Page 126 of Relapse

Something shifted in his eyes after that comment. “You’ll grovel. Or we’ll kill you.”

I narrowed my eyes. I was about to call their bluff. What did I have to lose?

“Okay. Do it. Save your bricks, stop bullshitting, and just shoot me. Pussy.”

Vance’s eyes flared. He was pissed, and his anger was about to get the best of him. He was always so easy to provoke. I watched as he grabbed the brick and chucked it towards me. I dodged, easily, loving the cracking sound as it ricochetted off the wall behind me.

“You missed.”

It was over then. The games. They shoved me down, the concrete biting into my knees, but I didn’t make a sound and I didn’t fight back. I let my weight settle into the gravel and stared up at the glow of the freeway bleeding through the gaps in the overpass above.

“Hold him,” Dante said.

A set of hands clamped around my biceps on either side. I could’ve pulled free if I wanted, but that wasn’t the point. This was meant to be theater—me in front of an audience of concrete pillars and rusted metal. If I wanted to convince Jace that I had “reformed” then it was necessary to go through with whatever pain my cousins had planned.

Dante stepped forward, hefting a brick in his palm. He wound up, and I watched it come—watched the way his shoulder twisted with the effort as he flung it at me from only a few feet away. It caught me in the ribs, and the air dragged out of my lungs almost instantly.

I sucked air through my teeth, my body spasming with each cough. Warmth welled up in my mouth. I spat blood onto the asphalt, hacking and gasping.

They didn’t wait for me to catch my breath. Another brick. This one clipped my shoulder, sent numbness radiating down my arm. My throat clamped around what would have been a sound of physical pain—whatever they had hit the first time, tore at my insides the minute my jaw opened to make noise. I slumped forward, the scream trapped behind my teeth. The two holding me shifted their weight and I braced myself for more.

They’d expect crying. Pleading. They’d expect a man who understood he was beaten.

They wouldn’t see that from me.

“That all you got?” I ground out, nearly leaning into my cousins for support from the dead feeling in my arm. I couldn’t feel anything from my shoulder down.

Dante hesitated. They always hesitate when you don’t scream.

I tasted copper in my mouth. The bleeding hadn’t stopped. “You’re going to run out of bricks. And then what?”

“Fucking psycho,” Vance muttered.

“Yeah,” I agreed, cracking a grin up at them before spitting at their feet. “Now, hurry the hell up and finish it.”

The hands on my arms tightened, but I could feel the tremor in them now. Fear had a specific way about it, and I knew it wasn’t coming from me. I was prepared to die. And they better hope that I did, because they wouldn’t be prepared for what I had in store for them if I made it out of this situation alive.

Ray released my arm to grab my wrist—rough, sudden—and slammed my hand flat against the cold ground. Vance snatched the same brick that knocked the wind out of me, and stacked it beneath my palm. My fingers twitched against the abrasive surface, already knowing.

“Hold him still,” Dante said again, and my cousins leaned their weight into me this time, forcing me to stare at the hand about to be brutalized.

The second brick came down on top of my hand with a loud crunch, similar to the sound of sticks cracking under a heavy foot. I didn’t know the human body could make such a noise.

It wasn’t instant. At first, I felt nothing, and stared, almost amazed, as trickles of blood seeped out of the edges of the brick—my hand still wedged between like some sick, macabre sandwich.

But then Dante lifted the top brick away, and fire exploded up my arm, every nerve ending inside of me shrieking in alarm. My knuckles had shifted and two of my fingers weren’t recognizable anymore. The pain didn’t stop after that—Dante slammed the brick down again, this time, leaning into it, grinding the two pieces together, pulverizing what little structure there was left in my hand.

Not even the pain in my ribs could stop the scream that time. My voice echoed through the metal pillars around us.

My fingers and arms spasmed, useless and trapped. Instinct had taken over, and I thrashed with all of the force I could muster. My body and mind was warning me to protect my flesh, and the sensation was unlike any I had ever experienced. It was animalistic. I had to get my hand out of there. The pain was too much.

My cousins struggled to hold me and I screamed again, this time, the sound was weakened in the back of my throat. The pain weighed down on me and my head swam.

“You still got five more on the other hand,” Dante said, his breathing heavy with the exertion used against me. “Maybe we should do those too?”

“He still needs to use one hand,” Vance piped in.

I was listening, but barely. My vision was still locked onto my mess of a hand, the bloody bricks, the pain circulating through my veins. I tried to flex what was left of my fingers. The way the digits had swollen so quickly was unreal. Only my pointer and thumb had any movement and even attempting that small motion had my stomach heaving.