Page 209 of Beautiful Venom

“It’s not as it seems?—”

“Yes or no.” She speaks over me. Again.

My jaw tightens. “Yes.”

She laughs then, the sound piercing my ears as sobs echo through it.

I can’t help but remember the first time I saw her laugh.

That day, from the top of the roof.

“God, you should be proud of yourself. You played me so well, Kane. I hope I entertained you enough.”

“You were never a subject of my entertainment,” I snap, then rein it in and breathe calmly. “Let’s meet. We need to talk.”

“So you can finish the job with Violet?”

“I won’t harm her.”

“But Jude will. Like he did a few months ago.”

“He didn’t?—”

“Stop lying to me!”

Fuck. If she talks over me one more time, I’m grabbing her throat through the goddamn phone.

Why the fuck isn’t she letting me speak?

“Just so you know, if Jude comes near her, I’ll kill him.” All her sniffles disappear and she sounds stone cold, far away. “Don’t let me see your face again or I’ll kill you too.”

The phone goes dead.

36

KANE

SIX MONTHS AGO

“Is this the place?”

Jude’s voice carries on the wind, doing nothing to interrupt the fucking chaos below.

“Unfortunately, yes,” I say.

Most of the streetlight bulbs are burned out—only three work across the entire street. But as his dark eyes scan the area below, carefully observing the sketchy-as-fuck neighborhood, he looks like a grim reaper with a thirst for blood.

The place reeks of so much poverty, we had to leave Jude’s motorcycle and my car at the gas station to avoid standing out and rented a Hyundai to reach this fuckery of human society.

The stench of piss, vomit, and rotting trash fills the air, thickening and swirling in the night’s stale humidity.

From up here, we have a perfect view of the grimy streets, of the skittering shadows moving like ghosts beneath flickering streetlights.

Small-time dealers lean against the walls, barely hidden in the dark, slipping bags of powder or pills into greedy hands, their eyes darting around, their rancid breath polluting the air. The faint murmur of exchanges is punctuated by the occasional shout or cough from the alleyways or the paper-thin walls. Now and again, there’s the dull clatter of a bottle rolling on the cracked pavement.

A couple of homeless people huddle in a corner, too far gone to care about the fights brewing around them. Their rags hang off them like dead skin, their hollowed-out faces lost in the shadow of a world that doesn’t give a damn about them.

There’s the breaking of glass bottles and a muttered quarrel rising between two small-time gangsters under the glow of a busted neon sign, their voices low but threatening, tension vibrating in the air.

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