Jacob screamed. Shock crossed his face.
Then he was dead.
What. The. Fuck.
Lena’s expression was wild, flickering from rage to grim satisfaction as a breath of relief rushed through her body. Then something shifted. She looked at Jacob’s body,really looked at it,and horror flooded in. Disbelief followed closely behind as the reality settled that she had killed him.
That reaction was typical for most people the first time they killed someone. The shock came first. Then the stunned realization that they had actually gone through with it. That they wereactuallycapable of taking a life, and of the brutal force it required.
Knox and I had long since grown numb to death.
But the memory of our first reaction, our first time seeing death laid across the floor, flashed briefly in my mind.
Two women with empty eyes and twisted necks.
Lena's hands began to shake as she let go of the screwdriver, still buried to the hilt in Jacob’s skull. Her eyes flicked back and forth between Knox and me, wide, fearful, and assessing.
My brother cocked his head, studying her reaction, while I tutted and wrapped a hand around her arm. She shook, trying to tear away from my grasp.
“Lena, Lena,Lena.Now why would you go and do a thing like that?” I said lightly. “We were just beginning to have some fun with Jacob here. All that hard work, days of chipping away to extract intel, straight down the drain!”
“Why did you kill him?” Knox asked, his tone more curiousthan angry.
The little mute looked down at her bloodstained hands, still trembling with disbelief. Her bewildered expression said everything.She had no idea why she’d done it.Lena had snapped. Something Jacob said or was about to say set her off in a way she couldn’t yet process.
“Well,” I said with a sigh, “now that Jacob has finished spilling his secrets, I guess you’ll have to fill his shoes. Ready to get started?”
She said nothing, her gaze still fixed on her shaking hands.
I used the handsaw to cut through Jacob’s bindings, then shoved him off the chair and let his corpse tumble to the floor in a boneless heap. I dragged his body into the back room, where the Arca cleanup crew would arrive shortly to collect it.
When I returned to the workshop, a frown crossed my face.
Knox had replaced Jacob's blood- and piss-soaked chair in the center of the room with a fresh one. I supposed he wanted to make the little omega more comfortable.Had he ever done anything like that before?Sure, my brother wasn’t as openly cruel as I was, but he was still cold, methodical, always doing his job with precision and never taking unnecessary steps.
Like finding a clean chair.
My eyes flicked from him to the chair questioningly. He shrugged, already guiding the mute toward it and looping a zip tie around her wrists. I leaned back against the wall, ready to watch him work his magic.
He crouched down, bringing himself eye level with her, then pulled a long blade from the holster on his thigh.
“I don’t want to do this, runt,” he said. “Just tell us what you know, and we’ll let you go.”
I wouldn’t have opted for the blade this soon. Our method was to start small, escalating the pain gradually to gauge the threshold of an interrogatee’s resolve.
Knox was going off-script, and I wasn't sure why.
“Just talk,” he said, frustration creeping into his voice.
“Talk!” he barked this time, despite knowing she didn't respond to it.
She just sat there, staring at him. Her hands had stopped shaking now that they were restrained behind her back, and her wide brown eyes had gone flat. Knox lifted the blade, dragging it upward before resting it against her chest, then across the delicate skin of her neck.
“Tell us what you know about Marco’s other omegas,” he said, his voice calmer now.
At first, she didn’t move. Lena sat perfectly still. Then she raised her flat gaze to meet his. Her mouth opened, then closed, and in one swift motion she thrust her neck forward, into the knife.
My brother jerked his hand back just in time to prevent real damage, but a thin line of blood welled and slid down her neck from the shallow cut.
