Page 67 of Razors & Ruin

“Currer fucking Brook!”

I step back and raise my arm, swinging it down with all my strength. The razor slams deep into the Beadle’s neck, sending blood spraying everywhere, and I let it go, leaving it stuck there.

The dying man clutches at his throat, trying to pull the blade free, and I let him do it before snatching it from his hand and stabbing him again and again.

He flounders and grasps but cannot get out of the chair, and it’s only when his pathetic efforts begin to slow that I grab his hair and hold him aloft, unsheathing a clean blade with my other hand.

“Lower background?” I hiss. “Fuck yourself, you cynical, conniving son of a whore. I will go to Sommers and find out what really happened to my girl, and as for you—men you wouldn’t wipe your feet on will shit you out before this day is through.”

He struggles to focus. “You won’t,” he mumbles. “She’s not?—”

I slit his throat slowly from ear to ear, a big ol’ smile a mile wide. There’s another explosion of blood, but it’s the last few good pumps he has, and I drop him back in the chair, exhilarated.

I will make that decrepit cleric tell me the truth about my daughter’s fate, even if it’s terrible.

And then I will take him apart.

34

Nellie

The yelling is loud overhead, and names I never want to hear again as long as I live vibrate through the very walls like hexes.

Johanna. Currer Bell.

Names I did everything I could to banish. Names that should never have returned to us.

The trap opens suddenly and loudly, dispatching the Beadle onto the bakehouse floor, and I scream. The bastard isn’t even dead, his beseeching eyes rolling as he flails his arms at me.

I snatch a mallet from the table and run at him, bringing it down on his temple. It caves in, fragile as porcelain, brains smooshing into the tool as I swing it again and again.

“Fucking die andburn, you meddling cunt!” I drop the mallet, exhausted, sweat pouring down my back. “What have you done?”

“Are you asking me or him?”

I see Sweeney standing there, lit in dancing shades of red and orange, blade in hand.

He’s drenched in blood from head to toe, not an inch of him clean, and I watch as he crosses the floor to the back door, locking it before pocketing the key.

Before I can run, he’s coming at me, closing me down.

This is it.

The Beadle must have told him something, something that could not be unheard, and the mistrustful thoughts he locked behind the doors of his mind are now kicking them off the hinges.

His arm lashes like a whip, snatching my throat, and he walks me backward. My feet skitter on the stone as I thump into the wall hard enough to make it rain brick dust.

His hands are always so fast, too fast to resist. It was not that long ago that he walked back into my life and did precisely this right before he took my virginity.

It feels all too different now—rage instead of lust—but his fingers still caress me, even as he speaks harshly into the shell of my ear.

“I know the baby Johanna didn’t die in a fire. She went to the priest, Sommers, but something else happened to her, something terrible.”

“Whathappened to her, Sweeney?” I ask, my voice barely audible over the roar of the oven. “Where is she?”

“I am going to the parsonage to find out once and for all.” He tightens his grip, his body pinning me. “You wrote the letter, didn’t you? Tell me the truth.”

I swore to myself I wouldn’t lie if he asked outright. This moment—this one, right now—was inevitable.

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