It was blinding.
I allow my mind to wander back to catching Jameson, I revel in his screams, how we dragged him from his comfy bed in the south side of the city, how he kicked and he screamed whilst tied up in the trunk of the car. He threatened us to start with but those threats soon turned to pleas. I replay how Ryker held him down as I slammed paperclips under his fingernails, remembering the feel of his blood on my skin. But it was only when the tip of that knife sliced through his flesh, permanently marking him with the S that he started to talk but it still wasn’t good enough.
He eventually died, sooner than I had wanted but a fitting end for him at least.
This apartment has been turned upside down twice, the remnants of the last time still strewn across the floor, glass smashed, holes in the walls, papers crumbled and littered over the varnished hardwood.
Jameson was useless.
They’re all fucking useless. A sudden burst of fury has my fist slamming into the wall next to where Valentine’s second hangs. He’s long dead, gone cold and blue and yet I wish I could see a flinch. I need the fear. The fucking terror. It drove me. I wanted suffering and pain.I wanted them all to fucking pay.
My men back from the room as my anger bursts from my body, what wasn’t destroyed before now is, the desk, the furniture, even the hundred year old bottles of whiskey on the shelves. All but Jameson and the note except now it’s embedded into his sternum, held there by my switch blade.
Blood coats my hand like a second skin, warm, slick, crimson. I feel it on my face, my throat.
I’ve never lost a single thing in my entire life, but I was losing everything now. Every-fucking-thing.
I can feel emotion clawing at my windpipe, my tongue, drying it until it sticks to the roof of my mouth, my heart pounding inside my chest to the beat of a frantic drum.
Wren. Wren. Wren.
That’s what my heart shouted.
I never thought something would become more important than my city. Than my family name but she has. Sheis.
“Lex,” Ryker steps into the room, the only one brave enough to face me down in this current state. I pick up a bottle and launch it across the room, a scream erupting from my throat, the bellow ricocheting off the walls to fill the space with an echo of my anguish. My rage. My pain.
He’s just another body, not necessarily in the way but a body there anyway. So easy to destroy. A life that can be snuffed out beneath my thumb with just a simple flick of my wrist.
I’m this fucking close.
I imagine what it’ll be like when I finally have Valentine in front of me. What it will feel like to inflict wound after wound onto him.
He’s smart to hide.
I wish he wasn’t, but I had to hand it to him as much as I didn’t want to.
There wouldn’t be anything to stop me if I saw him. I wouldn’t care if we were in public, fuck they can broadcast it for the nation, I’ll kill him still. I’ll make the whole fucking city, the whole country watch as I enacted my vengeance.
A calmness settles over me as I tilt my head side to side, working out knots that have formed in the muscles. Rolling my shoulders, I loosen the muscles in my back and flick a glance back at my work.
I give it an hour after we leave before this little scene is put before him.
I’d love to stick around and see just who it will be to deliver my message but I have no time.
For every day my little bird is missing from my side, I’ll triple,quadruplethe amount of damage I do to his men.
Going for his right hand now was a little hasty, I should have waited but my control, it’s slipping. And he can only be to blame.
Taking a deep breath through my nose, I close my eyes, inhaling the stench of death that tinges the air with a metallic tang, it was the smell of a man losing himself to his own demons.
And this time, there was no pushing them down. No restraining them. No concealing them from the people of this city.
They wanted the monster.
I’d give it to them and make them wish they never even stepped foot in this city.
This was war.
And it was a war I wasn’t going to lose.