Kings of Chaos (Dirty Broken Savages #1)(88)

I get in his face once again, not caring that he can’t lift his head to look at me. “I’ll tell you this because you’ll be dead soon. You’re the last one on my list. Everyone else before you already went down. Now it’s your turn. Saved the shittiest for last.”

He gurgles something that might be an insult or a plea or something. I can’t make it out, and I don’t give a fuck.

It’s time to end this.

I raise my knife one more time and drive it with all the force I can right into his chest. It plunges into his heart, killing him, and I yank it back out, flicking blood against the wall.

Ivan’s body sags in the chains, bleeding wetly, all the life gone from it. He was once someone who caused me more nightmares than any one person should ever have to face.

Now he’s dead.

I almost forgot the guys were all here for that, watching but not interfering, but then Gage steps up next to me.

“We have to get rid of the body.”





37





GAGE





RIVER TURNS to look at me after I speak. There’s some blood on her face, stark red against the black lines of the skull on her face. Even beneath the makeup, I feel like I can read her expression easily.

She looks haunted. Almost… lost. Whatever she was expecting to feel when she killed Ivan didn’t click for her, I guess. Or it did, but it’s not what she thought it would be.

Either way, we don’t have time to talk about it.

“Knox,” I say. “Get him down.”

Knox unlocks the shackles that held Ivan up on the wall, and his body slaps to the hard concrete floor with a wet noise. He’s bleeding everywhere from River’s cuts and the final stabbing. I sneer down at his body. Someone so powerful and so hated. By me, by River, by plenty of other people. And now he’s just meat. At the end of the day, no one is powerful enough to avoid ending up like this if they piss off the wrong people, and Ivan clearly did. His money, his bodyguards, his paranoia, all of that let him down. Trying to get his dick wet was his downfall.

Well, whatever he did to River was his downfall. Judging from what she said about her and her sister and the way Ivan liked his hookers to act, I can guess.

Blood seeps wetly out of his body, and I step back, shaking my head.

This is Knox’s specialty, so I let him take point on it. He’s removed enough bodies from this basement and other places that I trust him to get it done. I look to him, waiting to see what he wants to do.

“River,” he says.

She looks up at him, the name registering, but she’s still quiet. Knox shakes his head.

“No, like, we need to take him to the river. We did the woods last time.”

I nod. Knox always mixes it up to avoid dumping bodies in the same place too soon one after the other. That’s a good way to arouse suspicions, and we don’t need that.

“We need to hack it up. Makes it easier to transport,” he says, pulling out tools for that purpose.

It goes fast with the four of us. Five of us, if you count River. She’s helping, but I can tell her head’s not really in it. She still seems a bit dazed, out of it. Lost. Knox goes at it like he’s having a good time, and I know there’s probably a part of him that wanted to be involved while River was hurting Ivan. Ash and Priest work quickly, not relishing it the way Knox does.

We bag the body up, and Knox hauls it up the stairs. Usually, it’s just him that takes care of this stuff. Sometimes I send Priest or Ash with him, to help get it done faster.

But this time, we all go.

No one says anything. We don’t talk about it. There’s just some unspoken agreement that we’re all going to go and see this done.

We pile into the car, with Ivan’s body in the trunk. Knox drives, and no one questions where he’s going. He’s done this so many times that we all know he has spots he likes to use.

It’s not a long drive, but far enough out that even if someone finds the body, it will be hard to trace it back to us. But no one ever finds the bodies.

By another unspoken agreement, we all get out of the car and clamber down to the riverbank. Ash makes a joke under his breath about bringing River to the river, but River doesn’t even seem like she registers it.

She watches Knox tuck rocks into the bag to weigh it down and says nothing.

“Can we move it a little faster?” Ash asks, always the one to complain about these things.

“I swear to god, if you say you have a date tonight…” I mutter in his direction.

He grins. “No, I just don’t want to get all muddy and crap. And this piece of shit doesn’t deserve us standing around wasting any more of our time than we already have on him.”

He’s right about that much, at least. Knox motions for Priest to help him, and they each take one end of the bag. Together, they lift it up and then give it a heave before sending it into the water. It doesn’t float for even a second. The rocks and the weight of the body are enough to pull it down into the dark, murky water almost immediately.

We stand there for another few moments, watching until even the bubbles from the bag are gone.

Knox dusts his hands off and grins. “Am I the only one who’s suddenly starving?” he asks.

“Yes,” Ash and Priest say in unison.