Page 20

“Here,” I practically growled.

“Take it while it’s warm.” I then held my arm above his face and let it run, wanting to gag the fucker on it. I gave him a mouthful of me. Slow, unhurried, watching it go in with a sick fascination. Watching him choke on it. Watching him swallow some without wanting to because a man with a jaw held open like that has no other option available to him.

Somewhere behind me, a whole yard of murderers pulled in one fearful breath at the same time.

Every last one of them.

Men who had done unspeakable things in kitchens, stairwells, warehouses and the backs of vans, and I made them flinch like fucking schoolgirls.

That was the moment every loyalty in that place shifted, and it was not the broken hand that did it. It was not the beating that followed, either. No, it was because a man who will hurt you is just a man, and every one of them had met a hundred. They can weigh him. They know his rules, roughly, and they know what he wants and therefore what he can be made to fear.

But a man who will do that to himself for nothing at all, grinning like a crazy fucker, while there is a blade in his hand and your blood still on his knuckles?

There is no measuring a man like that. Nothing to weigh, and nothing to bargain with.

So, they went back a full step, all of them, and nobody had to tell them to. Then I went back to work on him. Not the way he would have liked.

Four things, and I picked them for time, not for spite. An elbow that would need pins. A knee that came apart with a sound like a chair breaking. Ribs, several of them. And last, his jaw. Once, hard enough that I felt the whole architecture of it let go. That one was for the boy he put in the hospital.

My father’s rule keeps my hands off the innocent, and that man had given up any claim to it a long time ago.

Then I left him there, breathing wrong, and straightened up to turn around and face my horrified audience. I held out both arms in the middle of that yard with my own blood sheeting off one of them.

“Who’s next?”

Unsurprisingly, nobody moved. The half circle of men once loyal to him had come apart into seven separate men, and every single one of them was suddenly a private citizen with no opinions at all.

Somewhere behind me a whistle started, then the sound of boots, and men shouting the things they shout.

But I still had time for one more.

Shame there were no takers.

“Good,” I said before licking up my arm, tasting the copper there before I turned my head and spat the blood out of my mouth onto the ground at their feet like the dark fucker I was. Then I gave them the only sentence any of them needed to carry back inside with them.

“This is my prison now.”

I lay down on the concrete before they could put me there, hands where they could see them, a model prisoner, because I had somewhere to be.

They took the man who used to run C wing out through the vehicle gate in an ambulance nine minutes later, sirens blaring, and there was not one man in that building who would ever say a word about how he got that way. Not to a review board. Not to the warden.

Not to a particular nurse I would soon declare as my own.

They would put me somewhere quiet for it, of course. But a man with nine stitches in his arm has to be taken out of somewhere quiet and walked to a nurse, and no amount of paperwork changes that.

That was precisely the point.

Although she would hear about it soon enough, in fragments, in whispers, before the next day was out no doubt. And she would look at me differently the day she did.

And if truth be told…

I was very much looking forward to that.

6

THE SWEETEST SCENT

THE GHOST