Page 41 of Spiteful Heart

The weight of each of those deaths had pushed me down lately, but hearing Tony say it aloud made it all worse. It was a good thing I was already on the ground, otherwise I might’ve let myself sink to the floor in desperation.

I was a monster, but Tony? Before me, he’d been the typical man, the kind of guy I’d go home with and kill in my Night Slayer days. He was a man who thought he could never do anything wrong, that he was owed sex. Hell, he probably didn’t think he did anything wrong in that office, after he’d told me that Bianca’s men had shot up the Dollhouse, where Roman and Carter’s girl worked. He would probably say that I’d consented to him just because I didn’t fight him on it.

Fuck. Some men really deserved a knife in the throat. Some men really did deserve to have their balls and their cocks sawed off so they could never be used again.

I’d known it before, but this served only as another reminder: men like Aiden weren’t the unusual. No. If anything, they were the norm. They were your brothers and your fathers and your uncles. They were your cousins and your neighbors and your bosses. They were everywhere, and they got away with their shit every single fucking day—and I was so tired of it.

Tired of it. Tired of them. Tired of the thought that their dicks were the supreme.

Society would call me a monster, but I would call myself a solution.

“Everything I did, I did for you,” Tony was busy saying. “All those girls, all those bodies… they were for you. Minus the one in the Gilded Rose. That one was for Newton.” His facial features darkened as he lowered his gaze to the floor, shadows covering his face. “After I’m done with you, I’m going to tie him up and make him watch me kill everyone he cares about. Then I’m going to catch Sylvester and Maddox and Viper—” He shrugged, once again staring at me. “—might as well get Big Mike, too.”

I shook my head once. “You’re insane, Tony. If you think you can do all that, you’re more insane than you look—and you should look at yourself in the mirror, because you look fucking crazy.”

He ignored me. “A part of me wants to keep you alive for it, make you watch, make you scream for me like I’ve dreamed about… but the other part of me just wants to let vengeance take over and kill you here and now.”

I’d wanted to die for so many years. Although my goal was always the electric chair or the lethal injection, any way out of this world would’ve been fine with me. If there was a gal with a death wish, she was me.

But now… so much had changed. So much was continuing to change, and I wanted to be around to see it. I didn’t want to leave my men. I didn’t want to die anymore. This life that I had was mine, and if Tony thought I would surrender to him and let him steal it from me, he couldn’t have been more wrong.

“Decisions, decisions,” I whispered, my voice muffled a little behind my mask. “Whatever will you do?” I moved my hands, resting them in my lap. My fingers clenched into fists, and I stared at Tony, unblinking.

Tony didn’t say anything to that. He only answered my stare with a glare of his own. Given that he looked half dead, like a comic book villain come to life, his stare was more evil than mine.

“It must be so hard being you,” I told him. “Even before all of this, you must’ve woken up each day and dreaded facing the world. Of course, you did. Why wouldn’t you, given the fact that your wee-wee is the size of my pinky?”

That got him to act, just as I knew it would. He let out a pissed off sound, and he was on me the next moment, pinning my body down by placing a knee just below my chest. My leather jacket fell open, most of my top half exposed to him. He pressed all his weight down upon me, my hands beneath his shin so I couldn’t stop him.

“Don’t you ever stop fucking talking?” Tony growled out, taking one of his knifed hands to my chin, below my mask. The tip of the blade dug into my skin, and with a quick movement, he hooked the sharp side of the knife under my mask and tore it off my face, leaving a trail of blood in its wake as the metal dragged over my chin and my cheek.

There was pain, I supposed, but I’d stopped feeling pain a long time ago.

The blade didn’t go deep on my face, but I could feel the blood pooling out of the cut seconds after. Tony smirked above me, baring his teeth in a hideous display of superiority. “No, you don’t. That’s the thing about you, Lola: you don’t know when to fucking stop. You always go harder than you should. I never understood why you were like that, but now I do.” He brought his right blade against my cheek, near the current cut, laying it flat against my skin. A threat that he’d cut me up more.

He could do it. I wouldn’t care. Cut me up. Scratch me up.

“I could ask you the same question,” I said, though I let out a groan when he put more pressure on the knee just below my tits. “But since you’re the bad guy now, I guess that gives you a pass for monologuing.”

Tony shook his head. “You always have to get the last word in, don’t you?”

I nodded. “I do, although with you… probably not.” I paused, taking in his sickly features, the yellow hue of his skin, the way his body was thinner than it had been before, back before his traitorous tendencies came to light. He might have knives for hands now, but he wasn’t strong. I could take him easily if I wasn’t restrained. “If you think I’m going to beg you to stop, if you think you’re going to make me scream, you should probably readjust your goals here.”

He bared his teeth like an animal, growling out his response as he moved his other knife to my neck, putting just enough pressure behind it to be uncomfortable. With one knee on my upper stomach and the other beside me, with one knife against my cheek and the other pressed against my neck, he had me exactly where he wanted me—and he looked like he wanted to kill me, an animal that had finally captured its prey.

And he could. He could very well kill me right now and end it all. My journey, my life, my redemption in the arms of my men. Not that I thought about redeeming myself, but… it was so nice to be loved. It really was. It was something I’d never really had before, not growing up, not while out on my own, not until I killed a Luciano son.

Tony and I were locked in a staring contest, neither one of us backing down or blinking. Hatred resided in his stare. I didn’t know what I looked like, and I didn’t care. The only thing I wanted right now was for Tony to not have his heart’s desire.

If he wanted me to scream, I wouldn’t. If he wanted me to beg, I sure as shit wouldn’t. If he wanted me to be filled with terror as he once again reminded me about how big of a man he was, he could fuck right off.

“Well, Tony?” I asked, smiling at him. My on-brand crazy smile that said in no uncertain terms:bringit. “Are we going to end this now, or what? Don’t you know it’s rude to keep a girl waiting?”

He frowned at me, baring his teeth, trying to prove he was some alpha male who could instill fear—but that’s the thing. He wasn’t. Not in me, anyway. He might’ve made all those girls fearful before he’d killed them, but regardless of how much he’d imagined it, I was not those girls and they were not me.

It was funny; I could see it change, the moment he realized he wasn’t going to get what he wanted from me, that I wasn’t going to scream or beg him to stop. It was a subtle change in his demeanor, a realization dawning behind the sneer, but I noticed it.

I’d played his game before, but I wasn’t going to play it now.

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