38
Isa
Joaquin dragged Dima’s limp body into the center of the kennel. The dogs on the other side of the gates where they were locked away snarled and bared their teeth viciously enough that even with the barred gates separating us, my heart stalled in my chest when I followed him.
Joaquin flipped him to his back, and I watched the moment his remaining eye widened and his mouth went slack. The bruising on my cheek and bandages at my wrists and ankles were the only sign that he’d ever laid his filthy hands on me, while he couldn’t so much as twitch from the neck down. I stood beside his body, kicking him with the pointed toe of my heel and prodding to see if he could feel the pain.
The lack of response on his face muted just a little bit of my fun as I squatted down beside him, reaching out a hand to cup his cheek tenderly. “??? ?????,” he rasped, looking as if those two words drained him of energy.
“I’m not your kitten. I never was,” I murmured softly, enjoying the moment of pain that flashed over his features. Rafe was a silent sentry at my back, staying out of the cage and letting me have my moment even though I knew it must have pained him to give up control over a death he’d wanted for so long. “I’mEl Diablo’swife.”
I reached back, accepting the knife from Joaquin when he handed it to me. I touched the tip of the blade to Dima’s skin, carving through his flesh and watching as it parted to reveal the muscled sinew beneath. Blood pooled on the floor, staining the shoes Montana had given me with full understanding that they would be ruined.
She could buy more.
She watched on, her face a blank mask that I related to all too much. There had been a time when I’d realized that not all violence was horrific, when I’d lived through the moment when I realized that there was something beautiful in watching the blood of those who would hurt me spill to the ground like paint on a canvas.
I reached over, carving through his other arm in the same way and exposing the raw meat beneath his skin. His legs came next, and then I cut through the cloth of his shirt and made shallow cuts in his chest and stomach so I wouldn’t hit anything vital and deliver him a death that was too swift for what he deserved.
Then when his bottom lip trembled, I brought the knife to his face and cut from his jaw to his good eye. The moment the tip of the knife came too close to his eye, he clenched it shut like it might protect him from losing it. I laughed, a deep, twisted sound that I’d never made as I drew the knife away finally. “Don’t worry,” I whispered. “I want you to see your death coming for you.”
I stood, handing the bloodied knife back to Joaquin and grabbing the gallon of blood the men had secured by stringing up the bodies of Pavel’s dead men and letting the thick, viscous liquid collect in a horse trough.
I smiled as I poured it over his body like gasoline, watching as the blood of his men filled his mouth and his nose and he sputtered and coughed. It covered his chest and torso, filling the gaps in his skin where I’d cut him and mixing with his own blood as it poured from his wounds. When the jug was empty, I stepped back and looked down at my handy work.
“I’ve heard you’re afraid of the dogs,” I said, squatting beside him again. His face was a massive red stain, covered in the blood I’d poured on him as that one eye fought to stare at me.
“Please,” he begged.
“Do you think you’ll feel it when they sink their teeth into your flesh? When they chew through your organs and devour the black hole where your heart should have been. Or will you only feel it when they eat that pretty face?” I asked, standing and looking down at him.
“Woman, you better watch yourself,” Rafe called, a deep chuckle resounding in his chest when I turned back to him. I left Dima in my rearview, making my way toward my husband—the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. His stare was unnerving, a glare in it as I approached him with a smile on my face. “I know you did not just call him fucking pretty.”
I stepped out of the kennel, feeling Joaquin do the same at my heel as we left Dima in the central room. He pulled the cage door closed behind us.
I reached up, cupping Rafe’s cheeks in my hand and stretching onto my tippy toes to touch my lips to his. “He is pretty,” I said, doubling down on my words and enjoying the moment of rage that I earned when his hands came around my waist finally and grabbed at the top of my ass. “To anyone who has never seen you.”
“Oh, please gag me,” Dimitry said, a smile in his voice as he flipped the switch. The gates that restrained the dogs lifted, and the frenzied racing of massive paws over the concrete came. Claws scratched the surface as I turned to watch over my shoulder, hearing Dima’s terrified scream echo over the walls as they came closer.
The growls of them erupted through the room. Goosebumps raised on my arms when they tore through Dima’s flesh, the wet, snarling sounds something that would haunt my nightmares for a long time.
Even still, it was worth every moment of knowing that I’d turned his worst fear back on him like he’d done to so many others. Even still, there would be no regret for the stain to my soul.
He deserved every ounce of terror he’d suffered and then some for the women and children he’d sold, for those he’d raped. I only wished he hadn’t been paralyzed and unable to feel pain, because then he might have suffered the same fate as his father.
Thatwould have been a sight to see.
“Good puppies,” I murmured, drawing a laugh from Dimitry where he stood beside Montana. “What will happen to them?”
“The dogs?” he asked, huffing a second chuckle. “I’ll take them home with me. They’re good dogs, particularly when they’re well fed. Pavel just has a tendency to keep them hungry because they’re more vicious that way. They’ll have a good life now.”
If there’d been any doubt that Pavel deserved what was coming to him, it disappeared with the reality that he’d starved his dogs to use them as weapons.
Dima’s screams faded out as he died, his blood mixing with what was already on the concrete floor, and when they finished?
The dogs were no longer hungry.