Page 79 of The Butterfly Killer

“Like I promised, you don’t have to worry about him anymore.”

He came toward Marcus without abandon. There was no hesitation. As he continued to smile at killing someone, he tried to wrap his arms around Marcus.

Marcus moved away, curling into himself.

Roman backed up, a confused look on his face. “What? Are you not happy?”

Marcus gasped. He spat the taste in his mouth out onto the ground. “This is supposed to make me happy?”

He snuck another glance at Michael’s lifeless body.

His mind tried to reason with himself, tried to tell him this wasn’t Michael anymore. This was just a corpse in the ground. Michael, the man who’d almost donethosethings to him, was long gone.

First, the visceral reaction came in a tsunami wave. It was a battering ram, crushing his soul and his bones beneath it. If his lungs were working in the first place, they would have collapsed along with the rest of his body. Secondly, a long couple minutes later, this crashing wave that almost crumbled him to the ground, passed.

It was the standstill before a tornado. It was a haunting feeling of calmness that couldn’t mean anything good. It was a warning that something worse was on the horizon and Marcus didn’t know as to what it was.

The calmness settled within him. There was a clear cut from when he feared and when he felt nothing.

Well, not completely nothing. There was a creeping emotion that should have made him question his own sanity except he didn’t really care that he felt this way about the person Roman had killed.

“Did you make it hurt?”

He tilted his head upward. His words almost drifted away in the cold breeze.

Roman had heard them. His brows rose, but slowly, a sly grin replace the surprise.

He took a cautious step forward.

Marcus found it a little amusing thathewas the one Roman was being careful around.

He let Roman get close to him. He was waiting patiently, yet he was impatient for the answer.

Roman drew close, his shoulders hunched so he appeared smaller, and the stance was almost submissive in a way.

“I made it hurt so bad. He begged,” Roman said with a proud smile. In his tone, he was asking for praise.

Marcus lifted his hand and touched Roman’s cheek.

“Tell me.”

He guided Roman’s head to rest on his shoulder. Roman tucked himself into Marcus’s chest.

His hands settled on Marcus’s hips.

“I took his belt and I strung him from the beam of the shed,” Roman raggedly whispered in Marcus’s ear.

A shiver went through Marcus. Something foul and aching settled in the pit of his stomach.

“I stripped him. He shook with fear. He put up a fight, but the blow you’d given him made him easy to overpower.”

Marcus wrapped his arms around Roman’s neck.

“I started with his toes. I broke each one. He didn’t break until I moved on to snapping his ankles. He sobbed, but he wasn’t broken like I like.”

Roman slipped his hands under Marcus’s shirt. His stomach quivered beneath the touch.

“I carved him up. I can show you. Each letter of your name, baby. M-A-R-C-U-S on his chest, on his face…”

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