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Freddie: We’re not done.
Maybe we’re not, but I’m not backing down this time. For once, I’m going to hold my ground until he bows to me.
Chapter 10
FREDDIE
Twice in one day.
Staring up from my phone, I look around the cobbled mews.
Georgina’s left me twice in one day.
Turning to look at her house, I pocket my mobile. It’s all so quiet now that it’s just me left standing here, yet my head is the loudest it’s ever been as I force myself to head back to the car.
I love you.
That’s all she wants to hear. All she needs from me, and like it’s the biggest fucking lie of my life, I can’t give it to her. Except it’s not a lie. I’ve never wanted anyone the way I want Georgina. I’ve never cared for another person the way I care about her. She’s the most precious thing. Georgina is my most precious possession, and like she said, I am the moth that will destroy her. I am the thing that will pick and pick at her until there’s nothing left. Yet, I can’t stay away.
The lump that’s been lodged in my throat since I promised Lucy that I wouldn’t leave her gets bigger and bigger, swelling until the only way I can get rid of it is by screaming or beating the shit out of something or someone. I would destroy myself if I could, but that would make me as weak as he was. It would make me no better, and this is why I should never have allowed myself to have her. Now I’m fucked if I do and fucked if I don’t. Georgina is the only thing I can think about. The only thing I want, need, crave, desire…
Slamming the door of the car shut, I scream. I scream so loud that the windows rattle and shake with every strike of my fist on the rim of the steering wheel. Even when they bludgeon against the light leather, I can’t fucking stop. I’m fucking drowning, and it doesn’t matter how hard I try to swim, I can’t. Worse, my efforts only serve to exhaust me. Deplete me of whatever control I have left.
I love you.
Three simple fucking words that any other fucker could spew turn out to be the one thing I can’t do. Put a man in front of me and I can tear him limb from limb. Gut him like a rat. I can crush bone, slice flesh, and peel skin.
Before I even know what I’m doing, I’m tearing away towards the office. I know I shouldn’t. I know that I’m going to shit on my own plans, but short of chasing Casper down and going at with him…there’s nothing else. It’s what we do. I need a fight, and he gives it to me. It’s our kind of workout. We spar for hours. Even that is fucking gone.
The lower floors are all dark when I make it to office, and with it being a ghost town, I find myself exactly where I shouldn’t be. Tucked in the small cot in the corner of the room, the next best thing to self-flagellation whimpers. He may not be able to open his eyes anymore or to hear with the clouting his ears have taken, but the bastard knows I’m here. He knows that he’s not going to make the night.
I had every intention of dragging this out. Of making him suffer until he begged me to kill him. Yet, I can’t stop myself from stalking to his half-dead corpse. A low rasp pushes from blood-crusted and glued lips, ripping them open before I yank him off the makeshift bed by his dislocated shoulder. Still, he makes no sound aside from a sobbed breath that barely registers in the silence surrounding me.
The more I tug him along the floor, the more his shoulder twists awkwardly while the stitches on my arm threaten to pop at the brash movements. The tug, bulge, and flex of muscle pull at the threads. When I lift him onto shattered knees that can’t hold his body weight, a low, wheezing complaint escapes him. Hitching him up onto the chair, I pull back to get a look at him, but the sight of my own bloody hand has me whipping it across his face so hard that he flies across the room to a heap on the floor.
“Do you love?” The question blurts from my mouth as I drag him back to the chair, and this time, I tether him to the wrist cuffs on the arms. “Who do you care for?”
The disappointing thing about torture is that once you can’t look into the eyes of the bastards, you can’t see the pain echo through them. You can’t see it destroy their hope. That moment when they know they’re going to die and it’s not going to be better than suffering because the pain has encompassed all their soul.
“I’m going to find them. I’m going to find every person you have ever loved, and I’m going to crush them. Piece by piece.”
His chest heaves like he’s trying to say something. As though his words are just as stuck inside him as mine are inside me. A hoarse chuckle vibrates in the back of my throat at the notion.
“There. Turns out we have one thing in common,” I tell him, pulling my still-bloodied knife from my pocket and twisting it around my fingers. His eyes flicker behind swollen, bruised lids. “Neither of us can get words out.”
There’s no sound from him. Nothing. And it only serves to irritate me. The anger and frustration still simmering beneath the surface bleed to the top of my muscles and skin, coiling around me like a weed until it’s so tight. The tension is so fraught. Every single cell of my being explodes. Hot rage pours from me as my fists connect with any part of him they can. And still, he makes no sound. Not even a dragged-in breath. Nothing. It doesn’t matter how hard I go at him—still fucking nothing. Even when my closed knife begins to cut into my palm with the ferocity of my hits…
Fuck all.
I don’t know whether it’s his blood or my blood that trickles over my forearms. I don’t know anything anymore. All I know is that she’s gone. Georgina’s gone, and there is nothing that I can hold on to that will stop me from drowning. Her absence is a lead weight pulling me under. The light that she brought to my life is gone, and the darkness has never been so bleak. The shadows I feel at home are cold and lonely. She’s left me, and I’m alone.
It doesn’t matter that I was trying to protect her from him and the ones that sent him because I’m the one that hurt her the most in the end.
All while I was trying to protect her. The kicker is that I couldn’t protect her at all. Not from me and not from him.
The bastard’s fully limp by the time I pause to catch my breath. My knuckles are a throbbing mess. Yet when I flick my knife open, my fingers curl around it so tight that the handle might snap in my grip. Holding the side of his with my other hand, I keep my stare trained on his face as I edge him forward in the chair and plunge my knife into the side of his back, pushing it as deep as it will go until the seesawing motion of the blade allows the hilt to sink deeper into the kidney. The clenched howl is the first real sound he’s made in days. The sliver of his bloodshot gaze meets mine.
“Welcome to hell,” I tell him, lowering to his level as he growls with agony. “Burns, doesn’t it?”
