by Marni Mann
“Are you here alone, Tye?”
“Twenty-five even,” the bartender said before I could answer Dean’s question. He set both drinks in front of us.
Dean reached for his wallet and handed him a fifty. “Keep it.”
“You don’t have to do that,” I said, lifting the clutch from underneath my arm.
Dean’s hand touched my bare shoulder to stop me. “I’m happy to.”
“Then, you must let me buy the next round.”
“If that means I get to sit with you while you drink it, then you can buy me as many rounds as you’d like.”
That hadn’t even taken a few more bites of my lip. Either this was simpler than I had thought or Dean was just an easy mark.
“How about we go somewhere a little quieter?” I asked.
“I’ll follow you.”
I walked us toward one of the back booths that I had passed during my hunt for Dean. There were several to choose from. I took the one in the furthest corner, which also happened to be the roomiest. He sat next to me and allowed a little space between us. I appreciated that.
“Tell me what you do for a living, Dean.”
“You won’t find it interesting.”
There was a list of questions I had memorized that would keep the conversation going. They were all basic, nothing too personal. And, in case he wanted to know my answers, I had rehearsed several lies. I’d never had a job where I could be anything I wanted. That was just another thing I liked about this one.
“Then, make it sound fun,” I said.
“I own a logistics company that focuses on trucking. We do it all—air, train, sea—but my passion lies in eighteen-wheelers.”
“So, you like big rigs?”
I couldn’t help myself. It was almost too easy at this point.
“I like”—he looked down at my boobs—“big everything.”
My breasts could be described as average but definitely not big. Maybe he was referring to the ones he would buy me if I stuck around after breakfast.
“How about you, Tye?”
“Part-time student, full-time massage therapist.”
His eyes dropped to my fingers. “A young one who knows exactly where to rub. You don’t find that too often.”
“But I’m old enough to know what I like.”
He stopped at my mouth before he made it up to my eyes again. “And outspoken enough to ask for it.”
Not at all. This was an act. I wasn’t experienced enough to know what I really liked. There had been boys in the past, but none who had really given a shit about what I needed.
But this wasn’t about me. This was about Dean, and I knew he loved all this flirting.
“Shouldn’t that be the way it always works?” I reached for his hand, turning it over to rub the middle of his palm. He needed a tiny tease even though he wouldn’t ever get more from me. “Why touch a spot when you know another one feels so much better?”
“A girl after my own heart.”
I shrugged, finally pulling my hand away. “I just call it the way I see it.”
“And feel it.”
I swallowed a small bit of wine after swishing it around in my mouth. Dean’s glass was half-gone. I knew, when he came here, he never had more than three drinks, usually leaving with a woman before he even finished the second one. All of that had been in his file.
I gave him another smile. This time, I tilted my face down and looked at him with hooded eyes. “Drink up. I’m ready for round two.”
While he had been staring at my breasts, I had moved my glass to the other side of the booth and poured most of it on the floor. The carpet was dark, the lighting dim. Dean was too focused to even notice.
I held the drink up to my lips and swallowed the final sip of wine. “Same thing?” I asked. “Or do you want something different?” I stood in front of him as I waited for his answer.
“Don’t change a thing.”
I grinned at his response. Even though he was complimenting my body, I took it as a sign of how well I was doing.
“Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”
As I walked to the bar, I reached into my clutch to the inside pocket where I had placed the vial. While I waited for the bartender, I discreetly screwed off the top and tucked it under the back of my fingers. With my other hand, I pulled out two twenty-dollar bills.
“An old-fashioned and a white wine,” I said when it was my turn.
“What kind of white?”
“Always order the same drink,” Mina had said. “When you’re working, you need to remember your answers, yerekha. Keep them consistent. We want to slip through, not raise any attention.”
“Pinot grigio. A reserve if you have one.”
When he delivered the glasses, I placed my hands over the rims, so I could release my bent finger and drop the contents of the vial into Dean’s drink. Within a second, the tasteless mixture would be dissolved, and he would never know it was in there.
Once I gave Dean the cocktail, I slipped the vial back into my purse in exchange for a tube of gloss. I’d practiced the move in my dorm room all morning.
“What are we toasting to?” he asked, holding the glass up to me.
I pretended to think about it, smiling in the most seductive way. “To whatever happens next.”
I already knew what would happen next.
Now, I just had to wait for him to drink up.
Beard
“Why did you do it?” I snarled into Inmate #1497’s ear.
I’d taken the prisoner out of his cell and brought him into the Operating Room. That was what we called the chambers where we did all the torturing. There were three ORs inside the prison. Each guard had their own, and all of them were set up differently to house our favorite punishing devices.
Up in this motherfucker, the three of us were like doctors. We needed space to operate, and the cells weren’t big enough for that. The ORs gave us room to spread out our tools and access electricity and water. And each OR had a doggy door. Those were for the babies. Those little bastards weren’t allowed in the cells; it wasn’t safe for them in there. If an inmate hurt one, Shank would lose his mind.
That said a lot, considering his mind was more fucked up than mine.
The prisoner tilted his head to the side and coughed out a mouthful of blood. Most of it landed on his shoulder, the rest on his arm. “Fuck you.”
Defiance.
That was what everyone spewed when they first came in here. Innocence would be next. They’d promise it with everything they had—the lives of their children, their businesses, their homes. Once we broke them physically, they would finally tell the truth.
This piece of shit hadn’t cracked yet.
His hands were tied behind his back, his ankles shackled to the legs of the chair. Instead of the gyno or dentist chair, I’d used just a plain old wooden one for today’s operation.
I must have been feeling softer than usual.
Layla’s cunt had something to do with that.
“Why did you do it?” I repeated.
Every time he moved his neck, the rope wrapped around it would dig in a little deeper. It wasn’t there to strangle him, just to make breathing a bit more difficult.
Strangling was too easy.
He needed to experience more pain first.
“Answer me,” I demanded, using the back of my fist to whip him across the face.
Blood dribbled down his chin, and more ran from his nose. When it touched his lips, he spit. “Fuck you.”
Fuck me?
I laughed.
He’d done enough fucking. That was why he was in here.
We normally didn’t give a shit about the crimes our inmates committed. We were hired to torture and kill, and that was what we did.
But we cared about this one.
Because this asshole was a bad fucking dude.
He had been an inmate for over a month. We never kept them in here that long. They didn’t usually su
rvive more than a week. But seven days wasn’t enough for him. He needed to really suffer. He needed to feel levels of pain that he hadn’t reached yet.
The client had hired us before. It was a few years ago when one of his employees had threatened to leak some software he had created. The employee hadn’t had a chance to sell it to their largest competitor. Days prior to the sale, we’d captured the bastard. We’d flown him here. And he’d died twelve hours later.
He had been an easy one to break.
This time, the guy sitting in front of me wasn’t our customer’s employee.
He was the man who had raped our client’s seven-year-old daughter.
He had been found in her bed, his dick in the little girl’s ass. She had been on her stomach, her face pushed into the pillow so that it would muffle her screams. It wasn’t the first time he had raped her that day.
Or that month.
When our customer had asked his housekeeper why she didn’t tell him about the blood she’d found on the little girl’s panties, the housekeeper had said she thought it was blood from her period.
Seven-year-olds didn’t get their period.
Any fucking woman should know that.
And that was exactly what Shank had told that cunt before he’d sliced her throat.
This piece of shit would never touch that little girl again. He wouldn’t get a trial. He wouldn’t ever get to speak his side to someone who had the power to save him.
All he was getting now was death. But not until we decided we had tormented him enough. In the meantime, Inmate #1497 was ours to play with.
I took a knife from one of the shelves and pressed the tip to his forehead. It was sharp enough to pierce his skin immediately.
“Ow, that fucking hurts!” he shouted. “Stop! I can’t—”
I looked him in the eyes and snarled, “Don’t move, or it’ll hurt much worse.”
I dragged it down to his eyebrow and back up at an angle until I reached his hairline and then down to his brow again. I finished the letter and lifted the blade to start the next. He whimpered, his tears mixing with the blood. It didn’t cause me to stop. It caused me to push even harder against his skin.
When all three letters were completed, I took a step back to admire my work.
WHY?
The question he wouldn’t answer now was carved right into the middle of his forehead. It looked so fucking good.
I took a mirror from the same shelf and held it up, so he could see.
“Tell me now,” I said.
All this motherfucker had was tears. Those weren’t good enough for me. It wasn’t time for remorse; it was time to tell me the truth.
I held the back of his head with the mirror in my other hand, and I bashed the glass into his face, like it was a goddamn pie, as I screamed, “Why?”
“She touched me.”
“Go on.”
“And…and…I liked the way her fingers felt.”
I leaned into his ear. If he didn’t stink so badly, I would bite it off. “That doesn’t make it okay. She’s only seven years old, you sick, twisted motherfucker.”
“I love her.”
“SEVEN.”
“But I love her.”
“You don’t fucking love her. If you did, you wouldn’t have stuck your cock in her ass.”
Inmate #1497 wasn’t going to last too much longer. Not because we were ready to kill him, but because an infection had already set in from all the other torture we’d done. He’d been puking bile in his cell, and he’d stopped eating. His skin was yellow. His body was shutting down. After today, with the mutilation of his face, he’d be begging me to leave him a sheet in his cell to hang himself with.
I wasn’t that nice.
“She loves me,” he whispered.
“Seven years old.” I raised my voice. “Seven,” I said again. Repeating the word over and over, I walked to the back cabinet and removed a crowbar. I liked those better than baseball bats. The hook at the end allowed me to pull the skin after I took a big swing.
I aimed the tip above my head and batted, slashing the metal across his chest. The end hit him so hard, it sliced off half of his nipple. The thing just dangled there, waiting to be flicked off like it was a fucking booger.
He didn’t yell. Didn’t cry out. Didn’t even shed a tear.
He had nothing left.
I’d seen the same look so many times before.
“I”—he wheezed—“love her.”
I bent my middle finger, pressing my nail into the pad of my thumb, and aimed for the bottom of his nipple. I knew he probably wouldn’t even feel it, but I didn’t care.
“You don’t love a seven-year-old.”
When I released, his nipple shot across the room, hitting the cement wall and dropping to the floor. Shank would want me to feed it to the babies. Nipples were easier for them to eat, less bony than a finger.
Like I suspected, the inmate said nothing. Didn’t move. Didn’t even tug on the rope.
Once they stopped screaming, it wasn’t fun anymore.
And all his screams were gone.
I let the OR door slam behind me and went into The Eyes. Shank was sitting in one of the chairs, his feet on top of the desk, staring at the monitors, with Demon on his lap.
“You were too fucking easy on him,” he said without turning around.
“I cut off his nipple.”
I sat beside him and enlarged the screen, so I could get a better look at the rapist. His head was slumped down, his body still. The only sound in the room was his piss dripping onto the floor.
“Nah, you were easy on him. What the fuck has gotten into you?”
I closed out the feed and glanced at Shank. “Nothing.”
“Bullshit. A few weeks ago, you would’ve clamped the straightener around his nose and watched his skin bubble. But, tonight, you just whipped him a few times, smashed him with a mirror, and cut him with a crowbar.” He turned his chair, so he could face me, his hand rubbing Demon’s back. “Tell me what the fuck is going on.”
The straightener was my new tool. Diego had come home with it after one of his trips back to the States and used it to straighten the top of his hair or some shit. Shank and I’d picked on him so badly, he had thrown it away. When I had seen it in the trash with the little sticker on the side saying it went up to four hundred fifty degrees, an idea had hit me. I’d tried it on the next inmate who came into my OR, sticking his nose in between the ceramic sides and squeezing them together.
“Nothing,” I said again, feeling the smile tug at my lips. “I—”
“Ah, shit. I know that fucking look. You like someone.”
I’d been thinking about Layla since I got on the plane that took me back to Venezuela. There was something so cool about that chick. She was a little fancy for me, the way she wore those dresses and business suits, but that just made me want to dirty her up.
I’d never get her dirty enough to come to my side. The closest I’d get to Layla’s tongue would be watching it lick the stripper’s clit. But, hell, I could watch that all day.
“Yeah, there’s someone, but nothing will ever happen.”
“Bitch must be a lesbian. That’s the only thing I can think of that would stop you.”
I laughed. “She’s a lesbian.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Nah, man. She is. She’s got a girlfriend and everything.”
“Can you convert her?”
I shrugged. “Don’t know. Don’t know if I’ll even try.” I checked the monitor; the rapist still hadn’t moved. “We’re doing some business together, and she’ll be getting a commission from it. I don’t know if I want to mess with that.”
“I get it. No one fucks with my money, especially not the people I fuck.”
“Exactly.”
“Is she worth it?”
It wasn’t just that tight little body of hers that I craved—although I couldn’t get that or her gorgeous pussy out of my mind
. But I craved her presence, too. When we’d gone to the Cuban restaurant, she had eaten—really eaten, like getting her hands in the meat, taking a bite from my fork, not afraid to tear into my dessert. She had drunk liquor, not that chardonnay bullshit that most of the women I’d been with liked. From the way I had seen the stripper touching her, she enjoyed it rough. The same way I’d want to give it to her.
And she fucking screamed.
That was one of the most important things.
“Maybe,” I finally answered.
“Think about it.” He gently pounded his fist against the desk. “And think about this, too…Dad wants to see you.”
“I just saw him a few months ago.”
“No, Beard, he wants you at his place or at one of the mills.”
That was what we called Bond’s pill mills. He had tons of them scattered all over the place. Before Shank and I had opened the prison, we’d helped him run them. As his business had grown, so had his need to get rid of some of his associates. Not just hurt them. Bond had needed them to vanish permanently. So, Shank and I’d found this piece of land on Margarita Island, and we’d started building.
It had been a while since I visited Bond’s house or any of the mills.
And I had no intentions of going back to either for a long fucking time.
“I’m good,” I said. “Bond knows he can come here anytime, or I’ll meet him somewhere. Just not there.”
“Don’t you think—”
I stood up and pushed the chair, hearing the wheels screech across the floor. “I’m not talking about this.”
I didn’t shut the door behind me. I let it slam. It was the closest noise to a scream. And, once I put something in my stomach to soak up the coffee sloshing around, I would go into my OR, and I was going to kill that fucking rapist.
Go back to Bond’s place?
Shank had known better than to ask me that. He had known better than to even bring it up.
I could take someone’s life with steady fingers, but the mere mention of that place would cause my whole body to shake.
I took out an empanada from the fridge and swallowed mouthfuls of it during my walk to the OR. Through the small window in the middle of the door, I saw that #1497 still hadn’t moved. My hands twitched to hurt him. To make him bleed.
