I look away.
Focus.
As I approach, I notice Dragon’s already been fucking with Putnam. Putnam has the word RAPIST PIG cut into his forehead in impressively neat handwriting. Dragon is a master with a blade.
That’s for what you did to my girls, asshole.
I scan the room and find all my guys watching and waiting, some in the shadowed parts of the slaughterhouse and others in plain view. They want this every bit as much as I do. It makes me wonder what the fuck Church will be like without spending half the meeting contemplating revenge. I can’t even begin to imagine a life of peace.
So I don’t.
My life is war. It has been for a decade. A war I will win in the end.
Gibson hums something that sounds oddly like “Don’t Fear the Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult. It’s an appropriate song. Genworth and Putnam don’t need to fear the reaper. They need to fear me.
Putnam garbles out something, but from behind the strip of duct tape, it makes no sense.
“What’s that?” I ask as I bypass him to walk over to Hadley. She doesn’t flinch when I reach out and stroke her hair. I flit my gaze over to Genworth. His eyes blaze with fury, zeroed in on the way I touch her. No father wants to watch his daughter get defiled. “You know,” I say to Genworth. “I’ve spent a long time contemplating this moment. Killing the people responsible for taking my family away from me. I’ve imagined everything from a quick slit of your throat to more creative ways for you to die like carving out each of your organs one by one and feeding them to you until you fucking choke to death on them.”
“Gross,” Hadley mutters.
“I thought about making Dragon wreck your asshole, Putnam,” I growl, pinning him with a hard glare. “This isn’t business.” I mimic his words from the past. “This is personal.”
Dragon makes a salacious gesture of grabbing his dick through his dark jeans. Someone snorts out a laugh from the shadows. Probably Katana.
Putnam doesn’t seem fearful of the prospect of having Dragon sodomize him, just pissed. Well, fuck him. This is my show and he has to stay until the end. He’ll endure whatever fucked up plans I have for him.
“Do you miss him?” I ask Hadley as I point at Putnam.
She turns her head up to look at me, hate shining in her eyes. “No.”
“But you fucked your dead boyfriend’s daddy, didn’t you, Pageant Girl?”
Hadley shakes her head, tears leaking down her pretty, angelic face. A tide of anger begins rising around me, threatening to drown me at any moment.
“Are you lying, sweet girl?”
“I never fucked him.” Her bottom lip wobbles. “He fucked me.”
Putnam howls through the tape when Dragon viciously cuts his ear off. With a roar, he heaves it across the room toward the fire.
“You mean to tell me the rapist pig also raped you?” My words are deceptively calm as I cradle her soft face with my hand that shakes with rage.
“I didn’t want it, Koyn. I was scared.”
Another scream. Another ear.
Good Dragon.
I run my thumb along her wet, tearstained cheek and then bring it to my tongue so I can taste her salty sadness. “What I want to know is why your daddy would allow Putnam to defile you. Was this a part of the trade? Was this business or personal?” I arch a brow at Genworth, who glowers at me. “Did Daddy even know his precious princess was getting tainted by a sick sonofabitch?”
“I don’t know,” she whimpers.
The hateful look on Genworth’s face tells me he knew. Probably fucking okayed it. I’ll deal with him soon. For now, I want to make Putnam suffer.
Dropping my hand from Hadley’s face, I stalk over to Putnam. Dragon offers me his knife, but I use my own. Big. Gnarly. Lethal. I don’t want to kill him…yet. I want him to bleed. I want him to hurt. I want him to fucking cry.
“Hold him,” I bark out. “He’s going to squirm.”
I rip off the tape on his mouth and stick it to the side of the chair before unsheathing my knife. Putnam starts cursing up a storm.
“You can torture me to death, but I will always be the man who fucked your wife in the ass before I stabbed her to death. I’ll always be in your nightmares as you relive me raping your daughter’s tight, virgin, teenage cunt—ahhhh!”
His words are cut off and followed by a scream the moment I grab his scraggly beard and start sawing. I dig the blade into the side of his face near where his ear once was, just deep enough to carve off his skin, taking the beard with it. I slice along his jaw bone, the blade scraping against the hardness of it. As I pull on his beard, lifting the skin, I’m able to slice off his skin, only leaving the meaty muscle in his cheeks visible. Blood gushes all over the fucking place and it’s beautiful. Vengeance is a beautiful color. His screams go silent as he passes out from the pain. I continue my sawing all the way to the other ear hole. Once I have his slab of skin and beard in my grip, I pry open his mouth and shove the messy shit inside. This wakes him up, making him gag and groan. I grab the strip of tape, but my hands are too bloody to make use of it.
“Tape,” I hiss out, nodding at Payne, who hovers nearby, violence gleaming in his eyes. He rips away a long strip of the duct tape and then circles around Putnam’s head, sealing up all the bleeding face wounds and keeping all that skin and hair and shit in his mouth. Dude looks like something straight from a horror movie.
I can hear Hadley gagging from behind me, but I pay her no mind. My focus is on Putnam. On what he did to Ellie and Blaire…and Hadley. He’s a monster. One who needs eliminating.
“I want him to suffer,” I bellow, my words echoing off the walls around us. “I want him to fucking suffer.”
Dragon smirks at me. “I’m not putting my dick inside this piece of shit.”
We share a dark look. Wordlessly, he begins cutting through the tape that holds Putnam to the chair. He’s too weak to fight Dragon. Dragon manhandles Putnam over the side of the chair and starts yanking down his pants. I walk over to where I can see him and squat right in front of him. Putnam’s eyes are wide and pain filled. Stark fear shines in them. It’s so reminiscent of the look on my daughter’s face that I want to scream in victory.
But the war hasn’t been won yet.
“Make him hurt, Dragon.”
Dragon nods and then swiftly swings his fist. The same fist holding his knife. Right into Putnam’s worthless ass. Literally. Putnam squeals like a pig at slaughter—fitting as we’re in the old slaughterhouse. Dragon withdraws the knife and a splat of blood hits the dirty floor. Then, he stabs him again. Right in the fucking asshole. I take pleasure in the way Putnam’s face—what little skin remains—pales and his eyes roll back. He’ll be dead soon. I wish I could make it last longer.
“I think he’s had enough,” I tell Dragon. “I think he’s going into shock. He’s shivering. Put him by the fire to warm him up.”
Dragon’s face curls into a sinister smile. “You got it, Prez.”
He shoves Putnam back into the chair and Payne assists in taping him back down. Blood drips down in rivers from the chair that’s no doubt leaking from his ass. Dragon stuck him like the pig Putnam is. Together, Dragon and Payne carry the chair over to the fire. They sit him halfway in the fire. It’ll take him a bit to burn.