Page 66 of Obliterated
Max sighs up at the ceiling like the room owes him an answer. “Why do they always have to be so fucking loyal to the wrong person?”
And then, because mercy is a currency he doesn’t trade in, he stabs the dagger straight into the man’s leg. The blade slides home with an awful wet hush; the guy’s scream rips out raw and immediate.
I flinch, take a step back as the cry breaks into something like sobbing.
“What. Does. She. Do. With. The. Machine.” Max says it slowly, each word a measured blow.
“I don’t know!” he finally screams, voice gone ragged. “She makes tags for us. For people who don’t come through the docks, we arrived up north—”
“Up north?” Max presses, voice low and dangerous.
“The… the research facility. I don’t know what she’s doing up there, but she needs people.Theyneed people,” he stammers, blinking tears into the blood on his lips.
“They?” Max’s eyes narrow, slow and cold.
“No, don’t—I don’t, I don’t know who—” the man babbles, panic and pain tangling together, words spilling over each other until they’re nothing but wet noise.
Max pushes the handle deeper. An ungodly scream tears out of him, higher now, raw and animal, slashing the air.
It’s one thing to kill a man in your defense; it’s something else to torture one on purpose.
But I can’t look away.
My stomach flips and every decent bone in mewantsto step in, but some stupid, darker part of me leans closer, intrigued by this.
“I don’t know!”he screams now, voice shredding. “I don’t—I swear I don’t—get it out,get it out!”
“As you wish.” Max pulls the dagger free with slow, deliberate patience. The man hunches forward, gasping, blood bright on his lips.
For one breath, Max takes his handiwork in, and then finally looks up at me.
His eyes find mine and there’s a thing in them I know too well: that quiet satisfaction of someone who’s practiced his cruelty until it’s clean and precise. He doesn’t ask me to condone it; he just lets me see him, all of him, lets me see how right it feels to him.
And fuck how depraved I must be, because it doesn’t scare me, it doesn’t chase me away.
If anything, it only makes me fall harder.
“Guess we have a little field trip ahead of us,” he says, low and casual, like he’s ordering a drink at the bar.
Then he slices his throat.
The motion is quick and terrible. A neat, final cut. The sound is worse than the scream, a ragged hush that turns into a gurgle and then nothing. The man’s hands twitch once, twice. His eyes go wide and stupid and then they slack.
I don’t move. Watch how Max wipes the blade on the man’s sleeve with a single, practiced swipe and comes over to me, tucks the knife back to my hip as if he’s just finished tying his boot. Watch how, as he finds my eyes again and swallows, his nerves chase the demons away.
As if he fears how I’ll react.
And in that wet, perfect silence, I realize the monster has stepped out of Max. He’s back in his own skin after showing me every jagged piece, every ugly scar, every shadow and urge he keeps tucked away.
But I don’t fear him. I fucking don’t. I think I only love him more.
Chapter sixteen
Max
“Doyoureallythinkwe can find something up north? In the research facility? Someone willing to go against Joyeus and whoever is involved?” my best friend asks as we pick our way up the main road the next day, rucksacks packed with supplies that’ll hold us for a couple of days.
Kieran’s safe in my apartment. He bitched about it, sure, but I just can’t risk it. There’s not only danger from stray Walkers or whatever shit we find up there, but also the red rain. If it would fall right here? The trees can only stop so much.
