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The tall, tatted freak kept looking at me, but his partner in crime looked away, first to the cigarettes, then his partner.
The tall freak let out a sound, part scoff, part laugh. “Last request?” he asked.
I shook my head casually. “If it’s my last request, I’ll think up something better.”
He smiled. It was tight; he wasn’t letting down his guard.
The shorter freak was, though. He looked amused, the way a scientist might be amused by the antics of his lab rat.
When the tall freak gave a nod, the shorter one stood up, cigarette pack in hand.
“Come and get it,” he sneered.
I stood up, but the moment I was on my feet, the short freak shook his head.
“Crawl,” he demanded… because psycho killers couldn’t just be psycho killers. They had to be twisted freaks too.
I looked at the cigarette pack in his hand, then away, like I was weighing the worth of a few milligrams of nicotine. Really, it was an act. There were worse things than crawling, and getting from the sofa to the table was the objective here, no matter the cost.
I dropped to my knees and crawled across the floor—which was in substantially worse condition than the ceiling. The floor was carpeted, burnt orange with darker patches here and there, some of them dry… some of them not.Yuck.
Two sets of eyes watched me, and the air filled with the depraved energy that had filledEl víbora’sbasement. It made my skin crawl and my hands tremble, but there was no stopping.
“There’s no moving backward, only forward. So, move forward with me,”Brute had said. The context was different, but I clung to the words and used them to force myself forward. Closer and closer.
I would have preferred to go after the one with my knife, but since the shorter freak was the one with the cigarettes, I crawled toward his side of the table, planning, preparing.
I stopped a foot away from his black boots, sat back on my heels, and held out my hand for a cigarette.
He smiled, withdrew the smoke, but instead of handing it to me, he leaned down closer and placed the end between my lips.
Of course, he did. I had a feeling that wasn’t all he planned on shoving in my mouth. Too bad for him he wasn’t going to live long enough for that.
He reached for the matches, bent over just enough, just right. He’d left his torso exposed, and I honed right in, jabbing hard in the right, upper quadrant. A liver shot that made him scream.
He doubled over, gasping, completely oblivious to everything but pain while the tall freak shot to his feet,myknife in his hand.
“You’ll pay for that,puta,”he sneered with a grotesque smile. Why the hell did the sick freaks always look so happy about that?
He was angry. Livid, actually. And very distracted by it. He hadn’t even noticed the knife I’d grabbed from the short freak’s boot.
Not until he got close enough, and I drove it into his groin.
He screamed and tried to jerk away, but I stayed with him, twisting the knife until warm, thick blood saturated his pants and dripped down my hand.
He stumbled back and dropped my knife.
I let him go. He took the short freak’s knife with him, embedded in his body, but I snatched mine up, spun, and took a swipe at the other man before he could recover, catching him in a long, deep slice across his abdomen.
He screamed. The whole room was filled with screams.
“You don’t stop until they’re dead, Greta,” Vito had warned each time I’d shied away from the final blow. “The only way to make sure they don’t get back up is to make sure they stop breathing,” he’d say, over and over again until I’d stopped hesitating. Until it came almost as easy as breathing.Almost. Always, there was that single moment, like a hitch of breath, just like now, when they were bleeding but still breathing.
But like the span of a breath, that moment was brief.
I pushed past it and slashed the tall freak’s throat, mercifully deep—he wouldn’t suffer more than necessary.
The short freak stumbled and fell, clutching his belly. I turned to finish him off.
