Page 96 of Honey Cut
“English,” I say. “Or I won’t call an ambulance when I’m done with you.”
Hope is sometimes a better weapon than a knife. Even when it’s entirely a lie.
Three minutes later, I’m flicking the worst of the blood off my knife and murmuring the prayer for forgotten souls over their corpses.
O merciful God, take pity on those souls who have no particular friends and intercessors to recommend them to Thee…
And then I’m walking away, down the stairs with my head ducked and then out the alley door, long gone before the poor cocktail waitress finds the bloodbath I left behind.
* * *
Drobny’ssafe house is in a partially burned block of apartments, the concrete scorched on one side with scattered windows lit up on the other. Even though my hands shake a little as I approach the building and step into the broken shell of the ground floor, I am eager to kill this man, perhaps more eager than I’ve been to kill anyone in the last year. Not only because I know him to be evil, but also because he tried to kill Mark, my husband. My jailer.
The very thought of Mark dying terrifies me. It is pernicious how much I’ve grown to care for him.
I take as much care as I can going up the stairwell, but the ash and glass and debris from the fire still litter the treads, and my steps crunch more than I’d like as I climb up to the tenth floor. Agony stabs through my right ankle every time I put weight on it, and there’s a nasty ache from hip to thigh that tells me I’m going to have a fairly dramatic bruise there. I didn’t quite make it out of the club undetected and was chased nearly to the blokovi before I killed one of my pursuers and lost the other with a hasty lunge from the bridge to the train tracks several feet below. I got away, but my ankle and hip paid the price.
But the adrenaline is fizzing in my blood; I’m sharp, alert,ready. When I get to the right floor, I slide my knife free and steady myself. Pull my breath and balance into my center. I don’t know whether to expect one person in the safe house or ten, and I don’t know if I’m about to kill an unsuspecting man or a man who’s been alerted that his people are being hunted all over town.
The hall is dark, a husk of a hallway, with half-charred apartment doors yawning open and the moldering remains of sofas and tables and pictures inside, all of them water-stained and streaked with soot.
There’s a faint light from the end, a place where the debris slowly stops and the walls are clean—the fire spared this section. I adjust my grip on the knife, my fresh pair of latex gloves cool and dry, and get ready to peer into the open doorway.
I hear a scream.
It’s a scream like the others I’ve heard tonight, a grown man in unbelievable pain. The scream of someone who never thought pain would happen to them.
Is Drobny torturing someone in there? That is a complication I didn’t plan for and one that I’m not sure how to work around. I wouldn’t kill an innocent person—but how to know if they’re innocent? And witnesses are never a good idea…
But when I stop at the edge of the door and carefully angle myself to see inside, a jolt of pure, unblemished panic rips through me.
Drobny isn’t torturing someone. And this isn’t acomplication.
This is my husband.
My husband is standing inside Drobny’s safe house, a tarp spread beneath his feet, a bare light bulb from the kitchen casting him in dramatic shadows. He’s wearing black-latex gloves, just like me, and a black knit hat pulled snugly over his hair. He’s not wearing the suit he left the penthouse in but tactical clothes very similar to mine, with a leather jacket instead of a trench coat.
Drobny is zip-tied to a chair in front of him, shirtless and black-eyed. The tarp is underneath him too, although it’s hardly necessary. It’s currently spotless, save for the two bags of blood tossed carelessly to one corner and a few shiny spots below Drobny, which I think are spatters of sweat. I angle myself a bit more and see the IV catheter taped neatly on the inside of one of Drobny’s elbows—Mark’s been slowly depleting him of blood. Maybe injecting him with something too. An expedient way to weaken someone, to kill them, without all the mess of stabbing and slicing, without the effort of strangling.
The efficiency of it is chilling, even to me. Me who is holding the hilt of a knife that’s still speckled with gummy flecks of drying blood.
I blink a few times and try to make sense of what the fuck is happening, what thismeans. Mark is not collecting information from a member, and Andrea is nowhere in sight. Mark is at a safe house that was extremely difficult to locate, and Mark is torturing and about to kill the same person I’ve been tasked to kill.
Mark who is supposed to be retired from that life. Mark who drinks gin all day and fucks like it’s preferable to breathing. Mark who occupies himself with manipulating stocks and legislation when it amuses him.
This is not that Mark.
thirty-seven
ISOLDE
In leather,with his hair tucked away from his face, there is no hiding the predatory strength of his body or the stark brutality of his features. His eyes are nothing but chips of dark sea ice in his face. When he speaks, his voice is chilling, and not because I haven’t heard him cold or angry or dangerous—I’ve heard all of those things—but because there is absolutely no humanity left in his voice at all. There is no fury or regret or compassion, there is no trace of desire or interest that could be exploited or appealed to. He sounds flatly uninterested when he asks, “Have you changed your mind, Filip? It’s getting late, and I’d rather not be in this shithole any longer than I need to be.”
“Fuck you,” Drobny mumbles. He sounds dazed but still present.
“So we’re not quite there yet.” Mark sighs. It is a performance of disappointment, but behind it is nothing. No emotion. No feeling.
As he circles around Drobny, I shift back into the shadows of the hall, watching them through the crack made between the open door and the jamb. I debate leaving, I really do because this is…bad. Mark like this, Mark doing this, and if he knew that I knew?—
