She peels open her eyes, utterly devoid of shame. “Fuck off, sewer rats.”
"Dimitry know you use his grunts to get off?" I sneer, my hand tightening on my shiv. How the fuck is this going to play out?
Odessa doesn’t flinch. Instead, a slow, cat-like grin spreads across her face. She reaches back, fisting her hand in Gleb’s hair. “Let’s see if your tongue is better than your fingers.” She presses Gleb’s head into her crotch, not letting him move.
“Mon Dieu,” François sighs from beside me, his voice dripping with disgust. “It is like mating time in a zoo. Hideous.”
Odessa laughs sharply, then looks at me. “We’re all animals here, de Vaux, or didn’t you realize that? What about you, Bevan? I’ve heard Diggers are hard workers, I’ll give that a try.”
“Fuck off, you gross bitch,” Aurora hisses pushing in front of me.
“Jealous?” Her laugh echoes around the corridor. "Gleb can’t actuallyfuckanyone anymore, thanks to you, so the least you can do is let your boyfriend fuck me. I’m sure that would be preferable to your frigid pussy.”
Gleb rears back, his face now a violent shade of purple. He staggers to his feet, pulling a shiv from somewhere. “You bitch,” he screams at Odessa, but she doesn’t move. Doesn’t flinch.
She simply points a manicured finger at Aurora.
“Don’t get mad at me, you big, stupid animal.” In the dim light her eyes seem to be dancing with a sick kind of glee. "There’s the one who took your not very manly-manhood. Why don’t youshow her exactly how much you’ve missed your poor little pee-pee?”
The redirection is instant. Gleb’s rage pivots on a dime, his bloodshot eyes locking onto Aurora with a renewed, sharpened focus. He ignores the rest of us entirely.
“Princess Slut," he rasps, the shiv trembling in his grip. “Time for payback.”
I push Rory back. "Stay clear, he’s coming in hot," I mutter. I let Imran slide off my back, but before the kid even hits the ground, I see Aurora move.
In one fluid motion, she passes the skeletal weight of Imran over to a startled François. The Frenchman catches the boy with a look of utter bewilderment, his arms full of dying Digger while Aurora launches into a blur of motion.
She doesn’t go for Gleb. She goes for the source—with a perfect, tight spin—a pirouette fueled by pure, unadulterated venom. Her leg whips out in a high, arcing extension, and her heel connects with the side of Odessa’s jaw with a sickening, bone-deepcrack.
Odessa’s head snaps back, her eyes rolling as she’s slammed against the crates. She hits the floor in a heap of exposed tits and navy twill.
Aurora staggers but remains upright, her chest heaving. “Guess what, Odessa?” she hisses in a lethal whisper. “The Ballerina Butcher decided to make a house call.”
Gleb lets out a guttural roar and lunges but I catch his wrist in mid-air. “Not today, you fat fuck,” I growl.
The beast inside me howls to attack, but François—still awkwardly cradling Imran with one arm—reaches out with his free hand and lays a single finger on Gleb’s shoulder.
Instantly, the Russian’s eyes roll back in his head and he collapses like a puppet with its strings cut.
“He’s dead,” François says, his breathing barely elevated. He looks down at Gleb’s corpse, then at the unconscious Odessa, then finally at the dying boy in his arms. “Now, if we are quite finished with the theatrics, I would very much like to stop carrying this… person. Onward.”
That was my fucking kill. Boiling with an anger that is almost out of control, I scoop Imran back out of François’s stiff arms and grab Rory’s hand, tight.
We leave the Guild trash in the dark where they belong.
“What next?” whispers Rory.
De Vaux tilts his head forward, his posture resetting into its usual elegant alignment. “Next? We travel to the absolute depths of this hellish hole once again. To solitary.”
???
The air heats with every foot we descend. The smell of mold and sweat permeates the walls.
Deep down in this basement is where Quo keeps the ones who need to be broken, or those who are already too broken to release upon the population—as I imagine this London guy is.
Will he be violent? A danger to Rory?
I won’t let him hurt her.
