Page 43 of Cruel Pawn
Aegi yowled, right beside us, and his eyes darted away from me in surprise. I released the chains from his throat and threw my body up against his, knocking him onto his back on the mattress. Deja vu hit, but this wasn’t Arden. Deep down, Iknew Arden wouldn’t really kill me. Even if I wasn’t sure of his motives, he didn’t want me dead. Icarus did.
He fought the moment his back hit the mattress, and I grunted at the impact of his fist in my ribs, right where they were already bruised. When he bucked, I didn’t fight, allowing momentum to carry me up his body. My thighs landed on his upper chest, and I would havereallyliked some underwear right now. But needs must.
I was out of breath, in pain from half a dozen different places, but it was almost easy to clamp my thighs around Icarus’s throat, wrench him onto his side, and snap his neck.
I fell back onto the bed, panting hard, my throat viciously sore, my ribs throbbing.
Aegi howled at the top of her lungs, leaping onto Icarus’s chest and sinking her teeth into his shoulder. The one I didn’t stab. Ha, now he had symmetrical wounds.
“Dead,” I told her, gasping for breath, adrenaline still rife in my body. “He’s dead.”
22
Arden
“Stefan tells me you’ve gone off the deep end,” a low, rumbling voice commented behind me.
I paused in the act of pulling my victim’s intestines out through a gaping hole I made in his stomach, the innards dangling like bunting in the cold basement. “Not really.”
Kavan snorted. “Tell me that when you’re not elbow deep in organs, kid.”
I rolled my eyes. Kavan and his wife, Anna, my aunt, took me in when I was thirteen. He was as much my father as my biological dad. Who needed a treacherous scumbag of a mother when you’d had two dads? Even if one of them was dead, because of her.
“I’m completely fine,” I insisted, ripping hard until the rest of the intestines surged out of the dead guy’s body. Well, he started off alive, but I might have lost a tiny bit of control, and he died of blood loss when I stabbed him in the heart. Or maybe drivinga corkscrew into someone’s heart was enough to kill them even without blood loss. Something to look up later. I bet my opera would be interested in it, too.
“Sure,” Kavan agreed, striding across the Marshall family basement to lean against a stack of metal crates full of clothes. You’d be amazed how many changes of clothes you needed when you tortured and killed people. We each had a crate—mine was full of sweatpants, cute shirts, and hoodies. Damien, the utter psycho, had a box full of fancy suits. Who wanted to wear a designer suit after killing someone? “Is that why you cracked his ribcage open?”
Another candidate for why the guy died, ending my fun prematurely.
“He assaulted my future wife.” I draped the intestines around the dick’s neck like a scarf and reached for more organs, ripping things out carte blanche, the violence like a storm inside me.
“Do I get a wedding invite?” Kavan asked casually.
“It’ll be a small, intimate affair,” I replied, grunting when one of the bastard’s ribs resisted my efforts to snap it off.
“How small? You, the girl, and the vicar?”
I didn’t reply, adding more weight into my efforts until the rib came away. I used it to open some more gouges on the fucker’s body.
“Arden.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re off the deep end is what you are,” he sighed. “What happened? Did this woman do something?”
“Eh.” I shrugged. “She was hired to kill me, but that’s all water under the bridge. She loves me now.”
The only thing she could do that would ever harm me was leave, but I’d made sure that was impossible. Even if she tried to run, I would find her. I’d sewn Airtags into my shoes while she slept, in case she found a way out of the cottage. Plus, there wasthe tracker in the halva she ate this morning. There was nowhere my Priya could run that I wouldn’t find her.
Kavan’s silence seemed sceptical, and sure enough when I discarded my victim’s liver to the floor, he had an eyebrow raised in my direction. I rolled my eyes, but his concern bathed my insides in warmth. We looked nothing alike, Kavan tanned and broad with distinguished features and a little silver sprinkled in his dirty blond hair, me with my black hair slicked away from my face while I worked, my skin pale, features harsh, eyes the darkest brown, but I looked at him and saw my dad. I sighed, and the longer he stared at me the more my rage, my violence, my walls disintegrated.
Behind them, I was shaken and small and hurt. It wasn’t even anger I was feeling, but pain.
“Guess who sent her to kill me,” I asked with a strangled laugh. “Guess who paid my future wifea hundred thousand poundsto make sure my heart flatlined, my lungs stopped, and my eyes turned sightless and empty. Guess.”
Kavan sighed heavily, pushing off the stack of metal boxes and striding across the basement to me. Unbothered by the blood he tracked across the floor, now smeared on the bottom of his shoes. “Cricket,” he said with no small dose of anger.
I nodded jerkily, bloodied hands curling into fists. I drove one into the pulped mess of my victim just to expel this prickly, sharp emotion carving a space in my chest. It tore up my throat too, making it hurt when I swallowed.
