“Yeah? And what do you do in this dungeon?”
His eyes shift nervously, and his mouth flops soundlessly.
In one quick motion, I flick off the nail my knife was poised under. The answering scream does little to abate the fury crawling throughout my body.
I will thoroughly enjoy killing this man. His tortured cries as his body slowly dies will be my lullaby as I fall asleep tonight.
It’s not until I position the knife under another nail before he finally says anything of value. Crimson rivulets are spilling from Mark's hand, but I’ve barely begun truly making Mark bleed.
“Wait! I said, wait, goddammit!” I cock a brow at him again, urging him to continue. “We uh—we perform rituals on them.” He tightens his lips, a pained expression on his red face. “That’s how we’re sworn in to the secret society. We must perform a ritual and drink the blood of a virgin.”
He confirms what they do to the children, the government’s involvement, and I make sure to have him clarify the two men left breathing next to him are a part of these fucked up rituals. It takes stabbing Jack in the thigh before he admits to his sins, but Miller admits it immediately, not wanting to suffer like Jack and Mark.
“Can I play now, Zade?” Sibby asks impatiently from beside me. She’s vibrating with the need to kill, and in this moment, I can relate to the little demon slayer. We have the same mission, and that is to murder some fucked up individuals.
“Go ahead and have fun with those two. I have a couple more things to get out of dear old Mark first,” I concede, nodding towards Jack and Miller.
“If you don’t let me go, I won’t tell you anything else! Nothing!” Mark shouts, desperate as death draws nearer.
“You’re a weak man, Mark. You’ll tell me anything I want to know once the pain becomes too much. You either die slow, or quick.”
Sibby happily prances towards them and goes for Jack first. She slashes up his face, and it takes monumental effort to ignore her. Especially when her cheeks flush so brightly, I can see it through the makeup.
I swear to God, if she gets off right in front of me, I’m leaving.
I bend down, getting eye level with Mark and hold the knife to his dick. The tool he uses to torture young children will definitely be getting a knife plunged through it tonight while he’s still breathing.
“Who did you speak to about Addie?” I ask.
Mark stutters, his eyes continuously glancing over to his friend’s torture. A bone cracks, followed by Jack’s loud wail of pain.
I dig the knife down further. Mark’s eyes snap back to mine at the clear threat.
“Focus on me, Mark,” I say darkly. “Who did you speak to about Addie?”
Licking his lips, he asks, “In what regard?”
“In any regard that has to do with you kidnapping my girl and selling her, like you were planning to do before I walked in. Did you speak about her to anyone in a position of power involved with these rituals or Savior’s?”
I know the answer before he opens his fucking mouth and says it. The dimming of his eyes as he accepts that he’s about to suffer a great deal more pain.
“Yes,” he whispers.
I lose my composure for just a second, enough to snarl and slice my knife across his chest.
He screams, his face beat red from the agony coursing through him, but I’m not done. Not by a fucking long shot.
“Who?” I bark, losing my control over the beast threatening to rip out of my chest.
When Mark continues to moan in pain, I poise the knife right back over his dick and dig it in sharply. Enough to break skin, but not enough to cause any real damage.
Yet.
“Okay, okay!” Mark yelps, his eyes widening at the pain.
“Who?!” I boom. “I want fucking names, Mark.”
He sniffles but gives me the names I need to know. The names of the people operating the rituals. Names that are more than likely aliases. But it’s a start.
He admits he’s never seen their faces before, and all communication has been through a video feed where they’re shadowed in darkness.
They’re some type of secret underground government, and based on Mark’s ramblings, they have far more control over our government than I thought.
The President is just a puppet, and these people who refer to themselves as the Society—they hold the real power.
“Tell me why you did this, Mark. Why did you insist on going after Addie when you knew she was mine?”
His chin trembles, the waste of flesh the epitome of a pathetic old man.
“She was already marked.”
My heart drops, thudding down my spine like a deflated basketball rolling down a staircase.
“I took a picture of her because she looked familiar. And when she told me her name, I realized that she was a target of the Society’s. It worked out perfectly that they happened to call me, and I told them everything. She… she’s worth a lot of money, man. And the Society wants her. It doesn’t matter to them who you are—it doesn’t even matter who I am. When the Society wants someone, they get them. And if I was the one to bring her in… I would’ve been highly rewarded.”
He sniffles, though it doesn’t prevent the snot from leaking out of his nose.
“Why did they target her?”
Mark sputters out a wet, humorless laugh. “Why do they target anyone? If they’re young and beautiful and happen to be noticed, they’re on the Society’s radar. She brought attention to herself in one way or another. It could’ve been from her books, or you know how women are these days. With the way they dre—” I snatch his hand again and flick off another nail before he can finish such a stupid fucking sentence.
As if showing any amount of skin is a goddamn invitation to be raped and kidnapped.
His answering scream does little to lessen the fury.
“I-I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry. Look, you just don’t ignore the Society’s demands. And they’re going to come after you, Z,” Mark warns, his voice tight with pain but also grave.
I hope they do.
They’ll be saving me the trouble of coming to them.
Knowing that Addie was marked doesn’t only spark anger, it sparks genuine fear for my little mouse.
It never mattered if I came into her life or not—Addie was destined for human trafficking, and the fact that she happens to be the girl I’m absolutely crazy about feels like kismet.
It feels like fucking destiny that the man who haunts her is the same man who dedicated his life to destroying the people set out to take her life.
“I know you don’t care,” Mark forges on, noting the look on my face. “But the second they find out I’m dead, they’ll up and move.”
I’ve accepted this.
I look over at Sibby, the girl now having moved onto Miller. She could be a scapegoat.
If the Society gets word of a deranged girl killing these four men—a girl who’s killed before—they would chalk it up to the partial truth. Wrong place, wrong time. An unhinged girl who swears she can sense evil sniffed these men out and decided to murder them in cold blood.
She’s the perfect scapegoat, actually.
But the thought of using her—it doesn’t sit right with me.
She’s a lonely, fucked up girl who helped me carry out these murders. Doesn’t matter that she would’ve done it anyways had I not been there. Without her, I wouldn’t have gotten the information I did tonight. And I can’t let that go unrewarded.