Page 16 of Cruel Games

I don’t even think it really registered to him even as the bat lined up horizontally across his face and connected with a sickeningcrunch,blood streaming from his broken nose as he fell like a fucking log, his fancy dinner jacket soaking up the dirty rainwater on the cracked concrete where he lay. He writhed in pain, like the bitch he was, blood everywhere now, screaming through his snot and tears as I towered over him, all acts of inebriation dropped.

There was no point in continuing the charade now.

“Who are you?” he whined, his cupped hands giving his voice an almost comical tone to compliment the nasally way air whistled through the broken cartilage. “Why?”

I had a moment of hesitation, a memory from long ago surfacing at the most inopportune moment to remind me why I was here, why I stood above a man in the alley who was known for raping and selling women when he was done with them, a bat in my hand and murder in my heart. Remembered my father’s pleas as the Neon Dogs themselves beat him to a pulp, maybe with this very same bat I now held in my grasp. Stealing his life away.

This man and my father were not alike. This man deserved what was coming to him, and then some. He wasnothinglike my father. He was the scum of the earth, and I was doing the world a favor getting rid of him. Women everywhere could breathe a little easier. There were a million more of him out there, sure, but one less sleazeball piece of shit was a good thing.

Right?

“Men like you are all the same,” I snarled as I brought the bat down on his kneecap, shattering it with a solidcrackas hiswhining turned to screams. And we couldn’t have people overhearing him, now, could we? So I slipped a handkerchief out of my bra and shoved it down his throat, muffling the annoying wails enough to keep going. “Shutup,you asshole! Ugh! I can’t believe you think you’ve got the right to protest this treatment when you were literally sneaking roofies in my drinks all night.”

His eyes blew wide at my accusation, nostrils flaring–or what little movement they could form, considering his nose was absolutelywrecked.I’d imagine even that little twitch hurt like a sonofabitch, too, if his watering eyes were any indication.

“That’s right, buddy. You didn’t think I’d notice the way my drinks were fizzing? How you always found a reason to be too close, how your arms moved around me instead of over me like any normal guy would? How you always watched me take a drink to make sure I was swallowing the liquid poison in my hands?” The bat swung again, almost like it was an extension of my rage, and I smirked at the satisfying sound of his bones shattering from the force. “Yeah, fucking cry, you bitch. Men like you are no men at all.”

Over and over, I took that bat to him, bringing it down on any part of him I could reach—his stomach, his legs, his chest, his back, as he writhed on the ground and tucked his arms over his head in a feeble attempt to protect what was left of his disgusting face.

If he was pleading for mercy between blows, I couldn’t hear it. Couldn’t make out the words as snot and blood mingled on his face with the constant stream of tears, his teeth no doubt locked down on my handkerchief as the pile of broken bones tried valiantly to remain conscious.

It was a losing effort, though.

He wouldn’t stay awake to see the final blow coming for him. They never did.

Men were such pussies when it came to pain tolerance these days. They say balls are sensitive. Pussies take a pounding andturn around for more. Must be why women had longer lifespans. If men had to have children or menstrual cramps, they’d probably yeet themselves off the nearest bridge.

The bat swung back again, landing on the side of his shoulder, and this time he managed to scream around the cloth in his mouth, crawling to his shattered knees in a feeble plea for his life to be spared.

I wasn’t in the mood to give him what he wanted. I had a job to do, and I didn’t have all night.

With a cackling scream of my own, I wound my arms back and spun around, pivoting my hip as my whole body weight connected with this man’s skull at the edge of his temple. I heard acrack,but it didn’t look like the bat had splintered, so my guess would be his head caved in.

His body crumpled to the ground in a mess of tangled and limp limbs, and I nudged him over with the toe of my heels, rolling him onto his back to reveal that part of his head was now concave, resembling a crater on the moon’s surface.

Sweet fucking justice.

The actual act of killing was far too easy for me. It didn’t do anything to me the first time I killed a man. Or the second. Or the third. Which, in hindsight, should have sent me to therapy, maybe an actual asylum, in a padded cell in some mental hospital somewhere. But instead, all it did was assure me I was the right person for the job of avenging my father.

It drove me to do it more. Embrace the darkness inside myself.

And then, when I realized how cathartic it was to snuff out the life of a human who didn’t deserve to breathe in the same air as the rest of us, I decided there was no going back.

What would I do when I finally achieved what I’d set out to do? When I took the lives of the men who’d become my mortal enemies, the Neon Dogs, the assholes who’d shattered the life of an innocent girl without batting an eyelash. Could I just returnto my normal life like I hadn’t let this rage, this determination, turn me into a killer?

The answer wasn’t one I was ready for, so I shoved the thought to the back of my mind and focused instead on the task at hand: moving a dead body.

If anyoneever tells you that moving a dead body is easy, then look them in the face and call them a liar. It isnoteasy. It is the hardest thing you will ever do, especially while in stiletto heels, a miniskirt, and crop top in fourty degree weather. And now I was adding one more thing to my growing checklist of things I could do to improve my efficiency.

Wear fucking boots, or stash a change of clothes.

Or, conversely, I could just kill these fuckers in the places I needed to leave them to complete the contract. Or wherever I expected the Neon Dogs to find them.

And that was another thing—completing the hits only meant the Dogs were making money off the back of my hard work. Sure, the act of ridding the world of these creeps was like charity work, but I was only willing to donate so much of my time without benefit. I’d have to make a move, and soon, or my patience would run too thin, and then I might make a mistake I couldn’t afford. I might slip up and do something rash and unexpected that meant the end of me.

I wasn’t ready to die. So, keeping my head was important. Very much so.

If I didn’t have much of a tether to sanity when this was all said and done, well, I’d cross that bridge when I got to it. Until then, the only focus was giving the Dogs back what they’d given my father, in spades.

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