Vice(23)

The room is silent.

The guy who was schooling her on how to behave a moment ago sways a little, a bizarre, confused look on his face, and then he slumps to his knees right in front of the girl, slowly touching a hand to a smoking hole in his chest. He looks down at the hole, and at the blood that’s slowly beginning to trickle from the wound, and then he laughs. Just once. One surprised, disbelieving snap of laughter. His eyes roll back into his head, and then he topples forward, head first into the blonde girl, who shrieks and scrambles back, terrified.

Plato and his companions have stopped f*cking and are all looking at me like I’ve lost my mind. In fact, everyone is looking at me like I’ve lost my mind.

“You…that was…really f*cking dumb,” Plato says. His dick is still hard, which is kind of off putting, but impressive. None of the other *s in the room have managed to maintain an erection. Their balls look like they’ve well and truly shrunk up inside their bodies.

“You have no idea what you’ve just done.” Plato grabs his boxers and his pants from the floor, hurrying towards me. Another guy steps out, trying to block his way. He’s huge, well over six feet; he looks like he’s just processed the fact that I killed a man at their f*ck fest, and he’s really not happy about it.

“I hope you like pain, new guy. We’re about to break every bone in your goddamn body.” He rushes forward, murder in his eyes, and I hold up the gun, closing one eye and aiming the thing directly at his head. My hand is steady. I don’t need to close an eye to squeeze off a shot and put an end to this motherf*cker, but it makes it look like I mean business. The guy stops in his tracks, and his face turns a frightening shade of crimson.

“You’re not seriously going to shoot two of us,” he snarls. “Fernando will have your head for this.”

“He can have it, if he demands it,” I say. “I have seven bullets left in this gun, though, and I’m a crack shot, *. I’ll take eight of you before I leave this room, and I’ll die without a single regret.”

“You’re insane.”

“No, man. I have just had enough.” And it’s true. Years of men abusing young girls. Years of raiding warehouses in the middle of the night, to find teenagers handcuffed to gas pipes, while lines of guys take their turns with them. And years of looking for my sister, never finding her, thinking with each new obscene horror I find that this could be what she’s been going through for so long. It’s taken its toll. Every second has left a black mark on my soul that’s slowly but surely tarnished me. There’s no good left in me. There’s nothing to keep me from killing as many of these sick motherf*ckers as I can and welcoming death with open arms.

I’m about to pull the trigger, to kill this motherf*cker right where he’s standing, but then a small voice whispers in the back of my head: Laura. What about Laura? She could be here. She could be here, and then what? If you die, she’ll never escape this place.

My finger eases off the trigger. The guy breathes out slowly, his hands twitching by his sides, eyes narrowed into slits. I can tell he wants to be the one to do it. He wants to be the one who kills me. No matter what happens here today, I won’t be giving him the satisfaction, though. I’ll bury a bullet between his eyes before that happens, or I’ll kill him with my bare f*cking hands. A man like him will never best a guy like me.

Plato grabs hold of me by the arm and drags me back, hissing under his breath. “Come on. You have to get out of here.” He’s managed to get his boxers on, which I’m more than pleased about. He shoves me backward, and then he’s dragging me toward the door.

Persephone gets to her feet, tits wobbling everywhere; she holds a hand out, grasping at thin air, shock all over her face. “Don’t! Don’t open the door!”

Plato casts a troubled look over his shoulder. He shrugs. “I don’t think it’ll be that bad.” And then he’s opening the door and pulling me through, slamming it shut behind us.

I stand in the long, empty, beautifully decorated hallway, staring at the now closed door. “That thing’s been open the whole f*cking time? What the hell, man?”

Plato pants, out of breath, like he just ran across the finish line of an uphill marathon. I recognize the fear painted across his face. I recognize the wide-eyed look of panic in his eyes. “Once you walk through that door, you stay in that room until he tells you otherwise,” he says.

“What? Why?”

“Because Fernando’s a psycho. He has rules, and those rules can’t be broken, no matter how stupid they are.”

“And if you don’t stay inside?”

“Then Fernando feeds you to his wolves.” He says this so matter-of-factly that I think he’s joking for a second. But Plato isn’t laughing. His face is pale, and a thin sheen of sweat has broken out across his forehead.

“I don’t suppose that’s a metaphor for a severe beating?” I ask.

Plato shakes his head. “No, man. That’s about as literal as it gets.”

“How do you know?”

“How do you think, *? He waits until nightfall and then drags us out of there onto the front lawn. He makes us watch.”





CHAPTER FIVE





AN APOLOGY