Page 146 of Dance of Ruin

Or at least, destroyer oftheirworlds.

Adam Chapman and Steven Haines. Naomi knew them as Gus and Seb.

The two pieces of shit who put their fucking hands on her. Who lured her in with the promise of a photoshoot, then drugged her and sexually assaulted her while she was blacked out.

Put their fingers in her. Touched her wherever they wanted. Jerked their pathetic, tiny, rapist dicks while looking at her and came on her body.Filmedher at her most vulnerable moment.

Well, now they’re in a hell they haven’t evenbegunto comprehend.

I found them the fun way:huntingthem. I watched the video again until I could pause it and zoom in on the window in the background. A window that looked out at a café, enough of the signage visible that I was able to find it in the West Village, figure out the angle, and then determine the building where Naomi was assaulted.

From there, a very prickly but ultimately helpful woman named Celine Rios, a ceramics artist who lives and works in the building, told me about the photographer and his assistant who’d sublet the top floor.

“Always in and out at late hours,” she’d complained. “Bringing in all sorts of sketchy types. Not artists. Dangerous-looking men.”

The top floor studio they’d been subletting still had signs of carnage when I saw it. The owners had already started fixing it up, but there were bullet holes in the walls, and clear bloodstains in the tile grout in the kitchen.

Celine didn’t know what’d happened up there, but I do.

Leonard tried to start shit with the Obsidian Syndicate and sent people to the studio space in the West Village. There was a fight, and Mario, that contact who got me the fucking video, grabbed the thumb drive and got the fuck out in the middle of it.

There was still a square of plywood over the busted back window that leads to the fire escape, where Mario made his break for it.

After that, the hunt was easy. Both of the fuckers had gone to the café across the street a few hundred times, and most of the staff knew them.

Not as Gus and Seb. As theirreal names.

And here we are.

Steven, AKA Seb, sounds like he’s trying to speak, but it just comes out as a wet cough. Blood drips down his chin from his ruined mouth, his jaw slack.

Probably broken, come to think of it.

I walk toward him slowly, my boots loud in the quiet stillness.

“Something you’d like to share with the group?” I ask, voice low. “Because now’s your chance, while I’m giving my arms a rest.”

He flinches, even though I haven’t made a move to hit him again.

“W-we didn’t pick her,” he mumbles, blood still leaking from his swollen lips and trickling down his fucked-up face. “Th-they did.”

“Who’sthey?” I snarl, grabbing a hank of his hair and jerking his head back.

He groans in pain, his eyes—excuse me,eye; he’s only got the one, now—rolling around aimlessly in its socket as the chains he’s hanging from rattle.

“I don’t know…” he chokes wetly. “No one high up uses names. We were just told that she was the daughter of a congressman. We didn’t ask questions.”

Adam—Gus—wheezes beside him. “I-I know…” he croaks.

“I’m sorry, what?” I whirl and punch him in the dick, just because.

I should mention they’re both completely naked and their chains are suspended from old meat hooks. I’m willing to bet Naomi isn’t the first girl they’ve raped or assaulted together.

…So this retribution is alongtime in the making.

“If you know, stop fucking crying like a little bitch andtell me,” I snarl, punching him in the balls again and making him choke on the blood dripping out of his fucking mouth.

“Omar…” Adam gurgles wetly. “His name is Omar.”

---