Page 49 of Unholy Masks

This man, fuck! He is getting too comfortable!

“You asked just to get rejected?”

He shrugged. “I wanted to be sure.”

As if he hadn’t just asked about marriage, he nonchalantly turned away from me and motioned Mason to open his mouth. Mason obeyed—he cried, screamed, but didn’t resist.

“There.” Ryden pulled out a few teeth. “If you don’t marry me after this, it’s your loss.”

Was he joking?

“If you don’t shut up, Ryden, I’m going to extract your teeth next.”

“Hmm, violent. I love it when you talk dirty to me,” he said with a wink. I wanted to kick him. But because I loved him too much, I didn’t. “What do we do next to him?”

“How about this then? For all the women who had suffered because of it?” I asked, pushing my knife into Mason’s balls, but I was still not over the fact that Ryden, this handsome lunatic, just randomly asked me to marry him when we were out here killing a man, and then went back to business like it was nothing.

Damn!

“Very well.” Without blinking, Ryden sank his knife into Mason’s cock, twisted twice as Mason howled, his wail shattering the peaceful night. “There. Want anything else, Red?”

“I don’t know. Show me what else you can do with your tools. I love a man who knows how to handle his tools.”

“You’re insatiable. In-fucking-satiable.”

“Are you saying no?” I asked.

“Would I ever say no to you?” Ryden said, looking pointedly at me, a pout on his lips. “I’m not cruel like you.” He gave me a wounded look.

He did it so fucking smoothly too.

I shook my head, watching as Ryden pulled an old, rusted thumbscrew from his bag.

“Looks ancient. Where did you find that?” I asked, curiously looking at the grotesque device.

“Enzo,” Ryden replied with a shrug, like borrowing a medieval torture device from his best friend was perfectly normal.

“Why the fuck did Enzo even have this?”

“It’s not his,” Ryden said. “It belonged to his great-great-grandfather.”

“What? Did he help his clients along the way?”

Ryden chuckled, tossing the thumbscrew lightly in his hand. “Who knows? Maybe business was slow, and he decided to create some?”

I laughed, and Ryden stared at me, his eyes tender. His lips pulled up. “You look like you’re finally back. This thing with the Strangler, and you haven’t been smiling like this, not in a while.”

My heart hitched.

You should have said yes to his random as fuck proposal. Kat said.

No. Marriage is not for me. I love the way we are right now.

“Maybe I am. Now, show him pain. Show him what the women must have felt when he took their choices away.” Men like Mason were everything wrong with this world. It was sad that they… were allowed to survive, to live, to walk among innocent girls and women like they didn’t harbor vicious thirst within them. “Show him what it feels like when you desperately want to hold on, to claw your way back to your life, and you’re denied that as well.”

Ryden’s face twisted, the earlier lightness completely wiped off.

Mason’s fingers went between the plates of the thumbscrew. Ryden tightened the screws, and Mason screamed. I smiled with contentment as the sound of bones crushing filled the quiet that followed his agonized cries.