Ten Thousand Lies (13 page)

“Oh, wow…” I breathed, my heart kicking up the tempo.

Ricki did have bedroom eyes. When I looked closer, his eyes struck me as strange but not necessarily in a bad way. For some reason, I had imagined them to be blue or green. Not that I was disappointed. Those brown eyes were wonderfully sweet as he smiled into the camera for Xanthe.

A sting of jealousy pinged through me.

I want him to smile for me.

Ricki

“Well, that should do it,” I said, wiping up the last traces of blood and ink off the shoulder of my client. I covered the fresh tattoo with plastic wrap and taped it up. It wasn’t a difficult piece, just some script on a girl’s shoulder.

“Thanks,” she replied, standing shakily.

It was her first tattoo, and I had a feeling it would be far from her last. The first one was always the worst.

Rex waited behind the counter in the front of our tattoo shop, Inkwell, to take her money and give her aftercare instructions. Once that was done and over with, we’d be closing up and heading out.

Tonight was a big one. It was Rex’s first real mission.

By this time, Ronen and I were top thugs in the organization with a small army of lesser Locals working beneath us. Rex had proven to be fucking ruthless in his training, and Ronen and I considered ourselves damn lucky to have him on our team. It was a shame Ellen refused to let Xanthe become an assassin with us because the woman would be the best fucking killer on the planet.

A week or so before Rex had joined us, he’d had to go back to his old family home to find his paperwork for travel documents. Deo had called me to let me know how that had gone down.

“Man, me, Xanthe, and Rex headed over there, and it was going fine until his bitch mum showed up. She fucking lost her shit, started wailing on Rex, telling him it was his fault his father had left her. Dude…Xanthe fucking took my knife off me, grabbed the bitch, and then pinned her fucking forearm to the wall!”

“You’re shitting me.”

“I shit you not, brother. Fucking nearly gave me a heart attack! She said if the bitch ever laid a hand on Rex again, she’d aim for something vital next time. I don’t know if I should be scared of this chick or if the boner she gave me was from bloodlust. Creepy calm, she was. Like it was nothing to stab a person.”

“You keep your fucking dick away from Xanthe,” I warned Deo.

Deo went silent.

“Fucking tell me you didn’t, brother,” I bitched.

“Ehhh…”

“Shut the fuck up! You and fucking Xanthe?”

“Well, it’s not like she’s jailbait anymore! And, like I said, it was a turn-on. She’s…she’s fucking awesome in the sack, man. I could get used to having her around.”

“Yeah, well, don’t. She ain’t for you.”

“You don’t know that. I’m going to check on her this weekend—”

“David is gonna kill you. He told you she was off-limits!” I told him.

“When she was underage, yeah! She’s not illegal. And she was well into it, too—”

“Don’t, man. I don’t wanna know.”

“Suit yourself.”

Whatever fuckery those two had gotten up to, I wanted no knowledge of it, so I could claim innocence when David found out. Rex knew about it though and didn’t seem bothered. If anything, I thought he was happy Xanthe had found someone who understood her weird-ass brain and accepted her for who she was.

“You nervous, brother?” I asked Rex after the girl walked out of the shop.

“Nope. Fucking looking forward to it.”

I felt it, too—the need to shed some evil blood. It’d been a while since the last mission, which had been a complete success. Ronen and I had been soaked from the top of our heads to our fucking toes in blood, sweat, and the tears of the criminal dead. The rush had been unbelievable. Like savages, Ronen and I had stared at each other with the most diabolical smiles on our faces while standing over our kills.

“I never want to forget this moment,” Ronen had said. “This is better than fucking. Better than any high I’ve ever had. This…this is fucking
primal
, man.”

“Fuck yeah,” I’d replied although I really didn’t know if it was better than sex.

Ellen was right. Sanctified murder was still murder. The rush was no different, no matter what side we were on. In that moment, we knew our humanity had tarnished slightly. Hopefully, we’d redeemed ourselves a little with saving the four unfortunates whom we’d brought straight to headquarters to begin their rehabilitation.

It wasn’t all blood and gore. There were times we would be sent out to gather intel. Sometimes, we’d just watch certain locations. That sort of detail was what Rex had been doing before he was allowed to join Ronen and me on this mission.

Inked up, scruffy, driving a fucking pea-green Mini, we didn’t seem the type to cause more than a civilian ruckus. Harmless tattooists and a pretty boy hanging out in shady spots around Amsterdam. Nothing suspicious about that.

We’d even gotten our arses arrested a couple of times to help us blend in with the unsavory types. That’d been grand. There was nothing like being bailed out for a drunk and disorderly by the director of a top-secret vigilante organization hell-bent on eradicating evil. That sort of shite tickled me pink.

Shutting down the register, I moved the cash to my office in the back of the shop. When I came back out, Ronen had shown up with our knapsacks, courtesy of the Locals. We liked to have certain shit with us, like rope and Band-Aids. Rex had specifically asked for a rusted pipe; none of us had forgotten the fucking stool leg and Willis.

Black clothing for all of us. Black ski masks. Black socks and shoes. If we needed to make a getaway and be out in public, the black would hide blood really well. The ski masks would protect our identities as well as our faces. After the last mission, I’d picked bits of bloody brain matter out of my beard.
Not cool.

After I locked the front door, the three of us made our way to my office and changed. Then, we slipped out the back and into a black van with our man, Jones, driving.

“Where to?” he asked.

On missions, our boys would get info at the last minute if they weren’t working on the inside. As he was the driver, Jones didn’t need to know any more than to show up and take us to where we were going.

“Loading dock warehouses,” said Ronen. “New shipment will disembark at ten o’clock.”

We had an hour to get there, get in, waste some fuckers, and free some unfortunates.

Adrenaline was picking up in my blood, and the thrill began to sing sweetly through my veins. Looking at my two brothers, I knew it was the same for them.

Rex had a twinkle in his eye. Bouncing a little in his seat, a grin spreading across his face, he confessed, “This is gonna be fun.”

Fuck yes.

We soundlessly slipped into the warehouse serving as a cargo hold, expecting to find seven unfortunates on the third floor. We had men on the inside who were to steer us in the right direction. It was these sorts of guys Ronen and I had dealt with when we went for his sister.

I’d met Ulrich, the man I’d turned into a gimp with a knife to an arse cheek. He was a nice bloke.

The three of us knew our guys, and they knew we would go fucking berserk on a raid, so they tended to just stay out of our way. With Rex, we might have a screw loose on top of everything, so they were to assist only when absolutely necessary.

Our man, Klaus, let us in through the side door. Guns at the ready, we stole through the rooms and corridors, eliminating the rabble with quick bullets to their heads. Silencers helped keep the racket down.

Outside the door to the second floor, hearts thumping, breaths tripping, we reloaded our handguns. I looked to Ronen, who nodded he was ready. Slowly, I pushed down the door handle.

“Oy!” said the guard.

He wasn’t ours, so he went down.

Belfry and Jakob, two of our guys, stood down the hall. They nodded to us and went in the opposite direction we were supposed to go. Crouching, we approached the end of the hall. Rex, being the tallest, popped his head around one side while Ronen scanned the other direction.

Two more fuckers down.

Third floor.

By the sounds behind the door, we were too late to save an unfortunate from the fate they were facing. Someone was no doubt being dry-raped in there. Laughter and screams of torment. The humiliation of having spectators created a certain tone; horror and agony blended into a note that wouldn’t ever leave the brain.

I saw it in Rex; he recognized it, too. Jaw clenched, he was looking in my eyes with his vision tinged red.

He stowed his gun in his belt, and he reached behind himself, slipping the rusted pipe from his pack with a slight whisper.

“You come in last,” I said. “Don’t lose your head.”

Rex nodded. It was all Ronen needed to wrench open the door.

Pop! Pop!

Pop! Pop!

Ronen and I took out the spectators, two bullets each. The unfortunates started screaming.

“Shut up!” shouted Ronen.

I had my gun aimed at the fucker who had a poor woman pinned facedown on a grubby desktop. She was a filthy fucking mess herself. Pants sagging under his arse, he was balls-deep in her. The motherfucker was trying to back out of his victim.

“Don’t fucking try it,” I snarled. “You move, I fucking shoot.”

The woman beneath him was shaking and crying. The others had gone deathly quiet.

“Assist!” I bellowed.

Within seconds, Jakob, Klaus, and Belfry came in. Ronen trained his gun on the rapist while I reached out with one hand and tore him off the woman. As she sank to her knees in hysterics, Belfry took off his jacket and wrapped her in it before lifting her into his arms.

“Get ’em out,” I said.

Our guys took the seven unfortunates and went down to meet Jones at the front door.

“Do you know whom you are dealing with?” asked the motherfucker in a heavy Russian accent.

“A dead man,” I replied.

Rex cracked the fucker on the head with the pipe, and he dropped to the floor. “Wake up, you piece of shite! You need to fully appreciate this!”

Heaving the Russian up, the three of us dumped him onto the desk. Dry and rusty, the pipe went straight up the fucker’s rectum.

“Turn him,” I snarled.

Ronen and Rex rolled him onto his side. With my shiny Army blade, I sliced the fucker’s cock clean off and shoved it in his mouth. Then, Ronen took his Locals-issued ice pick and drove it through the underside of the fucker’s jaw, sealing the man’s face shut. We watched as the life spasmed from the body. Its cries were muffled, as it bled out and choked on its own fucking anatomy.

“Once again, we’ve created a masterpiece of poetic justice,” said Ronen quietly.

An ocean of blood was on our hands. We were horrors ourselves, but a sweet peace of mind swept through me. We were the nightmares of nightmares. Avengers who came in silence with a wrath bordering on demonic. Behind us stood the Devil, proud that we’d taken our prey down in such a gruesome manner and so fucking pissed our souls weren’t damned for doing so.

“Be it that every fucking murdering rapist knows the same fate,” spit Rex.

We left the trash there to be found by the garbage men.