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Kaige lifted a cleaver from a side table and offered it to me. “Here you go.”
My fingers brushed his as I grasped the handle, and he pulled his hand away quickly. I balanced the heavy weight of the rectangular knife in my hand. A menacing glint reflected off its sharp edge. “You… brought me here to cut off his dick?”
Kaige muffled a snort of amusement. Gideon sighed and handed me a thin, crinkling garment that unfolded into something like a hospital gown. He made an impatient gesture toward the corpse and a large plastic sack lying on the floor by the end of the table. “Your assignment is to dismember the body for easier disposal.”
“Get to work,” Wylder said. “Chop, chop.” He aimed a languid smile at me.
Ah. They didn’t just want to show me what happened to traitors but to get me up close and personal with the corpse. My gut twisted queasily, but I tightened my fingers around the cleaver’s handle.
I’d never carved up a human being before, but I’d heard Dad’s men talk about it. No need to get too fancy. Lop off the legs at the knees and hips, the arms at the elbows and shoulders, and then the head… No one wanted to split an abdomen open and deal with the mess in there.
Nine cuts, that was all. Easy peasy.
I pulled the plastic gown over my clothes and picked up the cleaver again. The guy’s elbow seemed like the easiest place to start.
Bracing myself and fighting a cringe at the deathly chill of the stiffening limb I held in place, I dug the cleaver into the skin just below the joint. The blade severed the muscle, sluggish blood oozing out across the metal edge, but jarred to a stop against the bone. I dug in harder, my jaw starting to ache with how tightly I was gritting my teeth.
“Your technique needs work,” Gideon observed unhelpfully. The guys were all watching me with total detachment, even Rowan’s face hard.
“I’m trying,” I snapped. “It’s not like I’ve done this before.”
Kaige walked up beside me and made a sweeping motion with his hand. “You really have tochop—lift the knife and slam it down. That’ll get you through the bone.”
He was speaking from experience, clearly. I swallowed thickly, hesitating just for a second, and Wylder’s sardonic voice rang out. “If you can stomach it, Princess. Or are you ready to give up so soon?”
“Maybe if you’re so impatient to have it done, you shouldn’t have used it for your stupid games.” I hefted the cleaver, its weight straining my arm, and whipped it down as hard as I could at the spot where I’d already cut.
With a sickening crunch, the bone shattered. I hadn’t quite struck the same spot as my first gash, and bits of vein and tendon speckled the table-top. My gut lurched again. I closed my eyes, breathing as shallowly as I could, and then gave the arm another viciousthwack.
The forearm split off completely. I stared at it for a moment, this horror movie scene I was bringing to life in front of me, and couldn’t restrain a shudder. As quickly as I could, I snatched the wrist and tossed the forearm into the open sack.
One down, eight more to go.
“Poor Kitty Cat,” Wylder taunted. “Hissing and baring your claws isn’t enough to win a place with the big boys.”
“You think so highly of yourself,” I retorted, approaching the shoulder with trepidation.
Now that I was getting the technique down, I hacked through the rest of the arm with just two strikes of the cleaver. A little more blood sputtered over my fingers, and I outright gagged as I dragged the upper arm to the sack, but I just swiped at my mouth with a clean section of my plastic sleeve and walked around the table to deal with the other arm.
This was the grossest thing I’d ever done, but ithadto be done. I let my mind drift apart from the details of the job, going through the motions automatically, focusing on the horrors the man I was dismembering had carried out.
Hewasn’t the victim. I was an angel of vengeance, packing up the trash.
“Don’t get careless,” Wylder said, but when I looked up at him, something in my face flattened his smirk. The others had fallen completely silent.
I glared at him. “I think I can manage.” Then I got back to work.
As I finished with the corpse’s other arm and moved to his knee, I kept my attention just on that limb, barely seeing the form in front of me as a person at all. The bubble of disconnection thickened around me, numbness dissolving into something harsher. All my pent-up rage from the last few days came bubbling to the surface, fueling each smack of the cleaver.
It could have been Colt I was cutting up. Strapped down and screaming while I hacked him to pieces bit by bit. Pleading as I drew out the torture, when he hadn’t given any of the Claws a chance to beg. I’d just smile and slice off one more piece of him until there was nothing left but chunks of meat packed into neat little Ziploc bags that could be tossed away and lost to oblivion.
An unsettling sense of savage satisfaction gripped me. I heaved the cleaver at the corpse’s throat, picturing a gurgle cutting off Colt’s last pathetic words. He could choke on his own blood before I chopped his head right off. He should get to experience the slow, painful agony he’d put my grandmother through.
I wrenched the detached head up by its greasy hair and chucked it into the sack. Then I turned back to the lump of a torso. The urge shot through me to stab the knife right into this monster’s heart.
A hand snatched my wrist. I lashed out with my other arm for a second before the real world around me came back into focus.
That wasn’t Colt in front of me. I wasn’t getting my revenge just yet. I was in Wylder’s basement, and I’d just diced up a stranger’s corpse. The smell of death wrapped all around me.
