Page 40 of Spiteful Heart

I tried to speak, but the shock had captured me and refused to let me go. My voice was strangled out of me, unable to be used. The only thing I could seem to do was stare at him in utter disbelief—because this surely couldn’t be happening.

This was comic book villain type shit. People didn’t just return from the dead. It didn’t fucking happen.

This was a dream, wasn’t it? I would close my eyes in a few moments and wake up in bed, with my heart pounding and my skin clammy. This had to be a nightmare. I’d only ever had nightmares of my brother and the things he’d do to me… but seeing the man before me and the current state he was in, this had to be a new nightmare of mine.

He cocked his head at me, trying to straighten himself out and failing. He stood before me, towering over me only because he was on his feet and I was not. “You want to know how,” he growled out, his voice just like it had been on the tape, so low it crawled over me and elicited goosebumps on every inch of my flesh. “You want to know how I’m here right now, why I’m not dead.”

I stared at him. That’s about all I could do from my position on the floor. Stare at him and wonder what the hell was going on. He should be dead. The man before me should be dead. That’s why the possibility had never even occurred to me; this was fucking impossible.

“I should be,” he admitted. “I think I was, for a while.” He stared to say something else, but then his body was suddenly racked with a coughing fit. His top half bent over, and he brought one of his knifed wrists to his face, as if trying to cover his mouth. Old habits, I guess, since he didn’t have any hands to work with.

My thoughts were unstable and wild. The main thought in my head was:this is impossible. This is fucking impossible. Someone pinch me and wake me up from this bizarre nightmare.

Dead people didn’t come back to life. They didn’t swoop back into your life to show you they weren’t dead. Swooping. Was. Bad. Swooping was very bad in this case. Dead people should just stay dead, you know? Call me a naturalist. Call me cliché.

His coughing fit ended after a minute, and he sneered at me when he was done. “You and those assholes cut me up and threw me into the river.” He took a step closer to me. “I couldn’t swim. I could do nothing but let the water take me… and so I did. I wanted to die. Do you know what my last thoughts were? Do you want to know what I thought about before I closed my eyes and breathed in the water?”

For the first time, I was able to speak, “Not really, but I have the feeling you’re going to monologue, anyway.”

Bad guys always monologued. That was their thing, no matter what the situation was, or the genre. Fantasy, contemporary, TV shows, movies; bad guys were all alike. I guess I couldn’t blame them. When their big plans were coming to fruition, it was only natural to want to brag.

His lips curled into a smirk, and it was the furthest thing from handsome. To think, I used to think he wasn’t that bad looking. That was before the truth came out that he was working with Bianca, before I’d realized he’d gotten me to do his dirty work… before he’d taken advantage of me when I couldn’t fight him, when he’d told me some horrible news and I’d become a frozen doll, too locked up in my own head to pay attention to what he was doing to me.

Tony.

Tony had tried to be like my brother. It’s why I’d decided to take his hands from him when we’d finally found him. Or, rather, when Newton gave him to me as a gesture of good faith.

“Ah, your wit,” he muttered, the smirk falling off his face. “How I’ve missed it.” His glare hardened, and he went on, “I thought about the bitch who took my hands from me. I thought about getting my non-existent hands on her and making her regret every single fucking choice she’s ever made in her life.” He coughed once. “I imagined the screams you’d make when I got ahold of you.”

Oh, yes, I bet he’d had a lot of those thoughts, but, you know, with what he’d done, he should know I only gave him his just desserts. What he’d deserved. Tony had made many mistakes, and the biggest one had been wronging me.

“I don’t know why,” Tony whispered, narrowing those beady green eyes at me, “but he saved me. He was watching you, and he saved me.” He pointed one of his knives at me, and then at himself.

“Who?” I asked. At this point, I wanted to know who I had to thank for this shitty turn of events, who all those poor girls had to thank for their deaths and the true terror they’d felt before they’d died.

“This isn’t about him! It’s aboutme,” Tony spoke as he bared his teeth at me. “It’s aboutyou.This is about us, Lola.” He lumbered toward me, and I didn’t move. I also didn’t follow him with my stare, letting him walk behind me.

He set one of his knives against my mask, dragging it up along the cheek part. An awful sound rose, metal scraping against metal, and I fought my urge to pull myself away from him. There was no use in fighting it… not yet. I’d wait until I saw an opening, and then I’d go for it. Right now, he was still monologuing.

Tony pulled his knife off my mask, continuing to walk around my slumped figure and stopping when he once again stood in front of me. “He got one of my hands, too. Tried to reattach it, but it was too late.” He let out a bitter sound. “Too waterlogged. My body didn’t take it back.”

So someone was watching us that night, and he’d taken it upon himself to get Tony from the river, along with one of his hands, and save him. Whoever he was, he must’ve worked fast, because even when we’d tossed Tony into the river, he’d been near death, having lost so much blood already.

But Tony said he did die, for a bit, which meant he’d drowned and this guy and… what? Given him CPR and brought him back? Cauterized his wounds after failing to save his hands? Given him back-alley blood transfusions? God. No wonder why he looked and sounded like such shit—he had to have gotten infected with something. Even now, he looked like a dead man walking.

“So now I’m stuck with these.” Tony held up the knives on the metal wrist clamps. Their jagged edges were a little rusty. Definitely not stainless steel, and based on how hideous the overall design was, including the straps keeping the gauntlets fashioned to his wrists, it wasn’t Fang’s design.

And, anyway, I doubted Fang would’ve done this. I liked to think the creepy cool dude with the sharp silver fangs in his mouth liked me a little, so he would’ve told me about it.

“Though, they’re not bad,” he said, hitting their dull sides together. “They’re pretty useful when you need to hold someone down. Turns out, these babies are better than hands. One stray movement and—” He made a clinching sound. “—that’s all it takes.”

Imagining those girls’ final moments was a lot easier, now that I had a face to the monster, now that I knew this monster had knives for hands. Edward Scissorhands would never do what Tony Bologna did to all those poor girls.

I shook my head at him. “I always knew there was something I didn’t like about you. How could you do that to those girls?”

Tony laughed, though the sound was interrupted by another coughing fit. “It was easy, actually. I just pretended they were you. When I looked down at them, I imagined I was looking down at you, and then I did everything I imagined doing to you.”

He was slow to kneel before me, still out of reach, sadly. “When they screamed, I imagined it was you. When they begged me to stop, I pictured the words coming out of that pretty mouth of yours.” His gaze dropped to my mask, which currently hid my mouth. “Don’t you see, Lola? All of those girls… they were you.”

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