It’s three in the morning before I hear Uncle calling on our sole landline phone. I know it’s him because he’s the only reason we have a landline in our slummy one-bedroom apartment. The Cypriot were more than happy to pay for it, once Dryas and I were jumped in to their gang.

Especially for moments like this, where we’d receive calls in the middle of the night to go do whatever mayhem we were instructed to do.

Half asleep, I follow Dryas down the winding streets, past the cafe where we were just a few hours before. We keep heading down the street and I don’t think anything of it.

I don’t think at all, because I only went to sleep an hour ago.

When we get to the apartment building just two blocks from the cafe, I don’t connect the party that Brandon described as ‘right down the street’ with the errand that we’re doing now. In fact, it isn’t until I climb the stairs and head into the apartment that I realize that something has gone very wrong.

The whole living room is an absolute bloodbath. The couch is soaked in blood, a couple of plastic chairs are turned on their sides and soaked in it too. It’s not the first time that a party has gotten out of hand. Usually, we’re called in to extract Cypriot members, take their wallets, and dump them at a local hospital.

Usually, there are no women at these parties. Not this time, though. There’s no one inside, except an unconscious female body curled up in one corner. She’s blonde and thin, but everything else about her is disguised by congealed blood. There’s no sign of her clothes anywhere, nor any weapon.

It looks like whoever did this, took the weapon with them.

“Motherfucker,” Dryas says, glancing at the body. “Fuck, do you think she’s dead?”

I just grunt. Dryas heads over to kneel beside her, checking for a pulse. I look around, checking the other rooms for other bodies. Finding no one, I head back out.

And then there she is, staring at me with those green eyes. Alice, my favorite waitress. There is so much blood around her mouth and nose that she’s almost unrecognizable, but those lovely green eyes can’t be denied. Where her throat used to be, there is just a red, oozing gape of flesh.

I don’t know what happened to her, but it was violent. At first, I can’t tell if she’s dead or alive. But then I see her chest rise and fall, and she makes a gurgling moan.

I’m nauseated all the sudden. A cold chill runs through me. “Oh, fuck.”

“No shit,” Dryas mutters, shaking his head. “Of all the fucked-up shit to get us out of bed for…”

“What are we supposed to do? Take her to the hospital?” I ask, unable to take my eyes off of hers.

Dryas gives me a disgruntled look. “You know what the rules are. Hospitals are only for survivors. And survivors are only Cypriot. We’ll have to dump her somewhere.”

And kill her, if she’s not dead by then. He doesn’t have to say it for me to catch his meaning. I know by now that Uncle wouldn’t have called Dryas and me unless a body needed to be disposed of, pronto.

“Goddamn it,” I say, shaking my head. “They might be able to help her…”

Alice scuffling sound coming from the bathroom makes me clam up. Dryas looks around, spotting a spare blood-covered blanket. He picks it up, clearly trying not to get grossed out by the way it’s stiff from dried blood.

He tosses the blanket over A’s body as I station myself by the hallway where the sound came from, drawing my gun. To my surprise, the bathroom door bursts open, and Brandon spills out. He’s covered in dried blood, which doesn’t even seem to bother him. He wipes his coke-rimmed nose on the back of his hand, letting out a giggle.

“There you boys are,” he says, clearly geeked up out of his mind. “I asked Uncle to ring for you two since you’re such devoted lads. I’m afraid that the little girl over there had a bit of a fall. She fell on my cock.”

Brandon lets out another giggle at the way he pronounces cock. I stare at him, my rage silently working its way up my body. Gripping my gun, I contemplate killing him, right here and now.

He just lurches out across the room, heading for the blood-encrusted couch. Brandon sits on it with a groan. “You know, I should’ve invited you two to come to the party. You’re not too young to know how to have a good time. Right?”

He pulls out a little vial of cocaine, tipping a bit onto the back of his hand. He snorts it, ignoring the blood dried on his skin. It goes all over the place anyway.

Dryas nods at me, getting my attention. He points to Brandon, then makes a gun with his fingers. He mouths, not here.

I nod, my throat tight.

“Hey, why don’t you give me a hand with her?” Dryas pipes up. “Since you didn’t invite us, you can give us a hand cleaning up.”

Brandon screws up his face and launches himself to his feet. “Yeah, okay. We can go to this hotel that’s on the next block. Put the girl in the pool, make it look accidental. That’s what I’ve done with the last few.”

The last few? My eyebrows shoot up. How long has Brandon been doing this, exactly? More than two women in a short time frame makes for a big, messy scene. The cops will come sniffing around, no doubt.

I make eye contact with Dryas, smiling just a hair. Now we have a reason to kill him.

Brandon laughs again, pointing to A’s body. She’s clutching something in her hands, some bloodied beads. “Look, look at the only thing I didn’t strip away from her. She was carrying a rosary. What a stupid fucking girl, huh?”

I stare at Brandon, dumbfounded. While I, obviously, don’t feel the call of the church, many around us do. And to make fun of her for having religion?

To me, that makes him a monster.

Dryas clears his throat. “Help me out, Brandon. Arsen, why don’t you grab something from the bedroom to wrap her in?”

In a handful of minutes, we get her wrapped up in a set of clean bedsheets. Dryas and Brandon carry her downstairs. I follow them down, keeping a lookout.

“Fuck finding a car,” Brandon says, barely keeping his shit together. “The hotel is really close.”

He leads us down a narrow, dark alley, sniffling all the way. Dryas glances back at me. I pull out my gun again.

“Hey, Brandon,” I say.

Brandon turns around, his hands full of the girl he maimed. “Yeah?”

I fire two rounds into his throat. His eyes go wide as blood spurts everywhere. He goes down, hard. Then I fire another round into the body that he’s carrying, although I suspect that Alice already died while we were transporting her.

Shooting her is really, honestly, so painful. For a moment, I feel like I ripped out my own heart and laid it bare on top of the bedsheet, where a bloodstain creeps out from where I shot her.

Nothing has ever been so heartbreaking as the moment in which Dryas drops her, turning to me. His dark eyes are full of things better left unsaid.

“Run,” he whispers.

Sprinting away as fast as I can, I try to forget about Brandon. Try to forget that I just had to kill Alice, if she was still alive.

And most of all, I try to forget the rosary that is still in her hand.

It still haunts me.