Page 57 of O'Mega's Revenge
I smiled at my former captor. “You try to think everything through, don’t you? Did you ever think that not everything or everyone is controllable?” My head betrayed my pity.
“I’m certain with the right leverage, everyone is controllable.”
“I should ask what you mean by that, but I really don’t want to know.” I examined my nails like I, too, was bored.
“You were so compliant when your mother was alive.”
My hand dropped as if a dead weight. “About that.”
He held up a hand, and,damn him, still held enough sway over me that it made me stop talking. “And she died because of you.”
“Nice try. She died because her husband was a piece of shit who crossed the wrong mobster while you were trying to find a way to impress folks. If it wasn’t her, it would have been some other woman.”
“On the contrary. I had grown quite fond of her. She was my favorite experiment. Those scars were beautiful, no?”
I resisted the urge to rub my own scars.
“Jackson’s right. This is boring as fuck. Bat signal any time, folks.” Missile wiggled and caused one of the lackeys holding her to watch her hips. She caught him watching and blew him a kiss.
He looked to his boss for a sign.
We all waited for the Surgeon to signal his men holding Missile to do something. Why else stage things so? Our little standoff got uncomfortably grim.
In that silence, I noticed a few things.
First was the palsy that spread down the Surgeon’s left side rendering him practically immobile. It was evident in how his fingers curled inward and didn’t grip the handles of his chair. It showed, too, in the frail lines of pain near his eyes. And in the fragile, sagging skin under his chin. This was a man on his way out. I might not have succeeded in sending him to Hell five years ago, but I certainly set the mechanics of death into motion. I took a step forward and knelt in front of him.
“You wanted me to be like you, didn’t you?”
I gripped his legs to feel the muscles that were no longer strong. The right side out sized the left by a fraction. He didn’t flinch as I dug my thumbnails into the tender skin next to the knee. In my mind’s eye, I remembered each cut I gave him. My first knife stroke caught him in the back, missing the kidney and getting hung up on the spinal cord. It had been difficult to pull the blade out. I’d made a mess of it, twisting and turning the blade to loosen it.
This close, I could see the scar where I’d cut his throat. Too far forward to kill. A rookie mistake. One I should have avoided.
Plunging the knife into his heart should have killed him. But I doubt he had such an organ. I’d been young, filled with rage, scared shitless, and stupid. The death I’d longed to give him wasn’t fast. Instead, I got something sweeter. Years of tortured agony that weren’t yet complete. I smiled.
“On the contrary, I made you into what you are. So beautiful and so ruthless. I can see it in your eyes that you are just like me.”
“I’ll give you that. You definitely put that in there.” I stood, making the goons relax a fraction.
“I would have made you into a queen. Anything, anyone you desired, it could have been yours.” He snapped his fingers soundlessly to illustrate how simple it would have been.
“Anyone?”
“Anyone. Even a future king if you wanted it. I can still make it so.”
I took a step back and motioned to Jackson to regroup. “I’ll start with Margaret Wheade.”
His brows furrowed. “Who is that?”
“The woman you killed two days ago,” Missile sputtered.
“Old lady, on the farm. Bit the bullet, literally.” Jackson grabbed another tiny bite of food and a bottle from the table.
The Surgeon looked at the henchmen. “Is this true?”
“Don’t pretend like you don’t know. Your goons came down to Maryland and shot up the place.” Missile’s furious hiss turned deadly. Jackson kept rummaging in the food, and Fell stepped behind me.
Only Nonno remained still. His attention was not on the game but on the star players. There was more than one in the room. His smile widened. “Looks like you can’t control your own house.”
