I strike without warning, my face concrete, my eyes barely flickering to my target.
The man yells out in pain as the knife slices through his cheek.
It’s not a deep cut.
The first ones never are.
But it bleeds like a fucking bitch.
I crouch in front of the man, one hand on his knee, the other holding the knife between my two fingers, wiggling it. He tries to sit back, tries to move away, but I just lean in closer.
“I don’t think we’ve met,” I tell him quietly.
My heart starts pounding. That buzz is back in my ears. As soon as the man locks eyes with me, I have to suppress the evil shudder that wants to course through me.
“Fuck you,” the man whispers hoarsely.
I smile at him, and he shifts back in his chair. He’s already been through a lot—his face is broken and bruised and the way his left arm moves, it looks like it’s come out of the socket. His feet are bare, and he’s missing several toes. The skin has been cauterized, ensuring he didn’t bleed out.
They tried their best…but it wasn’t good enough.
And I’m salivating at the thought that now he’smine.
“I’ll give you one chance,hijueputa,” I murmur, lifting the knife and holding it less than an inch from the guy’s open eye. The other one is glued shut with blood, swollen and bruised from a fist.
The man presses his head back, but I follow. The tip of the knife doesn’t tremble, doesn’t shake.
He focuses on the metal, then on my face. His lips move slowly as he mouths, “Fuck you,” again.
My smile turns into a grin. “That’s fuck you,El Saljave,” I correct.
What little blood is left in the man’s face drains away. His throat starts bobbing up and down, his lips trembling. “No,” he whispers, spittle dotting his lips. “Please—”
“Tell me who owns your pathetic life,” I drawl.
The man licks his lips. Moisture collects in his eye, trickling down his face and over the weeping cut I made just under his cheekbone. “P-Please, El Saljave,” he whispers, the words breaking up in terror. “I cannot…I cannot.”
His accent is coming through now. Maybe he’d suppressed it before. Mexican, but that doesn’t mean anything. He could be working for anyone. I need a name, and he knows it.
“It takes a long time for someone to bleed out from little cuts like this.” I press the tip of the knife into the slice on his cheek.
The man squirms, now even his bruised eye leaking tears.
He could hold the answer to everything. And that’s all I can think about when I’m staring at him. That, and how he had Nyx in his sights, ready to end her.
“Tell me who you work for.”
But he refuses to speak, even when I start slicing his face off in little, tiny ribbons.
Chapter Nine
Savage
We’re heading back inside the house when Sergio stops beside the pool. His entire entourage comes to a halt—me and Vito included.
“Where is she?” he asks.
My skin goes cold even as I let out a casual, “Who?”