Page 13 of Unholy Bonds

“Who the hell are you, Blondie? Why did you follow me?”

Something about the way she caught the knife and sent it sailing back to me still bothered me. She fucking wiped her prints off the knife before she threw it at me, and it was her game at that moment. And then there was her car without a license plate. She came well-prepared.

I didn’t know what she’d do with the knowledge of what she saw. The cops would pay a lot if she decided to sell my secrets. They had been hunting me for a long time; they just didn’t know it was me.

“I hope you won’t do that,” I said. I enjoyed our conversation back at the pub. She intrigued me. But if it came down to her or me, I’d choose myself.

If I had spent my night drinking with Enzo like I often did, or perhaps cooped up in my room, working on Sofia and Nikki’s murder, I’d never have encountered this asshole or the phantom woman who came with him.

“You’re the reason for my predicament, Matthew,” I grumbled, untying him from the beam and placing him on the floor.

I sawed him in half before swiftly severing his head off in one fell swoop, feeling a moment of relief. I wrapped him in plastic until he resembled a massive, mashed pink sausage, soaked in his own blood. I chucked all the pieces into the garbage bags and secured them with zip ties.

This time, I had no intention of leaving anything behind. That would be unwise. That fucking woman was the reason my art now felt like a burden I had to abandon halfway through. Killing never felt so lifeless before.

In the past, I always left something behind for the cops to find—a head stuffed with writhing black snakes for a woman who murdered her husband and three daughters with poison; a severed hand holding on to colorful balloons for a man who kidnapped a little girl using balloons and then killed her.

It was my twisted note, to let the world know that these monsters were paying the price for the monstrous sins they had committed.

Resentment threaded its fingers with mine as I packed my bag, looking around to ensure I hadn’t left anything behind. I hated this nameless, faceless woman for disrupting my routine. Now no one would know the end of Matthew, and no one would celebrate that he was gone.

I barely broke a sweat as I grabbed the garbage bags and hauled them to my car. Soon I was on my way to Enzo’s funeral home. The man who opened the door was tall and pale, and he didn’t even blink his dark blue eyes when he saw my trash bags.

“Busy night, it seems,” he commented with a click of his tongue, opening the door wider for me.

It was a good thing that his funeral home existed outside the city. Enzo owned the funeral home, the crematorium, his house, and the surrounding lands. His family had been in the business of death for generations, and it was not a bad business to be in. He was fucking rich, even though one wouldn’t know that by looking at him.

“Yes. I was just going to get a glass of whiskey,” I said, scowling. “Then I saw him.”

“You called Reah.”

I nodded with a grunt.

Before I crossed paths with Enzo, I was discarding the pieces of the bodies in the Detroit River and Lake Erie. Sometimes, the bodies floated back up as if they were tired of staying buried in secret. I never got caught, but it had started to become increasingly hard, and that was when I encountered Enzo in a nasty twist of fate.

“So, what’s his crime?” he asked curiously as he grabbed a trash bag from me.

“Being born?” I said, and he chuckled.

“Shit, the worst sin.”

“He goes by Phil, but his name’s Matthew. He was a Florida native with a long rap sheet and not the kind you’d want to be associated with.”

“Makes sense why he’s a sausage now.”

“Fucker had three rape charges against him, but the evidence was never solid enough to put him away for good. Slippery bastard. I’ve no idea how he escaped three charges with no conviction.”

Enzo and I walked toward the back of the funeral home.

“Men like him deserve to go like this,” Enzo said, opening the connecting door to the crematorium with a bow. “I preheated the oven just like you asked. The fire is waiting!”

After investigating and reporting a story of fourteen-year-old Hanna, who was raped and murdered by twenty-four-year-old Jacob Levey, who then somehow escaped through a hole in the system like the rat he was… the animal inside me woke up, hungering for more blood.

My decision was made the moment I saw the girl’s bruised face, her broken body. It was like a shock to the system. How could anyone hurt something so innocent in that way?

Being an investigative criminal journalist was my job, but hunting these monsters was slowly becoming life.

The one man I’d always wanted to hunt and kill was still out of my reach. Until I could kill my father for all the crimes he’d committed, I’d have the others.

---