Max

Blade was pale and sweating. For a moment, if I ignored the scars, he almost looked like Bills. Except Bills wasn’t a chickenshit. Maybe he was crazy. Maybe he was reckless. Maybe he was a loose cannon that had worried me on more than one occasion, but I never would have thought for even a single second that Bills would run. He wouldn’t abandon me or my men, wouldn’t leave us to the wolves outside the door when he knew we were losing.

 

That was the difference between men like Bills and men like Blade. Cowardice.

 

“I think it’s time for a conversation, don’t you?” I asked Blade calmly. There was a good chance Blade was still armed and I was obviously not. But I wasn’t worried about it. In a fair fight, I’d win against this man. In an unfair fight, I’d probably still win and if I didn’t, I knew Blade wouldn’t make it out of this room, much less this house, alive.

 

It was a small comfort at the very least that brought me a burst of radiant satisfaction. No matter what happened next, at least I knew this piece of shit in front of me wouldn’t live to see tomorrow.

 

Blade cleared his throat and smoothed his hand over his hair, trying to collect himself. It half worked, but he still looked scared, worried, like he had figured out what I’d just figured out.

 

That he was a dead man walking.

 

“All right,” Blade answered, forcing himself to sit back in the chair. He cracked a broken, shaky smile at me, trying to be his old self. It didn’t quite work. “What is it you’d like to talk about?”

 

I crossed one leg over the other so my right ankle was set on my left knee. I studied Blade for a long moment, like I was thinking, though I already had my questions in mind. It was just a ploy to make Blade sweat a little first. Judging by his flickering smile, it was working. Finally, I asked, “Who was that man? The one you ‘gave to me’ as a good faith present?”

 

A slow smile spread across his face and, for a moment, he looked like the cat that ate the canary. I didn’t like that look, but I still felt confident. There wasn’t anything he could do or say at this point that would change how things were going to end. I finally had a leg up. I finally had him cornered. He wouldn’t get the best of me. Not now.

 

“Carl?” clarified Blade, as though I would know his name. He worked hard to keep his voice cool and calm, like we weren’t in the midst of a war that had gone horribly wrong for one of us at least. Him, specifically. “He was in bad shape, wasn’t he? I mean, you really went to town on him. Poor bastard.”

 

I gritted my teeth, but otherwise kept my expression neutral. I was in control and I wouldn’t let it show that his words impacted me negatively, whether they did or not. I waited for him to continue and after a moment, still grinning, he continued.

 

“Carl was a bit of a problem for me, you know?” he said casually. “A liability. You know what liability means, Max boy? I know that’s an awful big word for a pea brain like you.”

 

I kept my voice steady and unruffled as I answered, “I know what liability means.”

 

Blade nodded his head, probably sensing that he was riding along my already frayed nerves. But he wouldn’t get to me, not like he wanted to. “Right. Well, that’s what Carl was. A fucking liability. See, Carl knew some things and, well, you understand how secrets can be important—vital even. You know what vital means?”

 

“Get on with it,” I all but growled, beginning to lose my patience, even if I kept my temper in check.

 

Blade’s grin widened, pleased with my reaction to his mockery. “Well, never mind anyway. Carl knew some things about the underground shit we were into. It was a while back when it started and Carl was as green behind the ears as I was. Didn’t know his ass from his elbow, did he?”

 

I waited as patiently as I could, sensing that what was coming next was going to be the real blow. Up to this point, Blade was just goading me, but he had a purpose. There was something real that had happened that was lying in wait for me and when it pounced—when it was sprung like a trap—I knew it was going to be brutal. He wouldn’t be grinning like an idiot at me if it wasn’t.

 

“So when I asked him, ‘Hey, you know how to work a camera?’ well, low and hold my surprise when his dumb ass says yes. And that’s what started it all. Two dipshits and a camera, like we had any idea of how much bank we could really make off it.”

 

I had a feeling I knew what he was getting at. Running girls. Prostitution. Porn. What he’d threatened to do to Lucy. I gritted my teeth against the idea of her being used like that, being forced into something. It took everything I had not to break Blade in half right then, but I needed this story. The rest was done and taken care of. This was all that was left.

 

“The first few videos were with willing participants,” Blade went on, watching my expression as he said the word willing. He knew it would irk me, get under my skin, but I did my best not to let it show. His smile flickered slightly in disappointment, but otherwise, he continued as though he hadn’t paused at all. “They were all right, but I started realizing there was more money to be made in violence. Girls who looked like they wanted it and then talked like they didn’t. That was what guys wanted. They wanted to get into a woman’s pants, but they wanted her to fight him tooth and nail on it.”

 

I felt the increasing urge to throttle him rise again. I wanted to kill him and the only reason I kept my cool was the knowledge that, once he stopped talking, I would. It brought me the very smallest of comforts.

 

“So, we tried it that way. We asked the women to act like they didn’t want it.” He shook his head, for the first time looking disgusted. Of course, not with himself or his actions, but rather, with the women. As though they had done something wrong. “But porn stars—if you could call these trashy women that—weren’t actresses. They couldn’t fake it to save their lives.” He grinned, showing crooked, haphazardly placed teeth. “That’s when I realized the answer to it: take the girls who didn’t want it. Drug ‘em, threaten ‘em, blackmail ‘em. Whatever you had to do to get them in front of that camera, and then find the biggest, meanest son of a bitch out there and fuck ‘em until they cried and screamed. That’s where the money is.”

 

Bile rose in my throat and it took everything I had not to end the conversation right then and there. I had started to tremble, anger swelling within me until I thought I might burst with the pressure of it.

 

He was disgusting. No, worse than that. He was less than the scum you shaved off the bottom of your shoe. Worse than the sewers with their floating, stinking shit. There was no word for him, but there should have been.

 

Even then, I didn’t think it would be strong enough to describe the intense feeling of hatred I felt towards this man. Could I call him human anymore?

 

He must have seen it, the way my face grew red with anger and my body began to tremble with hatred, and the bastard enjoyed it. He was doing his very best to torture me and on some level, it was working. But his story wasn’t over yet. “You know, the Slayers were small back then. Much, much smaller than the Sin Reapers. You were top dogs back then and we were just these little guppies trying to find our little piece of crap to carve out of this city. But the territory was all yours. All the Preacher’s.”

 

Finally, emotion filtered into his voice. It was anger and that deep-seated hatred that didn’t flare like mine and burst in a bubble of molten lava. Instead, his was a slow burn, cooking and festering over time until, when it finally did come out, there was no stemming the tide. And there was no getting over it. He bared his teeth at me, though his eyes were glazed and glassy. He wasn’t thinking of me at all.

 

“The Preacher had everything I wanted and that just didn’t sit well with me,” he told me, pinching out the words as bitingly as possible. “So I realized my newest enterprise would put me in a position to have a little leverage.” That smarmy, greasy grin of his was back and I wanted to smack it off his face. “So when I saw that pretty little wife of his, still looking good even after the baby, well, I just couldn’t let that go, could I?”

 

I let my eyes close, just once, in silent prayer for Mary Gilles, the Preacher’s widow. When I opened them again, Blade was staring at me. He wasn’t gleeful, wasn’t happy or grinning. He was just malicious. A disgusting, worthless piece of human flesh, a shell of a man.

 

“I picked her up and slipped her a little something. She was half out of it when I got her to the bed. I fucked her until she was bruised, while Carl recorded the whole damn thing. He was nervous, but I talked him into staying cool and collected, the camera man I needed. When Mary came around, I showed her the tape. That bitch can bawl, you know it?”

 

I couldn’t resist. My hand went across his face, hot and fast, before I’d even realized I had reached for him. The hit must have stung because I managed to split his lip at the very least. He whipped his head back at me, furious, but then he seemed to realize where we were again. He calmed himself and I did the same, sitting back in my chair.

 

He continued his story, not that I wanted any more of it. “I told her if she didn’t give me what I wanted, well, I’d show her hubby. She was damn compliant after that. A pretty good lay, if I do say so myself. Sometimes I made her fuck others, too. Sometimes I’d watch. Sometimes there’d just be two that she’d have to deal with at once, because that’s how whores live. I was one up on the Preacher and that poor sap didn’t even know it. By the time he did, it was too late.

 

“I’d pushed things into motion. I’d finally started to get the numbers. The Preacher was getting old, getting soft. He wasn’t a rider anymore, much less a leader. So when I began to snatch up territory, he was too scared to do anything about it. That’s when I finally struck. I sent him the tape. Poor Mary did everything I told her, but she should have known better than to think I wouldn’t give him the tape. After all, he deserved to know she was cheating on him, right?

 

“Poor old man couldn’t handle it. He killed himself. Things were finally coming together. With the loss of the Preacher, the Sin Reapers were nothing but a memory. By the time you even had an idea of what was going on, I could already taste victory.”

 

I forced myself to smile. Not because I was happy, not because I felt like I was winning—all this shit wasn’t a victory; it was a massacre—but because I was feeling spiteful. I wanted him to hurt, as much as I could before he died. “You call this victory?” I asked, letting the anger wash through my voice. “Because I’m pretty sure those are my boys out there and those bodies just on the other side of that door are your boys.”

 

Finally, for a blessed second, Blade was silent. Sullen like a child, he slumped back into his chair and folded his arms across his chest. He looked like a petulant child after being reprimanded, feeling slighted for something that was clearly not his fault.

 

Except I could lay everything at this one man’s feet and feel pretty damn justified.

 

Forcing a smile, Blade kept going, and I realized it wasn’t about how many blows he could get it or searching for a chance to get out of this mess. Now, it was solely about buying just a little more time. Seconds, minutes, hours if he could. Now, it was about not waiting to die.

 

“Carl got sloppy. He got sloppy and then when the cops started sniffing around, I knew I couldn’t trust him. Piece of shit was a rat, trading me and everything I’d built for his own worthless hide.” Blade spit in disgust on the floor, like he was spitting on Carl’s grave. “So I figured I’d get two for one. Get rid of a rat and the only man who might end up letting the wrong shit slip to the wrong people, and give you a little test run. I wanted to see what you would do when I offered up a piece of forbidden fruit. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you took it.”

 

I nodded my head. I gritted my teeth against the information that had just poured from Blade’s lips. Some of it I’d known before, some of it was new, but none of it was surprising. Not after what I’d been learning these past weeks about Blade. I understood now that the things that were set in motion had been turning long before I was cemented into the Sin Reapers and there hadn’t been a damn thing I could do to stop them from culminating in this.

 

It was inevitable.

 

I thought about Mary and how she must have felt. How she still felt, all torn up inside and having known, in the end, that nothing she did could have saved her husband. I thought of the Preacher. I understood now why he’d killed himself, even if I still didn’t agree. It had been a coward’s way out, though I knew it wasn’t because of any lost love between himself and Mary. The Preacher had been a good man and he’d loved his wife with all his heart, but in the end, that was what had eaten him up so completely.

 

In his mind, the Preacher had done the most deplorable thing of the bunch. He’d failed his wife.

 

Mary had been put through hell and the Preacher had been unable to stop it. He’d tried to live with the consequences, but hadn’t been able to. It had destroyed him in the end. But that had been part of the thing that made it such a coward’s choice. He could have found a way to live with it. Mary did. He could have done the right thing and figured out how to help his wife work through the demons that must have been feasting on her for years. He could have killed the son of a bitch that had done that to her in the first place.

 

Any and all of those choices would have been a justifiable course of action. I would have backed him up on any of them. But instead, he couldn’t see past his own grief, not even to help Mary deal with hers.

 

In the end, he let it devour him, even when Mary had been strong.

 

I thought of Lucy. It would haunt us the rest of our days what had happened to her, but I would do everything within my power to help her work through it. We would be a team and we’d survive, because we had to. I wouldn’t take the coward’s way out, no matter what had happened to her today. I would be there for her.

 

I nodded my head once, finitely. “I only have one question left to ask you Blade. Do you know what it is?”

 

Blade stared at me, something lurking in his eyes. Maybe he didn’t know the exact words, but he knew what I was searching for. “Can’t say that I do.”

 

“I want to know who you’re working for.”

 

“I run the show!” he burst out suddenly, anger surging through him. “This is my club! The Slayers belong to me!”

 

I didn’t bother to tell him that his precious Slayers were either dead or long gone, scattered to the wind. He already knew it; I could see it in his wild eyes. “Who’s calling the shots, Blade?”

 

He bared his teeth at me like an animal. “I ain’t telling you shit.”

 

I smiled at him coldly. “Yes, you will.”

 

In the end, the very end, all Blade would give me was a name. Cash Jones. Maybe it was all Blade had, I didn’t know. But his time was up. I couldn’t let him breathe one more breath. So when I stood, he sensed his own end. He didn’t beg, but he sneered and threw as much maliciousness at me as he could as I reached for the gun I had tucked away in my jacket. It had a bullet with Blade’s name on it and he knew it. When I pointed it at him, he just continued to yell and blather at me.

 

Then I pulled the trigger and there was finally silence.