"If you can run, absolutely fucking run," Woody agreed. "Sometimes that's the safest and best option to save yourself. The object of the exercise is survival. Not being a hero because you feel like you have something to prove." Also the voice of experience right now.
"What we're trying to teach you is what to do if you can't run," Leif said.
"Right," Woody agreed. "You didn't want to feel helpless. I don't want you to feel helpless either. Every woman should know how to take care of themselves."
A haunted look flicked across his eyes. He tried to blink it away, but it lingered there, long enough for me to see it. Long enough for me to understand.
He was thinking about his sister. If she had the skills to protect herself, would she still be around now? He didn't want what happened to her to happen to me.
Honestly, that made two of us. Whether she was dead or alive, I didn't want to disappear without a trace like that. These three men, they'd hunt the entire world to find me. If they never found me, they'd never stop hunting. Vice versa was true. I'd never stop looking if any of them went missing.
I'd burn the world down if I had to. Pull it apart. Shatter it into a million pieces until I found out exactly what happened to them. I had to know how to be ruthless.
If that meant stabbing a knife into an already dead corpse, I would. It wasn't as though I hadn't done it already. I'd carved a skull into a dead man's forehead.
Stabbing someone in the ribs or the heart? That was something else. They were right. I had to try this.
"Okay, what do I need to do?" I asked.
Leif smiled and picked up a knife from the shelf beside the guns.
"Come with us." He walked over and unlocked the door at the back of the basement and gestured for me to step through with them.
The moment I crossed the threshold, the temperature plummeted. I rubbed my hands up and down my arms, the cashmere soft under my palms.
I followed them into another room off to the side of the darkened corridor. "You have a morgue in here?"
"Doesn't everyone?" Leif said with a laugh. He handed me the knife and opened one of the drawers.
"This is the one who led the other two. For the record, I killed him second." He peeled the sheet off his face down to just below his navel.
I regarded the man's waxy face. Remembered his voice as he spoke to Woody and Forrest.
Reconciling this corpse with that man was difficult. He looked like a prop out of a movie.
Tentatively, I reached out and touched his hand. I almost expected him to snatch my wrist, jump up and throw himself at me.
Of course, he lay still. Cold and hard to the touch. As dead as the man I'd mutilated. Perhaps more dead, because the other man was still warm at the time. Yes, I know there weren't different levels of death, but it seemed like it right now.
"If you want to go for a slow death, slide the knife in here." Leif placed the side of his hand on the corpse's stomach, between his ribs.
"Or here, straight through his heart." He placed his fingertips on the man's chest.
A strange sensation passed through me. One that took a moment to understand what it was. A thrill of excitement. This man tried to kill us. He'd failed. He'd failed so badly he was lying dead, right here for us to do this to him.
I wrapped my hands around the hilt of the knife. Raised it probably more than was necessary and jammed the blade straight down into the cold, still chest.
It slid through easier than I expected. Skin, flesh and muscle gave way to the colder, harder steel.
"You're a natural," Leif said. "How do you feel?"
I stood with the knife embedded all the way to the hilt. Turned to him and admitted, "Turned on."
"Funny, me too." With a twitch of his eyebrows, he slid open the drawer beside the corpse.
CHAPTER 5
SABLE
