Page 55 of Dreadful

Cards fountain upward, fluttering like wounded birds. A shirt drifts across my arm. A glass shatters near my feet.

I go down hard amid the wreckage of our game.

My ears ring. The world tilts, black and formless. My fingers find the familiar shape of the gun at the same moment his fist knots in my shirt.

He hauls me up. My feet slip on playing cards, stomach lurching as the room spins into focus. The smell hits me first—sweat and cheap leather, stale smoke clinging to his kutte.

“C’mon, girlie.” His breath is warm against my temple. “We can work somethin’ out. No reason you gotta get hurt on account of these fucks.”

Blood pools under my tongue. I swallow against the bile rising sharp and acidic.

His grip twists the fabric tighter. “That a no?”

The barrel feels cold in my palm. I don’t want to use it. Not yet.

“You don’t have to do this.” The words scrape raw.

“Nah.” His head cocks slowly. “Prez’s orders. Gotta deliver a message, see?”

His open palm cracks against my cheekbone. My head whips sideways. Teeth slice into soft tissue. Copper floods my mouth. Something warm and wet tracks from my eyebrow down toward my jaw.

White static swallows sound and sight.

“Ain’t personal.”

The room swims back into view just as he draws his arm back again.

I spit red onto the floor between us.

Then I shove the barrel hard under his chin, tilting his head back. “Back up.”

He freezes. For one suspended second, we’re locked there—his knuckles white in my shirt, my finger resting against the trigger guard.

I dig steel into flesh. “I said back the fuck up.”

A low chuckle vibrates against the gun. “You ain’t gonna shoot me.”

I lower the barrel. His grin splits wide.

And then I pull the trigger.

The sound is enormous and immediate, a pressure that hits my sternum before my ears catch up.

His leg goes out from under him. The howl that comes out of him is animal, nothing like a human sound, and his fist tears free of my collar with enough force that I hear the fabric give. He grabs for the wall, the curtain, anything—finds nothing—and his shoulder drives through the window in a single catastrophic moment of weight meeting glass.

Warm air floods in, and I don’t move. My arm is still up, the gun still level, pointed at open night.

Holy fuck.

“Bishop?”

Something warm is moving down the side of my face. I press the back of my hand against my eyebrow, and it comes away dark.

“Bishop?”

I hear him before I see him. A low, straining sound, the kind that comes out when there’s no air left for anything louder.

They’re behind the couch. Bishop on his back, the man on his chest, both of his knees pinning Bishop’s arms to the floor. Bishop’s hands are locked around the man’s forearms—every tendon visible, his whole body shaking with the effort—and the knife is still moving downward in increments, slow and inevitable, a thin dark line already opened across his throat where it’s already been.