call off this crazy cunt! She’s?—”
He doesn’t finish, because Pandora stabs him in the gut. Allers cries out, letting us hear his own opera wails.
Pandora’s eyes light up, her smile stretching wide.
My breath catches at how fucking beautiful she is.
River crosses his arms against his chest. “Don’t hit anything vital too early,” he says. “He deserves more than a quick death. I doubt they gaveRachela quick death. Do you remember Rachel?” His eyes are intent upon Allers. “Pretty girl, still in high school? You played with her, then you got tired of her. She ended up in the trash, which is where you’re going to end up.”
Allers only whimpers.
I go up behind Pandora and wrap my arms around her waist. She smiles and gives me a quick kiss on the jaw before turning back to her canvas.
Blood gushes out of the cut she’d made. If I look closer, I can see past the outer meat and straight to his intestines.
It reminds me of the slaughterhouse Asch and I had once visited, except I feel no sympathy for Allers.
He hurt Pandora, even if it was indirectly.
He deserves all of this.
“Nothing personal, Allers,” I say, pasting on a smile of my own. “But you’re going to look better after Pandora carves you up.”
Allers shakes his head. Tears leak out of his eyes. “P-please.”
“Rachel begged, didn’t she?” Pandora says. She lays her knife at the end of Allers’ wound and drags it up, towards his ribs. “But did you giveherany mercy?”
Allers sobs and cries.
Pandora abandons that cut and stabs him on the other side, drawing the knife along his flesh and baring even more of his insides. Blood is spilling out of him at a rapid rate, fast enough to where I’m not sure he’ll survive enough to truly regret what he’d done.
I wonder if he even remembers Rachel.
With Bobbi and Anastasia’s help, I’d found all the records of our transactions with Allers. Rachel was just one of many. I’d known he had a voracious appetite, and hell, I know what it’s like to get bored with somebody.
