Page 126

“You will pay for it, though,” Trip growls, his grip tightening on my wrist. “One way or another⁠—”

“That isn’t going to happen.”

His voice isn’t loud. But its low, gravely baritone timbre makes it vibrate throughout the blue-lit room.

I turn to see Damiano leaning against the door to the room, one hand casually in his pocket as the other one absently strokes his jaw.

“Tucker!” Trip snarls. “The cunt you brought just spilled—” He stops cold, his brow furrowing as the penny drops.

“Yo…” The guy next to Trip frowns. “What happened to the girls, bro?”

“Oh, yeah,” Damiano sighs. “They had to go.”

“Excuse me?” Trip spits. “The fuck do you mean, they⁠—”

Damiano’s hand casually slides out his pocket, reaches behind him, and locks the door with an audible click. His eyes find mine, and a shiver of excitement ripples up my spine as I grin at him.

I try to start to cross the room to Damiano.

Trip grabs my arm and yanks me back.

“Here's the deal,” he spits. “One of you coughs up fifty-grand right now, or else me and the boys are gonna run a train on this bitch until we get our money’s⁠—”

“Oh! I have a third option!” I pipe up, a huge grin spreading over my face as adrenaline kicks in.

Trip snickers. “Yeah?” He elbows the guy next to him. “What would that be?”

“Castrating and slaughtering every single one of you motherfucking Temu Epstein knock-offs.”

The room goes silent.

Trip’s brow furrows as a slight trace of amusement tugs at his mouth. “And how exactly would you do⁠—”

“Like this.”

I grab a bottle of vodka on the bar by the neck, smash it against the wall, and stab the jagged shards of it right into his fucking jugular. A geyser of blood erupts from his throat Tarantino-style as his eyes bulge before he collapses into a wet, gurgling heap on the floor.

For about two seconds, nobody can process what just happened. Trip is still twitching on the floor, his hands clamped uselessly to his throat while blood spurts through his fingers and spatters the bar, the floor, the bottles, and the electric-blue wall.

“What the FUCK!?”

It’s the one guy's scream that breaks the spell. Then, all at once, everything goes beautifully, spectacularly, fucking gloriously to shit.

My pulse roars as I start indiscriminately slashing and stabbing with the broken bottle in my hand.

One of the fuckers plows into me when he slips on the bloodied floor while trying to get to the door. I just grin, wind up, and ram the remains of the bottle into his groin. The resulting scream of horror is sweet enough, but fuck me, the spray of blood that explodes from his severed femoral artery is pure art.

After that, it all sort of slides into a blurry red mania.

At one point, I grab one of those douchebag katana swords off the wall and things get real fun. Later, I’m straddling a guy on the floor, tears of laughter rolling down my cheeks as I slap the fuck out of him with his own severed hand, when a huge BOOM rips my head to the side.

Apparently, the bouncers have finally figured out that things have gone fucky in here, because they come in, guns blazing.

Or rather, they’ve come in, but the blazing gun is now in Damiano’s hand.

He stands with a foot planted across the throat of one of the bouncers, a big smoking shotgun braced against his shoulder. The wall in front of him is a thick, dripping splatter of bone shards and blood as the now-headless body of the other bouncer drops to the floor.

In one graceful move, Damiano brings the fuck-you end of the barrel to the forehead of the guy struggling under his foot and pulls the trigger, turning the floor around him into a Pollock painting.