Page 124 of The Beautiful Dead

Remi moved beside me, silent as a shadow, his grip tight on the knife he never went without. The blade still bore Ghost’s blood.

A shame it wasn’t more.

Federico wasn’t sloppy. He wouldn’t have left Elio unguarded.

The first man never saw me coming. I wrapped my arm around his throat, yanking him back into the darkness. The crack of his snapping spine was lost to the wind.

Remi handled the next one, slipping through the night like a wraith. One second the guard was standing there, gun raised, the next his throat blossomed open like a second mouth.

The third saw what was happening and tried to run.

Remi tackled him to the ground. I crouched beside him, pressing a boot to his throat, watching with mild amusement as he choked on his breath.

“Where’s the boy?” I asked, voice eerily soft.

The man gargled something unintelligible. His answer didn’t matter. I pressed harder. Bones cracked. His body twitched, then stilled.

Remi wiped his blade clean on the dead man’s shirt and grinned. “Shall we?”

The door to the house groaned on its hinges, the inside suffocating with the stench of mildew and something darker.

Blood. We followed it like the hounds of hell. Past the crumbling wallpaper, past the rooms filled with broken furniture and discarded remnants of lives long forgotten.

Until we reached the entrance to the bunker. The door was padlocked. Remi pulled his bag off his shoulders and handed me some bolt cutters. They sliced through the metal like it was butter, and within seconds, it clattered on the ground.

I ripped it clean off the hinges. The stench hit us first.

Rot. Sweat. Terror.

A single dim bulb swung from the ceiling, casting jagged shadows across the room as a moth fluttered around it. The only sound was the slow drip of water seeping from the cracked, tiled walls.

Elio hung motionless from the rafters, a lifeless marionette strung up by men who had no business playing god. The bag over his head sagged slightly, his body shivering against the damp.

Not dead.

But not far from it.

Remi stepped forward first, blade already in his grip, flicking the edge of the bag up with the tip. The moment the air hit Elio’s face, he flinched.

“He’s alive,” Remi muttered, though there was something almost like disappointment in his tone. He grinned at me over his shoulder. “For now.”

Elio made a noise—half-strangled, half-panicked. He couldn’t see us, not yet, but he could feel us. The shift in the air, the cold presence of something worse than whatever had left him strung up like a slab of meat.

I grabbed him by the shoulders and hauled him up, cutting the rope with a flick of my knife. His body crashed to the floor in a heap, limbs twitching as blood rushed back into them.

He coughed, a wet, painful sound, and gasped for breath. Then he stilled. Listening. He still didn’t know who we were.

Remi crouched beside him, grabbed the edge of the bag, and yanked it off.

Elio blinked rapidly, his pupils blown wide, confusion painted across his pale, sweat-slick face.

Then he saw me. His breath hitched. “Who…?” His voice was hoarse, barely more than a whisper.

I tilted my head. “You know who I am.”

Recognition flashed behind the exhaustion in his eyes. “Domino.”

“Good. Saves me an introduction.”

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