Page 63 of Mayhem

I pointed toward my own chest. “You had me, you fucking coward. Until you decided I was the easier person to sacrifice.”

His eyes moved toward the elevator. I saw him calculate the distance to the elevator, the button, and whether I was close enough to stop him. I let him make the choice. Nichlas backed away once, then turned and lunged for the doors.

He got his fingers against the call button before I reached him. I caught the back of his head with both hands and drove his face into the metal hard enough that the impact cracked through the room. His body went loose immediately.

I caught enough of his coat to keep his skull from bouncing off the floor when he dropped, then crouched beside him. Blood was already spilling from his nose, darker against the pale metal before it reached the carpet. I pressed two fingers to his neck and waited until the pulse answered steadily beneath them.

I looked from his unconscious face to the empty lounge, recalculating the evening I had expected to have. “Well, fuck. This wasn’t exactly what I planned, but it works.”

Forty-Three Minutes Later

Nichlas made a wet, miserable sound behind me while I washed his blood off my hands in the little bar sink. It had dried beneath two of my fingernails and across the heel of my palm, so I had to scrub harder than I expected before the water stopped running pink. When I glanced over my shoulder, his head was still hanging forward against his chest, but his breathing had changed.

“Finally. I was starting to think you weren’t going to wake up, and that would’ve been tragic.” I shut off the faucet and dried my hands before walking back toward him. “I need you conscious for this part.”

His head came up slowly as I had moved one of the heavier dining chairs into the open space near the windows while he was unconscious and secured his wrists behind it with two of the restraint straps I found in a cabinet I absolutely had not been told I could open. Another strap held his ankles to the front legs. I had left his chest free because I wanted him able to breathe properly, and because tying an unconscious man tightly enough to restrict his lungs seemed like a stupid way to accidentally end my evening early.

Blood covered the lower half of his face. His nose had swollen badly where it met the bridge, and one eye was already darkening from the impact with the elevator door. The blood that had poured from his nose while he was out had soaked through the collar of his shirt and dried in streaks down his neck, leaving the expensive white fabric underneath looking like somebody had spilled wine over it and given up trying to blot it clean.

Nichlas tested his wrists and immediately panicked when the chair answered with a scrape instead of letting him move. “Echo, what the fuck? Untie me.”

“I would, but you already tried running once.” I crouched in front of him and checked his pupils again. “You hit that door hard. I was worried you’d broken something important.”

His breath shook. “You slammed my fucking head into it.”

“You were leaving.”

“I was scared.”

I stood and walked over to the coffee table, where I had arranged the handful of things I thought might be useful. I had decided against anything complicated. Complicated required attention I would rather spend on Nichlas, and I knew enough about bodies to understand that pain did not need creativity to work.

“Every explanation you give me eventually comes back to that,” I said while picking up the narrow blade I had found tucked behind one of Malakai’s less interesting knives. “You were scared when they approached you. You were scared when you gave them the book. You were scared when you left me bleeding. You were scared when you realized people were still looking for me, so you stayed hidden.”

Nichlas jerked against the restraints when he saw the blade. The chair legs scraped across the floor, but I had positioned him far enough from anything useful that all he accomplished was moving himself a few inches.

“I told you what happened.” His words came faster as I approached. “I told you everything I knew. What else do you want?”

“I want you to hurt.”

He stopped pulling as I came around behind him and rested one hand on his shoulder, feeling the muscle bunch beneath my palm. “Every time I breathe wrong, I can feel your betrayal. Every time I twist too fast. Every time something catches the scar in just the right place. You left me with a reminder I get to carry around for the rest of my fucking life.”

I slid the blade through his shirt just below the shoulder, opening the fabric before touching skin. Nichlas started begging before the point ever landed, and I listened for a few seconds because I had imagined this sound often enough that hearing the real thing deserved some attention.

Then I drew the blade across him. The cut was shallow and long, deep enough for blood to gather immediately along the line before spilling down his chest. Nichlas screamed and threw his weight sideways, nearly taking the chair over with him. I caught the back before it tipped and shoved it flat again, laughing when he tried to twist far enough to see what I had done.

“Stop moving. You’re making the line ugly.”

“Jesus Christ, Echo!”

“He isn’t coming.”

I wiped the blade against the clean side of his shirt before moving around to face him again. His eyes were huge, fixed on my hand, and tears had started running freely through the blood drying beneath his nose.

I wanted him to know something terrible was happening and have no control over when it stopped. I caught his left hand and turned it palm-up despite the awkward angle of his restrained wrist. His fingers curled automatically, so I forced them open and pressed the tip of the knife beneath one nail. Nichlas understood immediately.

“No. Echo, no, please. Don’t.”

His scream broke halfway through and came back hoarse. Blood welled around the edge of the nail as the point slid beneath it, and his entire body locked hard enough to make the chair tremble under him. I stopped before doing permanent damage, withdrew the blade, and watched him suck in air through his mouth while sweat broke across his forehead.