Slow Agony (Assassins, #2)(77)

Well, there were pieces.

I thought maybe I’d cry or throw up again, but I didn’t. I kept it together. I felt numb and accepting of it. It was only the last in a string of horrors I’d gone through over the past month.

Griffin and I didn’t talk much while we were working, only conversing to give each other direction or to discuss the best way to accomplish a task.

He dug the mass grave. I dragged out the bodies, using the sheets as a makeshift sling. He buried the bodies. I used the hose and bleach to try to clean up the basement.

It didn’t work.

The blood had soaked into the concrete.

I got down on my hands and knees. Scrubbed at the floor with Comet.

The scarlet stains wouldn’t go away.

That was how Griffin found me. I was up to my elbows in cleaners and blood, scrubbing at the floor as hard as I could.

“Doll,” he said.

He was on the steps. I looked up at him. He was covered in dirt and blood. He looked like something from a horror movie, some monster that had crawled up from the ground to wreak vengeance. I felt sick again.

“You’re not going to be able to get it up,” he said.

I dropped the scrub brush I was using. It hit the floor with a clatter.

“If I were cleaning for Op Wraith, I’d probably paint over it,” he said. “Just hose it down and leave it.”

I stood up. My legs shook. Suddenly, I realized I was exhausted. We’d barely slept after escaping, and then we’d been up all night with Marcel. I was hungry too. I picked up the hose again. “You turn on the water for me?”

Griffin walked across the basement, his footsteps echoing through the room. He turned on the hose.

I washed all the bleach and Comet down the drain. It was tinged with pink.

The water turned off. “That’s good.”

I let the hose drop.

He was next to me again. He caressed my upper arm. “We need to get cleaned up.”

I shut my eyes.

His hand found mine. “Come on.” I let him lead me up the steps. When we got to the top, we closed the door on the basement. I never went down there again.

*

I kept turning the water in the shower hotter. I felt like I couldn’t get it hot enough. I wanted it so hot that it would scald off a layer of my skin, so that I could emerge from beneath it clean and pure, and that everything else that had happened would wash down the drain with Marcel’s blood.

If Griffin didn’t like the temperature, he didn’t complain. We were in the shower together, but it wasn’t particularly sexy. We were just scrubbing. Both of us. I think we each washed ourselves three times.

Eventually, the water went cold.

I turned off the shower.

“It was fun,” I said, bent down, my hand still on the knob to control the water pressure. I’d participated in mutilating and torturing a man. I’d carved my name into his skin. I’d cut off pieces of his body. And it had been fun.

Griffin pulled the shower curtain aside. “Now you know what it’s like.”

I straightened. “What it’s like?”

He stepped out of the shower. “Turning off.”

*

Later, after raiding the stocked kitchen in Naomi’s house, we were lying on a bed in one of the bedrooms with the curtains drawn against the sunlight. I was too tired to breathe or move, but I couldn’t fall asleep. I kept shifting in bed, trying to get comfortable. Nothing worked.

Griffin’s voice, quiet and rumbling. “He deserved it, doll. He was a monster.”

I rolled onto my back. “I know.”

He sighed. “I’m sorry I ever got you into this.”

I wrapped my arms around myself. “It doesn’t bother you?”

“What doesn’t bother me?”

“What we did to him,” I said. “It was a little excessive, don’t you think?”

“No,” he said. “You don’t know what he did to me. What he did to me was worse.”

I knew that. And I didn’t feel bad for Marcel, not really. Griffin was right. He deserved it. But I was glad somewhere deep down that I’d never had a child. Because I wasn’t particularly sure that I would be a very good mother. Not if I was capable of this.

And Griffin didn’t even have any remorse?

Well, I guessed Griffin was used to it. I remembered that he’d tortured Knox. Conveniently, it wasn’t an aspect of his personality that I thought about very often.

He leaned over and kissed my forehead. “It will be easier tomorrow, doll. The day after that it will be even easier. At some point, you’ll hardly think about it at all.”

I shut my eyes. Maybe that was what I was afraid of.

*

I awoke hours later to the sound of a woman’s voice.

Griffin was sitting straight up in bed. “Jolene French,” he said, a horrified expression on his face.

I listened. It was French, all right. French was the psychologist from Op Wraith. “Where is her voice coming from?”

He pointed across the room to an open laptop, sitting on a card table.

“Come in, Marcel,” French was saying. “I haven’t heard from you in days.”

Griffin got out of bed and eased across the room to turn the laptop to face us.

French’s face filled the screen. Her eyes widened. “Griffin?”